C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  New Year, New You A.K.A.: Designing a Kick-Ass Program to Achieve Your Goals Simplifying Your Workout Program Now that it's the start of a new year (yes, I know, I'm a month late in getting this out😏), I thought it would - quite obviously - be a good time to put out a series of posts on some of the various keys to designing, and then maintaining, a workout program, whether your goals are building muscle mass, losing body fat, gaining prodigious amounts of raw strength, or some combination therein.  And perhaps the fact that I'm putting this out at the end of January may not be such a bad thing.  If you are already  having trouble sticking to your New Year's resolution(s), then just maybe I can be of some assistance.  For Part One in this series, I would like to offer some basic tips for getting "back to the basics" and simplifying your workouts.  Each post in the series will build upon the previous ones, so this seems as if it's a good way to start. Tip

  Welcome to the World of High-Intensity, High-Volume Workouts-Of-The-Day! First things first: read Part One of this series from September 15th of last month if you haven't already done so.  If you have, then we can move on... Let's keep things as simple as possible for the sake of "ease of workouts".  The workouts themselves will be hard enough without overcomplicating the program. Start off by training each of the core lifts - squats, bench presses, and deadlifts - on one day per week.  I like to train during the week when on this program - or when training someone on this program - and then take the weekends off for rest, relaxation, drinking cocktails, throwing down the gauntlet at an arm-wrestling tournament; ya' know, whatever it is you like to do with your weekends without having to think about also performing a hard-ass training session. So the split would look like this: Monday: Squats - pick any of the WOD below Wednesday: Bench Presses - pick any of the

  Brief, Basic, Intense, and Frequent Workouts for Monstrous Muscle Gains! Mike Mentzer was a fan of brief, hard workouts (and he even trained fairly frequently in the '70s before going "nutso" with very infrequent workouts!) I'm currently working on Part Twos of my "Eight Point Program" and "Intense and Infrequent Workout" series of articles.  In the meantime, I thought I'd write something short and to the point, just like the workouts I'm about to recommend. I just finished a brief workout myself consisting of squats, thick bar deadlifts, dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell curls, and sandbag carries.  Sometimes it's good to get back to the basics. Come to think of it, it's always  good to do basic, intense workouts centered around the big lifts.  But, typically, in my observation, most lifters do these sort of workouts too infrequently.  I used to recommend hard, intense, infrequent  workouts myself years ago in articles for Ironman

  No matter who you are or where you are in life, you need tools for "living the good life", as the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers would have put it. First, I believe that you need to be grounded in a religion.  And by "religion", I don't mean the form of fundamentalism that some of you may have in mind.  I mean religion as a living Wisdom Tradition .  The two Wisdom Traditions that have shaped me throughout most of my life are/were Zen and Eastern Christianity. Even once you are "grounded" in a Wisdom Tradition, you still need tools for your daily living.  One of the best tools that I have found comes from the late (and great) Indian philosopher and professor of religion Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran is most noted for developing what he called "passage meditation" where you memorize an inspirational passage and then use it in meditation to go deep within.  But it's not his passage meditation that I want to discuss in this post.  It

 Happiness Sucks and the Zen Way to Contentment C.S. sitting on his zabuton as he prepares for meditation I once read of a study dealing with music and happiness.  The study had two groups of participants listen to a composition of classical music.  The first group was told to simply listen to the music.  The second group was told to listen to the music and to try to have the music cultivate a sense of happiness within them while listening.  Afterwards, both groups were asked how happy listening to the music made them feel.  Interestingly, it was the first group that said they felt really happy while listening to the music.  The sense of simple bare attention, without attempting to alter the atmosphere through "being" happy, was enough to create happiness without effort. We live in a culture - and this is especially true if you're like me and deal with the "health and wellness" community - that is in the middle of a "happiness boom".  But the truth is

  Nothing Special: Everyday Zen and the Art of Lifting In her seminal book, 'Nothing Special: Living Zen' by Charlotte Joko Beck, Beck writes, "Beyond the meditation cushion, where do you ultimately find the profound clarity, presence, and simple joy of Zen? Where it has always been - in everyday life, whether it's raising our kids, working in the office, or even cleaning the house." Or, I might add, in the simple joy and surrender of lifting weights. There's nothing special about lifting weights, not really.  It's a very simple exercise.  Pick weights up, put weights down, repeat - that's about it.  Of course, its the sheer simplicity and very Zen-like nature of lifting that does  make it special, and therein lies its true worth.  And after doing it for a length of time, it simply becomes something that one does, but also something that one cannot but  do. Some posts ago, I wrote something very similar to this on the Zen-like practice of lifting weigh

  Throughout the course of my lifting career, I've tried quite a few programs, putting them to the test where the "rubber meats the road" so to speak: the gym.  I've had some misses (Mentzer-style H.I.T. training would be a good example) and I've definitely had surprising successes, such as Sheiko-style training programs, which - when I looked at them on paper - I thought there was no way in hell his programs would work.  But, much to my surprise, I got stronger (and bigger while eating hardly anything) on a Sheiko program. Matthew Sloan warming up for a big deadlift session. I've often had success, too, with programs that are wildly diverse.  I built a lot of muscle mass with one-bodypart-per-week programs when I was much younger - more than 25 years ago!  And I've built an impressive amount of strength using very high-frequency training.  When I squatted and deadlifted well over triple my bodyweight in competition, I used HFT - Sheiko, Smolov, and my own