"Do you suppose they will choose to make war against lean, solid dogs rather than against fat and tender sheep?"
Russian training methods and Russian sports science. Raise your hand if you (a) love these things but (b) don't read Russian. Then you probably owe almost everything you know to Pavel Tsatsouline, THE great interpreter of that subject and almost the most influential voice in American exercise. Pavel created an appetite for English-language popularizations of... Continue Reading →
I weigh in for my first kettlebell competition in 2001 as Com. Angelo looks on. That day I weighed 156lbs. Granted, I had to cut some weight, but these days I'd have to cut off a leg. This is an experimental post, summarizing my training for the past week. If I continue to publish these... Continue Reading →
Part 6 of our series "Tao of the Lazy Badass" and part 7 of our retrospective series, "Twenty Years of Pavel Tsatsouline." (Follow the links to find all previous installments.) In our last post, we talked about “fragmenting the load,” a fancy way of saying that you should chop up your workload into small, easy... Continue Reading →
Part 4 of our series "The Tao of the Lazy Badass" Long, Slow Distance I hate to say this, but your single biggest priority is to create some modest aerobic base. If you were cursed by an evil genie to be allowed only one kind of exercise, it would need to be something aerobic. Come... Continue Reading →
Part 2 of our series "Tao of the Lazy Badass" The 5x5 is a classic approach because it is a foolproof way to accumulate volume.For liability reasons, however, you should not attempt high-volume midget lifting. Just add more plates. Exercise is a tale of two variables: Volume (how much you do) and Intensity (how hard... Continue Reading →
I have lots of surplus packs, but there are two that I love and cherish. For big jobs, I have a version of the legendary Swedish LK-35. For everything else, I carry the nimble, gorgeous Swedish M39, the "Moose Sack." Like in Switzerland, Sweden's neutrality is very much an armed neutrality. Even though Sweden did... Continue Reading →
Rigert is said to have inspired the sport's governing body to change their rule requiring a uniform of a single color so that he could wear the striped t-shirt on the platform. Soviet weightlifter David Rigert was famous for his signature telnyashka, the blue and white striped t-shirt. Originally part of the Russian naval uniform in... 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 →
Speaking of Baltic hardmen like Hackenschmidt and Pavel, our Vilnius correspondent Sgt. Šileika has been trying kettlebells. He reports: "Kettlebells are so cool because they have their own idea of where they have to go. It takes my whole body to control them. Just handling them is an exercise in itself." http://www.usgsf.com So true! Many... Continue Reading →
David Rigert: even now one of the most popular Soviet sportsmen ever. But what the hell kind of name is "David Rigert" for a Russian weightlifter?! It's a trick question: Rigert isn't ethnically Russian, he's German. Rigert was born in 1947 to a family of "Volga Germans" who immigrated to Russia in czarist times and... Continue Reading →