C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Massively High-Rep Training for Massively Built Muscles (AKA: An Homage to the Late Dr. Ken Leistner)     Around five or six years ago, I was training with a good friend of mine.  Even though he and I are good friends, we rarely trained together (and still don’t) due to the simple fact that he never liked to train legs or back muscles very hard, and, unfortunately, preferred a lot more training on the “showy” bodyparts of the chest and biceps.  And, while I’m not against a nice “pump” workout for the pecs and the arms, I’m primarily going to train my legs and my back hard, even if it’s at the expense of other muscle groups.     And even though my friend could out-bench press me by a couple hundred pounds, I could easily (at least at one time) out-squat or out-deadlift my friend by 300 pounds on each lift!     That’s just sad in my book.     Now, even though my friend knew that I l...

C.S. sits on his zafu before a training session. 1 - The Journey Begins When I was a teenager, I had one great love: martial arts.  To be more specific, I suppose, would be to write that my great love was traditional Okinawan Karate-Do, which I had trained in since I was 9 years old.     I was a small kid, tiny you might even say, compared to the size of my fellow 4th-grade classmates.  For whatever reason - and perhaps schools still do this, much to the embarrassment of small boys - my 4th grade teacher would often line up the entire class against the wall of the classroom, boys and girls alike, from shortest to tallest.  I was always the shortest.  Add in the fact that, in addition to my smallness, I was something of an introvert, often bullied, and so my parents thought that martial arts might be a good way to build my self-esteem, not to mention keep me from getting pummeled on the elementary school playgrounds. ...