C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The Importance of Proper Breathing in Budo      I have been training in the Budo for more than 40 years.  In the last few years, I have been to a few dojos and I’m sad to say (or write in this case) that modern budokas don’t know how to breathe.  Most of them aren’t taught how to breathe in the first place, so they’re not even aware that there is a way that a budoka should breathe.  This is typically because the teachers in these dojos weren’t taught it themselves.  When they are taught breathing techniques, it’s only on a superficial level, such as to breathe in through their nose and out through their mouth when executing a technique in practice, whether it’s a block, punch, or kick.  But there is more to breathing in Budo than this, and that may not even be accurate, either.  There are different ways to breathe, depending on the technique and the art.      The one thing that I’ve noticed modern budoka a...

     It is, apparently, the end of an era as I just discovered that Dragon Door has shut down. Dragon Door, if you're not familiar, was the place where Pavel Tsatsouline pretty much got his start. They were the OG kettlebell company, publishing books, DVDs, and selling equipment for the new "functional fitness" craze. They also published a handful of my articles over the years. If I'm not mistaken - you can't access their articles anymore, so I'm not entirely sure - I wrote my first article for them sometime in 2008. So, since they are no more, I thought, over the next several weeks, I would re-post those articles here on my blog.      The most recent article that I wrote for them was The 30-Rep Program. When I have referenced that program in essays here on the blog, I have often inserted a link to that article, and since that link is no longer valid, I thought it would be the best article to start with.      I have long been a fan of ...

Lessons in Mind Power from Bill Pearl and Others      In one of Bill Pearl’s books, “Getting Stronger,” he has a chapter entitled “The Power of Positive Lifting” (which I have unabashedly stolen for the title of this essay).  He opens that chapter with a story from Charles Garfield, a sports doctor in the ‘70s, who had visited Russia in ‘79, when it was still the Soviet Union.  A group of Soviet sports psychologists and physiologists met with Garfield and told him of the wondrous powers and the fabulous effects of intense mental concentration on the performance of their lifters and athletes.  Garfield spent days with the Russian researchers, and apparently had enough “theory.”  He wanted to see results .  Here’s how Pearl tells the tale:      “At a gym, the Soviets quizzed Garfield. ‘How long since you’ve done any serious training?’ they asked.  ‘Eight years.’ ‘What was your maximum bench press in your prime...

  A Simple Method for Using Bodyweight Workouts as a Form of Muscle Building      After writing my last bodyweight training article— Bodyweight Training and Beyond: Lessons Learned from Martial Arts —I started making some more notes for Part 4.  However, while I was doing that, I was thinking about trainees who might want a simple way to use bodyweight workouts to build muscle.  So, I’m writing this piece as sort of an “in between” essay before I finish Part 4 of my Bodyweight Training and Beyond series.      The method discussed here is good for you if you want to use bodyweight training as your primary method of hypertrophy.  This is not an article for elite athletes, who might need more strength, speed, power, or a combination of those 3.  It’s also not for you if you’re already well-versed in bodyweight training and are already capable of highly voluminous, intense bodyweight sessions.  However, if you a...

Bodyweight Training and Beyond: Part 3 Upper Body Training Lessons and Workouts for Advanced Bodyweight Practitioners and Martial Artists      In November, I wrote a couple of essays with the titles “Bodyweight Training and Beyond.”  Part 1 focused only on bodyweight training.  Part 2 discussed how to incorporate bodyweight training combined with weighted workouts.  I originally had planned to write a 3rd part within a week or two of the previous essays, but I wound up writing so many different articles that the 3rd part went by the wayside.  However, as I was writing my last essay on bodyweight training, “ A Seldom Discussed Benefit of Bodyweight Training ,” I ended up with a lot of notes that I realized would make for another good article. So, it’s been too long in coming, but here, finally, is Part 3 of my Bodyweight Training and Beyond series.      In this essay, I want to discuss some various bodyweight ideas f...