C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

      “Bulking is basic.  Remember that.  If you try to do too much or get too clever… you’re not going to make the kind of progress that I’ve typically seen.” ~Dan John      I was reading Pavel and John’s book Easy Strength when I came upon that quote above.  That first sentence is so true that I don’t know why I never came up with it myself.  But, like a lot of the ideas for articles that I’ve written over the years, I figured that I’d use it for an essay of my own.  Which you’re now staring at on your computer screen or tablet or phone or, well, whatever-the-hell it is that you use to read my blog.      By the way, and before we get into the gist of this article outright, if you want to know about a lot of the ideas that I’ve stolen over the years—that’s correct; I’ve stolen a lot of good stuff—then check out an essay I wrote last year aptly entitled “Stealing Good Ideas.”   Any...

  The Best High-Volume, High-Intensity, Low-Frequency Programs for Mass and Strength & Power      Yesterday, while I was finishing up, ironically enough, my latest high-frequency training article, I received an email from a reader.  He said that he’d been using a couple of my HFT programs the last few months.  He said that he got pretty good results from them, and he now understands why it is that I “push” them.  But, he also said, he had an issue.  He didn’t enjoy training with them as much as he did with high-volume, high-intensity, low-frequency programs.  He said that he just liked training with a multi-split program where he trained each muscle group just once per week.  So, he wanted to know what I thought was the “best” program that didn’t involve high-frequency or full-body workouts.  The remainder of this essay is essentially what I wrote to him, albeit in more detail and a lot more fleshed out.  Here...