C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Happy July 4 th Weekend Ramblings      Yesterday was July 4 th , so my wife Tara and I traveled to my parents’ house to meet some of our family, eat a lot of BBQ—I smoked a butt, several slabs of ribs, and some sausage yesterday; all excellent mass-building, strength-inducing foods—and play a tournament of “washers [1] .”      On the way to my parents, Tara and I listened to XM radio, as we usually do.   My listening preferences are heavy metal and/or alternative music [2] .   Hers are stuff a little more mainstream—pop and country.   She tolerates, even likes, some alternative music, but doesn’t care one whit for metal, and so we decided on a compromise by listening to “the Pulse”, a station that plays some pop music and some radio-friendly alternative.   I immediately changed stations, however, once Maroon 5 started singing one of their recent releases, and one of their more popular hits.   ...

The Best Leg Workout You’ve Never Tried!      Two things work the best when it comes to moving massive amounts of weight, and/or gaining massive amounts of muscle: Simple work, combined with hard work.   Nothing else is going to cut it.      As Mark Rippetoe once remarked, “the most valuable lessons of the weight room: a simple, hard program works best, and that you get out of your training – and your life – exactly what you put into it.”      I could never have said it better myself.      I also have a good feeling that a whole lot of lifters know that simple, hard work is absolutely the best way to train for building slabs of muscle that is also capable of hefting ponderous poundages, but they don’t do it.   And I think they don’t do it for a couple of reasons.   First, either they’re lazy and/or have convinced themselves that fancier programs that don’t require hard work...

      Although my posts on Stoic philosophy are not as popular as those on lifting (or drinking beer, or good literature), I am going to continue with them nonetheless.      For those interested in lifting weights – whether you’re a bodybuilder, powerlifter, or just casual lifter (or, hell, even for you Crossfitters) – Stoicism is the philosophy par excellence.  Lifting weights, particularly hard and heavy lifting, can teach us a lot about how to live our lives, but we have to learn to listen to what our lives have to tell us.  For some, the art of listening is a little more difficult.  This is where philosophy comes in.      This particular piece comes from Seneca.  Seneca has long been my favorite of the Roman writers on Stoicism.  Perhaps this is because he is not just a Stoic, for he borrows on other philosophies of antiquity when they serve his purpose.      This piece on dea...

Old-School Arm Training Secrets: John McWilliams’s Arm Routine      My most popular posts here at Integral Strength typically fall into two categories: old-school bodybuilding programs or serious strength and power routines.      With that in mind, I thought I would do a series of articles on various old-school lifters and bodybuilders (the two overlapped once-upon-a-time), and on various old-school methods for training different bodyparts or lifts.   Thus, this first entry is on old-school arm training, but others will be on old-school chest, shoulders, back, legs, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, power cleans, etc.   And for this first entry, I decided upon an old-school bodybuilder cum powerlifter that many of you may never have heard of: John McWilliams. McWilliams's back double-biceps pose.  He was impressive even in his 40s.      When I first came across an article about McWil...

Double-Split Training, Part Two Understanding Why Double-Split Training is Effective      Here’s a cool thing about double-split training: there’s an endless amount of variety that you have at your disposal when it comes to double-split workouts.   In fact, however-the-heck it is that you like to train, you can make your training a bit more effective by turning all of those workouts into double-split programs.      Do you like to train each bodypart once-per-week, by training one bodypart-per-day, and blasting the living hell out of it, then giving it a week to recover?   (As I’ve written many times before, this was a very effective training system that I used to pack on pounds of muscle when I was much younger.)   If that’s your cup of tea, no problem, here’s what your double-split program could look like: Mondays: Chest Tuesdays: Back Wednesdays: Legs (quads and hamstrings) Thursdays: Shoulders Fr...

      In the summer of ’91, I dove headlong into training.   I read all of the various bodybuilding magazines that I could get a hold of—or, at least, all of them that I could both afford and get a hold of.   I was lucky, however, in that I had an off-again/on-again training partner who had stacks of magazines from around that time frame—primarily Ironman , Muscle and Fitness , and Flex —and I also had an uncle who had many older issue of Iron Man and Flex , plus things such as Strength and Health , and other such forgotten magazines that seemed (to me, at least) as if they were from another era.      Ironman had the most influence on me due to the “hardgainer” articles written by such writers as Steve Holman, Randal Strossen, Bradley Steiner, and Richard Winnett.   All of these preached a “less-is-better” and “hard and heavy, but infrequent” training philosophies.   (Not to say that Ironman only presented training ph...