C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Simple, Easy-to-Follow Programs for Unleashing Size and Strength Gains     While working on the next installment of my series on HFT yesterday, I received an email from a reader who was a little confused—perhaps more than a little confused would be more appropriate—about how he should set up his workout program.  And, as with a lot of questions that I get asked and are then turned into an essay or article, I thought it would be good to write an article about some easy and simple workout plans that are also quite productive—the same kind of workouts that I suggested to this young man.      Periodically, I receive these sorts of emails from readers who are confused over some of my recommendations.  After all, I do write about various forms of training and lifting.  They are often different because, for one, different people respond well to different forms of training, and, two, different lifters have different goals.  Your goal(s), how you respond to training, your training history, y

  A Unique Training Split for Size, Strength, Muscle Mass, AND the Look of Power      As humans—and as lifters—we tend to be creatures of habit.  In many ways, this is good.  If we want to be skilled at something, anything really, we need to make a habit of practicing it, practicing it well , and practicing it often.  If you want to make good gains—in strength training, mass-building, or a combination of both—you must be consistent first and foremost.  But, as lifters, it can sometimes actually hinder us, or, at the very least, not allow us to take full advantage of different training strategies.  Because, since we are creatures of habit, we create a habit of training the same way for each of our muscle groups or for all of our lifts.  Sometimes, however, it might help to take an almost counterintuitive approach to training.  And that’s exactly what this program is.  (In fact, I suppose that I could have titled it “The Counterintuitive Power-Mass Variation Program” but, as that’s word

  Muscle Mass AND Serious Strength:  The Best Way to Train for Both!      There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there—whether it’s on the internet or at the gym—about how to train for BOTH hypertrophy and serious strength gains.  The first problem seems to be that some folks just don’t know how to do either.  Guys go to the gym to “get big” but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift.  Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions.      If your goal is just hypertrophy, then don’t train like a strength athlete.  You should focus on pump-style training, “feeling a muscle” instead of working the movement, and ensuring that you can do more and more work for each individual bodypart.      If your goal is just strength, then you need to train for strength.  This means doing only a few core exercises—the ones you are training to get stronger on—and doing either a “Westside-st