"Do you suppose they will choose to make war against lean, solid dogs rather than against fat and tender sheep?"
“Like water, volume is soft and yielding. But volume will wear away rock, and it beats the crap out of excess fatigue. As a rule, volume wins over fatigue. This is another paradox: what is soft and voluminous is strong.”from the lost training manual of Laozi (Lao-Tzu) A difficult book, but the most important one... Continue Reading →
As Julien says, I recommend Pavel Tsatouline’s original primer on kettlebells, The Russian Kettlebell Challenge (2001), and the open-ended, unscripted training guidelines he gives there: Train 2-7 times per week.You can vary this week to week. You benefit from a certain amount of randomness in loading.Keep it to 45 minutes or less. Sometimes a lot less.... Continue Reading →
Strength and endurance are rivals. “Strength loves rest,” as the saying goes, and it hates endurance. Strength and endurance compete against each other for your training time and recuperative powers. Yes, you can do both (and you should, at least a little). But unless you are a pure strength athlete or pure endurance athlete (e.g. a... Continue Reading →
Part 6 in our series "20 Years of Pavel Tsatsouline." Complete table of contents here. Before Pavel came along, we did not deadlift. By “we” I mean young ironheads who wanted big muscles and got our (mis)information from dime store bodybuilding magazines. "[T]he deadlift is THE exercise of choice for anyone." In 1999 Pavel sounded... Continue Reading →
Part 5 in our series "20 Years of Pavel Tsatsouline." See Table of Contents here. Pavel Tsatsouline likens his programs to Kalashnikov rifles, which have just a few simple moving parts. You can strip the "Kalash" one-handed in the dark: pop off the top cover, pull out a spring and bolt carrier, and you’re left with one huge, solid main assembly. A rare but... Continue Reading →
The fourth part in our series "20 Years of Pavel Tsatsouline." Table of contents here. In our last installment we encountered Pavel Tsatsouline’s first major book, Power to the People,and his then-revolutionary doctrine that “strength is a skill.” From that doctrine, you can trace virtually every other part of Tsatsouline’s evolving system over the last 20... Continue Reading →
The third installment in our series, "20 Years of Pavel Tsatsouline." “Nothing is more practical than a good theory,” and Pavel Tsatsouline has always excelled at distilling exercise science into something immediately useful and dummy-proof. In his short, entertaining 1999 book, Power to the People, he changed popular strength training by drawing consequences that... Continue Reading →
The second installment in our series on the training doctrines of Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel Tsatsouline changed strength training so much—and so relatively quietly—that unless you are a middle-aged meathead, you probably cannot remember what it was like before "the Evil Russian" subverted our country's established order with his 1999 book Power to the People. It was... Continue Reading →
This is the first installment in our series on the training doctrines of Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel Tsatsouline entered my life through a side door. In 1998, on an internet forum hosted by the first man to squat 1000 lbs., “Dr. Squat” Fred Hatfield, I read a terse post by a polite Russian émigré. He introduced... Continue Reading →
20 Years of Pavel Tsastouline: IntroductionBefore the Russian Revolution: The Ancien Regime of 1999 Strength Is a SkillMinimalism: When All You Have Is a HammerOne Pull, One PressEnter the DeadliftPower to the People!