C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A Mass and Power Program for the Natural Lifter      This morning, I was reading some old muscle magazines—I have hundreds of them boxed in my attic—when I came across an article by Don “Ripper” Ross entitled, aptly for this essay, “Power Bodybuilding.”  I’m always looking for inspiration for new training programs, and this article gave the idea for the program you’re now reading.      Ross’s program was a 6-days-per-week routine where you trained chest and arms on days 1 and 4, back and shoulders on days 2 and 5, and, finally, legs on days 3 and 6.  I really like a lot of the training programs that Ross created—this one included—but I do think it had too much overall volume at each session for that many training days.  Each day contained between 8 and 10 exercises in his program.  Ross was the kind of guy that thrived on hard work and a lot of volume (oh, and a lot of anabolics).  This program keeps some of Ross’s principles—heavy training, multiple sets for each lift, low reps—and k

  Some Thoughts, Tips, and Ideas on the Standard Basics of Eating and Training      I often extol other lifters to “get back to the basics,” when it comes to both training and eating.  Sometimes you’re stuck in a rut and need to get back to the basics.  Maybe you haven’t seen any gains in either size or strength—whatever it is that you’re trying to gain—and so you need to get back to the basics.  Or maybe you’ve been following too many convoluted multi-exercise, multi-angle routines and need to get back to the basic barbell movements.      Anytime I get confused about my own training, I do the same thing.  It’s what everyone needs to do on occasion; get back to the basics of simple, but not necessarily easy, methods of training and eating.       Seems pretty common sense, which it is, but I realized something else the other day when I was having a conversation with a young man: not everyone understands what the basics actually are.      It happened this way: A few days ago, I was che

       Recently, there has been some renewed interest in my Texas Volume Training program that I wrote a little over a decade ago, based on the amount of views my original post has had of late and based on some emails I have received the last several months.  With that in mind, I thought it was time that I did a new post on this form of training.  What follows in this essay is an amalgam of a couple of my earlier articles on Texas Volume Training, and some insights I’ve garnered from lifters that have used it in the years since I first created it.      First off, TVT is a powerlifting program.  And though this might sound as if it’s hyperbole, and though I might obviously be biased since I came up with it, I think it’s one of the best programs anyone could ever use for powerlifting, but you have to be advanced enough to handle the amount of workload involved.  Also it’s not a program for people who only want some hypertrophy or only train for aesthetics, although it definitely will