C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

   The following is an article of mine that first appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Planet Muscle  magazine .  I thought this would be a good "Thursday Throwback" piece since I just mentioned Bulgarian-style training in my recent essay "4 Tips for Serious Lifters" where I presented some ideas of strength coach Nick Horton - a proponent of the "Bulgarian method" - who said "overtraining doesn't exist."  Whether you agree with that statement or not, you shouldn't really argue against it, or for it, unless you have at least attempted the sort of training that Horton was discussing.      (With regards to the defunct Planet Muscle , in the future I would also like to do a piece on its founder and editor, Jeff Everson, who died suddenly in 2019 at the age of 68.  Everson and I became friends over the course of me working for him.  And I miss my friend.)      On with our Throwback: Iconic picture of the iconic weightlifte...

The Squat Nemesis Training Journal, Part 3 by Jared Smith                   I am in day two of week three, and my body is definitely feeling it. I’ve never felt such an insane amount of delayed onset muscle soreness in all my days on this scorched earth!   (Okay, that may be stretching it just slightly, but you get the point.)   My numbers have gone up but not a tremendous amount. The most remarkable thing is my confidence level as it pertains to max effort lifts. The level of fear and anxiety over maximum poundage seems to have diminished for the most part.          There are some things that don’t happen often, and one of those things is me being distracted or so flustered by life that my training suffers. This week, however, my mettle was tested a little. Life will put obstacles in our way sometimes, and it is up to us to overcome the...

Nothing is Worth Having in Life that Doesn’t Require Hard Work, but it Has to be Performed Correctly “By nature, men are nearly the same.   By practice, they become vastly different.” —Confucius      I have two teenage boys.   When they were younger—around 5 and 6, I think—I wanted them to become involved in martial arts.   The town where we lived didn’t seem to have much, nothing like the traditional karate-do that I practiced religiously, diligently for thirteen years, and have practiced less formally ever since.   They decided they wanted to take Tae Kwon Do—which, to be honest, I thought was a rather horrid idea; I never thought very highly of the Korean-inspired dojangs that I had encountered up to that point [1] .      But I relented.      And was quite horrified by what I encountered.   Here was a martial arts “school” where you could get a “black belt” in a year ...

     The legendary Russian powerlifting coach Boris Sheiko once remarked, “he who trains more—lifts more.”  For the most part, I agree with that statement, as many of the articles on this blog attest to, but you also have to put things into the proper context in order to understand them.  Sheiko’s statement is quite a loaded thing for many lifters when they first hear/read it.  This is especially true if you’ve spent the majority of your time—either on the Internet or in the pages of a magazine—reading articles written by Western (particularly American) writers/trainers.  And it’s even more true if you’ve gotten great results from heavy, infrequent training using a lot of the Western methods.      First, let’s look at an overview of training in general, then I’ll discuss a little about my own personal success with programs such as Sheiko and similar “Russian-style” programs for those of you interested in actually usin...

     Here is the complete, unedited version of my "Bulgarian Method for Massive Muscles" that appeared in Planet Muscle a few months ago.  I included an excerpt of this a couples months ago on this blog, as well, but here it is in full.      Please, if you haven't attempted this kind of training before - or you haven't performed it long enough to give it a "proper test drive" - then don't dismiss it.  You will be pleasantly surprised with the results. The Bulgarian Method for Massive Muscles      In previous articles for PM, I have discussed the efficacy of high-frequency training.  High frequency training is effective because the more frequently you can train a muscle group, the faster you will grow muscle and build strength.  Notice that I didn’t say that the more frequently you train a muscle group, the faster will your results be.  For instance, there’s no way that you can do a typical body...