C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       I read a lot.  And I re-read a lot of books that I like, especially in the fields that I’m particularly interested in, such as strength training, budo, and philosophy (of all types, Christian and pagan, western and eastern).  Today I was reading Pavel and Dan John’s book “Easy Strength.”  I’ve read this book a couple of times, but thought I’d return to it today, thinking it might give me some quotes I could include in my ongoing HFT series, when I came upon, well, this quote of Pavel’s: “There is nothing wrong with a split if you’re not using it as an excuse to have a bis and tris day.  Ben Johnson lifted six times a week: three for the upper body and three for the lower body.  He cut down to four days when felt the need to back off.  I like Charles Poliquin’s weekly strength plan for fighters: 5 days of lifting a week, only two exercises per workout.”      First, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to have an “arms only” day; I’ve written a few of them in different magazines,

  Simple, Easy-to-Follow Programs for Unleashing Size and Strength Gains     While working on the next installment of my series on HFT yesterday, I received an email from a reader who was a little confused—perhaps more than a little confused would be more appropriate—about how he should set up his workout program.  And, as with a lot of questions that I get asked and are then turned into an essay or article, I thought it would be good to write an article about some easy and simple workout plans that are also quite productive—the same kind of workouts that I suggested to this young man.      Periodically, I receive these sorts of emails from readers who are confused over some of my recommendations.  After all, I do write about various forms of training and lifting.  They are often different because, for one, different people respond well to different forms of training, and, two, different lifters have different goals.  Your goal(s), how you respond to training, your training history, y

  The High-Frequency Training Manifesto Part 3: Some Powerlifting Specialization Programs      If you haven’t done so, please read Part One and Part Two first.  Each part in this series piggybacks off the previous one.  With that out of the way, on with Part Three…      Once you have trained utilizing high-frequency “easy strength” methods for several months, or if you’re already well-versed in HFT, you may want to specialize on a certain lift, a few lifts (such as the 3 powerlifts or the 2 Olympic lifts), or on a certain bodypart.  What follows are some specialization programs for powerlifting, although they will give you an idea of how you should train even if you want to specialize on something else.  Originally, my plan was to include some additional specialization programs in this one article, but after writing out the powerlifting programs, it was plenty long as it currently is.  In upcoming parts of this series, however, we will look at some more and varied forms of specializa