C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A Bill Starr-Inspired Method for Making Consistent Progress      When many lifters think of Bill Starr (assuming they even know who he was), they often think of his 5x5 heavy-light-medium system , a system of training that I have used at times, and have often touted, over almost the entirety of my lifting and writing career.  You can probably do a brief, cursory search right now on “Bill Starr training program” or something similar, and you will, in all likelihood, find more than a few training plans, and almost all of them—or so I would bet a hefty sum—will outline a week or two of training using 5 sets of 5 reps.  But if you take the time to read a lot of the training articles that Starr actually wrote—he penned hundreds, if not thousands, of articles for almost all of the major bodybuilding magazines and training journals during his lifetime—you would find that there was a lot more to his system of training than what he is typically known for.  This is not the essay to get into al

Some Rambling Thoughts and Reflections on Bodybuilding Supplements of the ‘90s      I came of age in bodybuilding, so to speak, in the ‘90s.  Oh, I started lifting in the ‘80s when I was a middle-school teenager, mainly to improve my strength and power in martial arts, but it was the early ‘90s when I went from weighing 135 (when I graduated high school) to 220 pounds of (primarily) solid, lean muscle tissue over the course of a handful of years.  If asked at the time what my “secrets” were to gaining so much mass, I probably would have rattled off the usual suspects: hard and heavy training, a massive, copious amount of calories on a daily basis (at one time I was eating between 6,000 to 8,000 calories each day), and the use of good supplements.  But I’m not so sure about that last one anymore.  Indeed, and eventually, at least, there were some good supplements that came out of the ‘90s—or, at the very least, there was one good supplement: creatine.  Overall, however, it was more th

  Only Have Time to Train on the Weekend? No Problem.      Yesterday, I received an email from a reader who had a question about setting up a “weekends-only” strength program.  I have had similar questions asked before.  The most commonly similar question is when lifters only have a couple days of the week to train, and so they want to know how to set up a minimalistic training regimen.  If that’s you, then check out this program I wrote last year entitled “Maximum Mass, Minimum Training.”   Anyway, this particular reader said he had been doing a full-body workout, 3-times-per-week, alternating between heavier and lighter sessions.  He said that he has a new job that is going to make it very tough for him to get to the gym during the weekdays, so he wanted to know if there was a way to train on only Saturday and Sunday, but still do full-body workouts.  The program below is the one that I gave him, and the one that I recommend for you if you are in the same, or a similar, boat.      F