C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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 ...

High Frequency Training Frequent Workouts for Fast Results      High Frequency Training—we’ll just call it HFT from here on out—involves any form of training where you are working each muscle group a minimum of 3 times a week (that’s right, a minimum ).   HFT usually gets a bad rap when it is presented to the average bodybuilding public.   It has become a fad to train each muscle group infrequently and with a very high-intensity and/or high-volume.   But I’m here to tell you right now that there is a better way to train.   So if you’re tired of hearing that the best way to train a muscle is to “annihilate” it and then give it a week (or longer) to rest and grow stronger, you ought to love this article.      If you don’t believe this kind of training works, you probably would like to see some examples of well-developed athletes and/or bodybuilders who have used it.   First off, let’s examine athletes .   So...

The "O" Word: The Often Misunderstood, Always Talked About Issue of Overtraining The Barbarian Brothers—those crazy bastions of strength and muscle mass that I often admired in my teenage years—once said: "There is no such thing as overtraining, only undereating." (Or something along that similar vein; could be that I slightly misquoted.) The Barbarians were often derided for that statement. The argument against their statement would go something like this: "It's easy for them to say such a thing. They are genetically predisposed mutants of muscle-building who are on butt-loads of anabolic steroids, HGH, and no-telling what else." I don't think the Barbarians were exactly dead on in their assessment—don't get me wrong—but they did have a point. Proper training—hard, heavy training in their cases—and diet are the keys to success. Overtraining, in their minds, was just something that was entirely overdone by the magazines and all of the n...

     Power Volume Training is a system that I came up with a few years ago, and wrote an article about it in the November, 2004 issue of Ironman.   Since that time, this is the one program that I have used more than any other when training someone who is solely interested in maximal strength—powerlifters, for instance.   Although mainly geared toward building strength, it’s also a great means of building muscle mass, especially when you have been performing workouts with higher reps.   (It would be a great form of training, for instance, after a couple months of Staggered Volume Training .)      Power Volume Training works by incorporating 4 distinct methods of training into one week of workouts.   The methods used are: Dynamic lifting Very heavy training—max singles, doubles, and triples; and never more than five reps Partial reps Frequent training      Like a lot of good methods of strength building, the parameters of this program aren’t set in stone.   However,...

     The following blog post is actually an e-mail from a friend of mine here in Tuscaloosa—Jared Smith—who sent me this workout, and wanted to know what I thought about it.  He calls it "consolidated volume training".  I kind of like that title.  Wish I would have thought of it myself.      Check it out: Consolidated Volume Training      I was reading some of Mentzer's writing and though I think that training balls to the wall heavy all the time will inevitably lead to injury. However, I do agree with his ideas on consolidated training. Using only a handful of key compound exercises which will sufficiently stimulate all muscles of the body to their fullest. The program I have in mind is a 3 day a week program. Each muscle will get trained 3 times over the course of each week which is a significant difference from the once a week programs that most people do. But if people notice, successful lifters train major lifts several times a week. The rep ranges will differ each w...