C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The Best Two-Way Training Splits for Inducing Hypertrophy and Unleashing Impressive Gains in Strength      I’m fond of full-body workouts.   In fact, if you’re new to training, and you stumbled upon this essay as you scoured the internet looking for the best split program to make you massive—not to mention massively strong—then understand that you’re better off utilizing full-body workouts.   At least at the start.   Eventually, you will want to move on to a split program of some sort, however.   Now, please don’t get me wrong (I mean, really, don’t), you could spend your entire training life doing nothing other than full-body workouts —whether they’re high-frequency “easy strength” programs, or heavy/light/medium programs, or just “basic” 3 day a week programs where all of the training is “ moderate ”—and never need anything else.   But eventually you’ll want to use some split programs, even if it’s just occasionally, and even if it’s don...

  A State-of-the-Art Mass & Power Program for Outlandish Gains      I’m fond of some forms of training over others.   This doesn’t mean, however, that I believe there is one training program or method that reigns supreme.   Some may make such a claim as that.   HIT enthusiasts—who seem to think like the Highlander in that there can be only one —I’m looking at you.   But there are also individual lifters and coaches who stumble upon a program that really works well for them , and they declare it to be the one program that stands above all others.   No, I believe that there are quite a few different training methods and programs that are effective.   But some are decidedly better than others, depending on your goals.   I like full-body workouts, high-frequency training, Russian-style power programs, routines that utilize the “big 4,” and old-school “classical” bodybuilding routines.   Those are all different, by the...

  An Old-School Program for Shirt-Busting Biceps and Titanic Triceps       This essay is the start of a planned series on old-school, real bodybuilding training.   It is a follow-up, however, to an article I wrote earlier this month entitled “Real Bodybuilding the Old-School Way.”   That article has proven popular enough that I figured there would be interest in an entire series on the subject.   So, I guess this is technically the 2 nd part, even though I never intended that first one as part of a series when I wrote it.      I would advise reading that article before continuing here (and not just because it will help you understand this article but because I think it’s a pretty damn good read even if, you know, I’m a bit biased), but the gist of it boils down to this:   Old school bodybuilders built impressive size, strength, and definition (before the advent of large amounts of PEDs) by following 3 “stages” of tr...

  Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part 4: Building a Massive Back and Monstrous Pulling Strength      This is the 4 th part of our ongoing series on heavy, light, and medium training inspired by the methods of one of the greatest strength coaches to ever walk the planet, Bill Starr.   Once this series is finished, I hope that it will include everything one needs to know in order to train using this methodology.   If you haven’t done so already, or if this is the first article in the series that you’ve stumbled across, please take your time to read the other articles.   At the very least, you need to read the first part before continuing here.   It lays the foundation that the other articles are based upon, and the rest of the articles assume a working knowledge of that one.   So, here’s the links to the past essays in this series: Part One: How to design an H/L/M program Part Two: Upper body training Part Three: How to build a mas...