"Do you suppose they will choose to make war against lean, solid dogs rather than against fat and tender sheep?"
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 →
"Для меня Ригерт — это бог штанги, на него я молился с детства." "For me, Rigert is the god of barbells. I prayed to him from the time I was a child." -Weightlifting BAMF Alexei Petrov
From Sgt. Sileika, a lean, solid dog in Vilnius who serves as our resident subject-matter expert in ruck marching and sentence diagramming. Living in the Baltics, he is located at the intersection (to use a fashionable word) of three of our favorite things: kvass, kettlebells, and Varusteleka. Power to you, sir!
https://youtu.be/xAnWOC4Pf_YHold on to your bursting telnyashka and chalk your calloused hands. We are heading into David Rigert Week! To warm you up, we are blowing the Kremlin's domes off with the metal band Lyube, from the famous lifting town of Lyubertsi.
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 →