"Do you suppose they will choose to make war against lean, solid dogs rather than against fat and tender sheep?"
So it feels like an ever-new mystery to get overpowered in fight training by short, thin, or otherwise gracile people who, it seems to me, can’t possibly have as much power. Not just outmaneuvered and outskilled, but manhandled or just plain pounded. I’m talking thin teenagers, featherweight women, even a girl who’s too young for PG-13 and weighs less than my checked luggage. What gives?
"However, the champ often 'took ill' with a pathogen transmitted in oak barrels known to disparately afflict the Irish community."
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 →
“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 →
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 →
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
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.
Yesterday we wrote about some Army researchers' finding that, in a long, heavy ruck march, the guys who march fastest are the most muscular ones. Not necessarily the strongest, but the most muscular. How can that be? If you beef up for a long ruck with an extra 20 lbs. of muscle, you're schlepping an... 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 →