At last, we’ve brought back our 15-part series on Alexey Faleev and his "80/20" system of power bodybuilding and physical culture as a downloadable PDF book! It’s available here, 100 pages for a suggested donation of $5 (or none at all). I am donating proceeds to charitable organizations doing works of lean, solid goodness around... Continue Reading →
Your weight is junk data, your mirror is unreliable, and your feelings are fake news
Feeling fat, looking fat, and being fat are three separate things. You can “feel fat” without looking or being fat. I’ll hazard a guess that it's mostly emotional, but even when you’re not being particularly neurotic, you can feel fatter or leaner depending on the fit of your clothes and your posture. You can also look... Continue Reading →
Power to the People!
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 →
A Farewell to Fatigue: How to “Fragment the Load”
Did Hemingway invigorate himself to run with the bulls in Pamplona by blowtorching his lungs doing Crossfit? Hell no. Papa knew how to pace himself. Part 5 in our series “Tao of the Lazy Badass.” Find the first four installments here, here, here, and here. You already know the First Law of the Lazy Badass:... Continue Reading →
“Those the gods would destroy, they encumber with a TRX instructor”
It's always some heavily muscled personal trainer. My toughest moments at Goruck challenges are when I must fireman's carry a teammate, and it's never the vegetarian triathlete who works for a socially conscious startup. I always get the dense, hypertrophied Paleo stevedore-type who runs a gym. It's amazingly easy to fireman's carry someone, but it's... Continue Reading →
Easy + Often = Badass
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 →
The Tao of the Lazy Badass
“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 →
Enter the Deadlift
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 →
After Faleev: What to Expect
At last, we've brought back our Alexey Faleev material as a downloadable PDF book! It's available here, for a suggested donation of $5 (or none at all). I am donating proceeds to charitable organizations doing works of lean, solid goodness around the world, so please be generous!
Faleev’s Cycling, Part 4: Two-stage Cycles
We've edited our Faleev "80/20" power bodybuilding series into a 100-page, for-charity, donation-based e-book now available here. Enjoy!