"Get on the
floor," the Russian said. He did not say please.
"Now? Here?" I
asked.
"Yes, comrade."
"Uh, okay."
"Now, I want you to
do push-ups, but I want you to turn your hands like this and breathe like
this…."
So it began. Over the next
hour, I learned to up the intensity of my squat, to instantly jack up the power
of my bench press, and to increase the speed of my punch. No, I wasn’t in some
dank Russian gym and I wasn’t in an elite European training center. I was in
the lobby of the posh Hyatt Regency hotel in Columbus, Ohio, interviewing up
and coming strength guru, Pavel Tsatsouline. It was the first interview I’d
conducted that left me sore the next day.
I first heard about Pavel
"The Evil Russian" Tsatsouline from those involved in the martial arts
community. Many were breaking through their stretching plateaus by using his techniques.
I picked up a few of his books and videos and was immediately struck by Pavel’s
in-your-face ideas about strength training. Frankly, I’d never heard of most of
the exercises he’d written about and immediately disagreed with at least half
of what he had to say. In other words, I was intrigued and had to learn more.
Pavel isn’t a big guy, nor
does he want to be. Wiry, functional strength and power is his game. His body
is more Bruce Lee than Arnold, and he’s more interested in training for combat
than training for the beach. As a former physical training instructor for
Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, his job wasn’t to make them pretty, but to
make them into efficient killing machines. The fact that they developed rock
hard physiques was almost a side effect.
Pavel holds a Soviet
Physical Culture degree in physiology and coaching and was also a nationally
ranked athlete in the ethnic-strength sport of kettlebell lifting, a practice
he’s now attempting to popularize in America. These days, Pavel is proud to say
he’s a "capitalist running dog" and is living the good life in
California with his American wife. Pavel spends his time writing books, making
videos, holding seminars and training American SWAT team members and other law
enforcement professionals.
I’m just glad he’s on our
side.
Testosterone: Pavel, you’ve written that bodybuilding is the
worst thing to ever happen to strength training. What’s up with that?
Pavel: I was quoting Dr. Ken Leistner and referred to the
"new" bodybuilding, post Arnold and Franco. The stuff they do today in
the gyms is more cosmetic surgery than strength training. The emphasis is on
the hypertrophy of everything but contractile proteins. A typical dude with
eighteen-inch pipes is a big joke on an arm-wrestling table… provided he has
enough nerve to test his virtual muscle in this manly art.
Strength training for
sports does not rely on sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, unless you are a sumo
wrestler or a football lineman. It should focus on myofibrillar hypertrophy
through many sets of low reps and, more importantly, on a host of neural
factors: motoneuron excitability, neural drive, Golgi tendon organ
disinhibition, etc. What bothers me is when newbies who come to the gym to up
their strength for, say, Alpine skiing, are told to do three sets of ten for
lunges, leg presses, leg curls, and other fluff instead of simplyhitting five
sets of five for squats or deads.
T: You’re pretty quick to call out bodybuilders and
their "fake" muscles. What’s so bad about being big?
Pavel: It’s a matter of preference, but in some
activities super-sizing is inappropriate. Middleweight weightlifters are the
strongest relative to their bodyweight. You don’t see many 250 pound rock
climbers because, well, they’re all dead. As your bodyweight increases and you
get heavier, your relative strength gets compromised more and more. Take a SWAT
officer who has to carry 45 pounds of gear plus his bodyweight. If he weighs
too much, he won’t be able to get over a fence or climb into a window fast enough.
So where relative strength is an issue, being too big is inappropriate.
If you’re a lineman or a
sumo wrestler, being big can make sense and if you do it for cosmetic reasons,
then it’s perfectly fine. Otherwise you must be very selective about what you
are building. Rock climbers have a saying: A good climber has the lats of a flying
squirrel, Popeye forearms, and the legs of a starved chicken. It’s functional,
for them.
T: So you’re more about functional, real world
strength?
Pavel: You bet. A friend fascinated with special warfare
showed me his copy of what was supposed to be a Navy SEAL memoir. He pointed
out a photo of frogmen boarding a ship. The caption read something like,
"My guys can bench press 500 pounds because they have to."
If you have any sense you
should ask two questions: 1) How many of your guys does it take to bench press
500 pounds? and 2) How is the bench press supposed to help you with any of the
physical demands of your duty? One of the top tactical officers in the state of
Texas, a Brit named Mark from SAPD, kicked butt at the last state SWAT competition.
The man can knock off twenty-some pull-ups and does rock bottom one-legged
squats with ease. How much does this officer bench? He tried it once and did 225.
Not a bench press to write home about. But that it is the point.
Unless you are training
purely for looks, you must focus on the strength needed for your sport, job, or
lifestyle. When I got the contract from the state of New Mexico to develop new
strength tests for their select Special Weapons And Tactics Teams, I did not contemplate
the bench press or curls, but enforced ten pull-ups, ten rock bottom one-legged
squats, and ten hanging leg raises. Everything performed with a forty-five pound
plate, the weight of standard tactical gear. For pull-ups and leg raises the
plate hangs on a waist belt; for one-legged squats the officer holds the plate
in front of him.
T: Interesting. What can you offer bodybuilders?
Pavel: I can show them how to get stronger immediately by
training their nervous systems. The best bodybuilders, when you think of Ronnie
Coleman, Dorian Yates, or Arnold, they’re very strong. Even if you don’t feel
like getting strong for the hell of it, you do not get the muscle density and
muscle tone without heavy training. Besides, when you are stronger you are able
to use more weight in your bodybuilding exercises. Will you make better gains
curling 95 ten times or 115 ten times? It’s a no-brainer.
T: Okay, so how are you going to accomplish this?
Pavel: Through various neurological phenomena. Let me
show you something, Chris. Squeeze my hand.
T: Okay. [I squeeze his hand as hard as I can.]
Pavel: Now, tighten your abs, squeeze your glutes and
crush my hand again. [I do]. Okay, what’s the difference?
T: Did I squeeze your hand harder the second time?
Pavel: Much harder. It seems preposterous to a
bodybuilder that clenching your cheeks and bracing your abs will strengthen
your grip, but that’s the way your body works. What I teach is just the
opposite of isolation. Isolation is impossible anyway. There is something
called irradiation.
Make a fist, Chris, a
tight, white-knuckle fist. Notice how the tension spreads into your biceps,
shoulder and chest. So whenever the load is meaningful, the tension will spread
elsewhere. It’s going to happen. If you try to fight it, you’ll only hurt
yourself.
Quotable Dr. Ken Leistner
compared a bodybuilder to "a collection of body parts". That’s really
the problem. Used to "isolating" and doing exercising sitting and
lying down, they have no knack of integrating their body as a unit. These guys
walking around the Arnold Classic may be able to bench press 400 pounds, but
most can’t tackle a hundred pound metal ball, like one of my kettlebells. Some
can’t even clean it to their shoulders and most can’t press it overhead, at
least not without horrendous back bending. They just don’t have the core
strength and they can’t integrate their whole body in the act.
Only by using those Malibu
Ken and Barbie weights can you truly isolate. So you might as well decide to
use your core muscles, brace your abs and your glutes and go the anti-isolation
route. Bodybuilders may think that will take away from the contraction of the
target muscle. We have just demonstrated with the grip test that this is not
the case. Whenever you intelligently contract other muscles — your glutes, your
abs, your diaphragm, and if you’re working the upper body, your grip — you
automatically increase the intensity of the contraction of the target muscles.
T: Haven’t you written that squeezing the bar really
hard when benching can increase your poundage?
Pavel: You can expect ten pounds within a workout or two.
This works with any upper body exercise, including curling. There is one
provision — you must do it either when you keep your reps very low, like five
or less, or in the very last reps of a set. If you can normally do fifty
push-ups, you can do five more using this technique. Get on the floor.
[The next thing I know,
Pavel has me pumping out push-ups right there in the lobby. Since this was
during the Arnold Classic, the lobby was filled with fitness babes. I tried my
best to impress. Pavel showed me how to grip the floor as hard as I could with
a claw-like grip, like I’m trying to twist a piece of it off, and contract my
glutes and abs while doing the movement. Sure enough, I immediately felt
stronger and was able to do more reps.]
T: [Panting] This is great stuff.
Pavel: By using extra muscle groups in a very intelligent
fashion, you do not take anything away from the exercise. You increase the
stimulation. Think if it as cheering versus cheating. You’ll immediately get
stronger. For example, flex your wrists during curls and you’ll get even more
stimulation to the biceps. And by doing all this you increase the tension which
protects the joints. You end up getting a great workout with fewer exercises.
You can do a curl and work the upper body with just a curl alone using these
techniques.
T: Tell us about breathing and training.
Pavel: Russian scientists have studied the so-called
pneumo-muscular reflex. Here’s how this reflex works. Think of your muscles as
loud speakers. Think of your brain as the CD player. The volume control is
located in the abdominal cavity. These special baroreceptors sense the
pressure. Whenever the intra-abdominal pressure goes up, it’s like turning up
the volume in your stereo and vice versa. So no matter how hard you’re trying,
if you decrease the intra-abdominal pressure you’ll be immediately weaker.
When I teach people to do
the splits, I teach them to minimize intra-abdominal pressure with a sigh of
relief. But for strength you want to maximize the intra-abdominal pressure, that
is , if you do not have a heart trouble or high-blood pressure. One reason why
some martial artists exhibit such tremendous power is because they understand
the importance of intra-abdominal pressure. They have a different way of
putting it, but that’s what they do. The loud "Kiai!" that you make
when you strike the target increases the pressure in the abdomen and
immediately amplifies the power. This is how a 130 pound man could strike with
the force of a heavyweight boxer.
When I started arm wrestling,
I was told by a professional in the sport, "Don’t let me hear you
breathe." This is because the moment you exhale, you’ll get beat. Arm wrestling,
by the way, is a very sophisticated sport in terms of incorporating all these techniques
of using the body efficiently.
As Marty O’Neal, one of
the top arm wrestlers in the Midwest, said, all of us have been beaten by
somebody who doesn’t look like anybody. In arm wrestling you find that more than
in any other sport because these people really understand how to tap into their
hidden reserves and use their muscle software.
T: How can we modify this karate breathing and apply
it to weight training?
Pavel: You have to learn to maximize this internal
pressure but time it with exertion, in martial arts lingo, "match the
breath with the force." One way of doing this is to pull up the rectal
sphincter to increase the pressure further, take a normal breath — 75% of maximal
breath is usually recommended by Russian scientists — and then you expel the air
at really high pressure with your teeth pressed against your tongue:
"ts-ts-ts!" Make sure not to release all your air, you need it to
protect your back and joints.
In some exercises you have
to modify this. For example, in the bench press your rib cage would sink in,
your shoulders would come up, and you would die about three inches off your
chest. So in the bench, you wait until you reach your sticking point and then
power breathe. In squats and deadlifts, of course, you have to hold your breath
because you can’t afford to lose the air; you need to stabilize your spine. If
you are really hard-core you may apply a highly sophisticated "reversed
breathing" technique to your squats and deads. If you are interested, pick
up an April 2001 copy of Powerlifting USA.
T: Anything else on reflexes and bodybuilding?
Pavel: Think of them as muscle software. Being a
bodybuilder is like having a powerful ThinkPad computer and only using it as a
word processor. Think of a little 130 pound
martial artist. This guy
could break a stack of bricks. A bodybuilder who weighs twice as much would go
to the hospital from that. Now, the bodybuilder may have a lot more hard drive,
so to speak, but he’s computer illiterate. He hasn’t learned how to program his
muscle software.
If you learn how to run
your software — the pneumo-muscular reflex, irradiation, successive induction,
etc. — you immediately get a lot more out of your computer, regardless of
whether you’re a lifter, an arm wrestler, or a bodybuilder. You don’t have to sacrifice
the function for the form. You can train this way to get big very fast, and you
encourage myofibrillar hypertrophy, not just blowing yourself up like a balloon
with soft, useless tissue.
T: So when you apply all these strength-training principles
to bodybuilding, you can lift more weight, which means you get bigger, faster?
Pavel: Yes, and do it in much greater safety because your
body is super stable under the load. That also means you can get bigger faster
because you don’t have to nurse injuries and resort to Barbie exercises.
T: Gotcha. Let’s get into your history a little bit.
Where did you grow up?
Pavel: I grew up in Latvia, one of the former Soviet
republics, in the city of Riga.
T: Were you involved with sports?
Pavel: Martial arts. And then martial arts brought me to
kettlebells, which happen to be a spectacular conditioning tool for any combat
sport. I received a degree in sports science and physiology from the Physical
Culture Institute and I did a stint with Spetsnaz as a PT drill instructor.
What I do right now in the United States is the same thing, only kinder and
gentler. [chuckling]
T: When did you come to the States?
Pavel: I came to the US in the early 90s. It was a time
when you could get out of Russia, barely, and could still get into America. I
started out doing all sorts of odd jobs, bouncing at a night club, selling hot
dogs, etc. I started an unsuccessful import/export business with friends; I
just didn’t know a thing about it. I finally realized I’d better do something
that I know about. So I rented an old bank vault and started a personal training
business.
T: A bank vault was your personal training facility?
Pavel: Yes, an old bank vault with submarine doors and
bars. You could hear the screams echo and the dropped deadlifts nicely. I did
it for awhile in the Midwest along with some seminars. Last year my wife Julie
and I moved to LA. Today I train SWAT and special response teams for various
government agencies and write.
T: How did you get involved with writing books and
articles?
Pavel: John Du Cane walked into one of my seminars one
day and asked if I wanted to do a book. So we did a stretching book. Things
started getting better and I got to know
more and more people,
mostly in the powerlifting community. I got interviewed by Powerlifting USA and
wrote something for them. Then I started writing for Milo which was totally
down my alley.
T: What’s your current involvement with EAS and
Muscle Media?
Pavel: Vince Andrich asked me to design the training
program for the new EAS Supplement Review and I just started writing for Muscle
Media.
T: They could use you. You were a top kettlebell
lifter in Russia, correct?
Pavel: I was nationally ranked. Competitive kettlebell
lifting involves one arm snatches and clean and jerks for repetitions. It’s
what they call a "military applied sport." They learned that a
combination of high-rep kettlebell snatches and clean and jerks improved many
motor abilities simultaneously. They measured strength by the three powerlifts
and grip strength and it all went up. They measured strength-endurance with
pull-ups and dips; it went up. They measured runs at various distances,
sprints, vertical jumps, you name it. They all improved.
Ironically, in many
instances the numbers went up more than with specific training. They had a
bunch of college subjects go through the typical Soviet military PT program
based on standing broad jump, pull-ups and a middle-distance run. One group did
nothing but kettlebells. This group outdid the first group even though they
didn’t practice the actual exercises.
T: You mean those that did only kettlebell work beat
out those actually practicing the events?
Pavel: Yes. They didn’t practice pull-ups or anything,
but the kettlebell group improved in those exercises. Can I explain it? No. But
if something is in your face, even if you don’t understand it, you’d better
take it and run with it.
T: Fascinating. What’s your stance on steroids?
Pavel: Obviously the Soviet teams have done plenty of the
stuff. My background is in the military and steroids are not something that we
used, although we did take stimulants on rough occasions. Personally, I’m
opposed to steroids. No matter how knowledgeable you are, when you are messing
with your endocrine system you have no idea which straw you are going draw in a
long run. Any mathematician who studies non-linear dynamics will tell you that.
T: You write a lot about training men for combat. You
say that a warrior doesn’t have time to warm-up when someone is coming at him
to kill him. So what did training men for war teach you about training the
average person who just wants to be in better shape?
Pavel: What it taught me was that an average person has a
much greater capacity than they think they have. For instance, when I give a
seminar to the general public, I have these guys that come out of the seminar
with about 30% more strength than when they went into it. They just learned to
tap into their strength reserves much better.
I also learned a lot about
psychological conditioning. If you believe you can do it, then it’s something
you can do and vice versa. If you believe that a warm-up is going to prevent an
injury, then that’s what’s going to happen. This is the same thing as believing
that if I don’t wear my magic socks then I’m not going to win.
In the Russian military
the alarm sounds in the middle of the night. The sergeant strikes a match and
before it burns his hand you had better be dressed and on your way to get your
gear and ammo. Warm-ups aren’t appropriate for the military.
Ditto for law enforcement
and other government agencies. These people do not have the luxury of a
warm-up. Take the US Department of Energy, one of my clients. If a bad guy is
going to try to hold up a nuclear power plant you can’t tell him, "Sorry,
I’ve got to warm up first."
T: So what do you think about warming up before a
workout for the average guy? Is it overrated?
Pavel: You bet. Pyramiding with high reps and light
weights or riding a bicycle is a waste of time or worse. You may progressively
practice your technique, e.g. pulling 315 x 1,
405 x 1, and 455 x 1
before deadlifting five wheels, but do not abuse it. Motor learning geeks know
that performing a skill out of the blue, a so-called retrieval practice, is
very effective for learning. My friend Dr. Judd Biasiotto squatted 600 at the
bodyweight of 132. He did this a couple of minutes after waking up and without
any warm-ups.
Occasionally, usually in
competition, you could improve your immediate performance by just supporting a
110 to 120% weight [of your max] a minute before going for the max, greasing
the groove with the wave loading Charles Poliquin and Ian King have been writing
about. But do not make a habit of it so your body does not get
"spoiled."
Last week, we featured Part 1 of our intervierw with Pavel
Tsatsouline. In case you didn’t read it, Pavel is a former physical training
instructor for Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, and he’s gained quite a
following with the martial arts community in this country.
While much of his dogma is
geared towards functionality, many of his novel concepts can probably be
applied to bodybuilding and powerlifting. Whether you agree or disagree with his
theories doesn’t matter. It’s our job to bring all schools of thought to the
table, where they can be duly analyzed, dissected, and, if warranted, buried.
T: I understand you have some strong opinions about
our mag. What do you think of Testosterone?
Pavel: I think you provide a lot of great information,
but you should save your Testosterone for the bite and not waste it on the
bark. Some of your editorials sound like the ramblings of an old man who can do
nothing but ogle women in a strip bar. Some reader mail could have been written
by fifteen year olds bragging about their imaginary conquests. Save your
Testosterone for the gym where it counts.
T: Hey, we like ogling women in strip bars! Fair
enough, Pavel, but since we’ll likely reach 25 million hits this month, we must
be doing something right. Next subject: Where do
Americans screw up in the
gym?
[Editor’s note: My people
— the Finns — had 44 wars with Russia. Now I know why.]
Pavel: The so-called "high intensity training"
is the worst. A bunch of lunatics from a galaxy far far away keep trying to
convince us that their stuff works while their bench press has been stuck since
Arnold’s first movie. Jimmy Stewart’s character in Harvey must have been a HIT
Jedi; he said, "I wrestled with reality for thirty-five years and I’m happy
to state that I finally won over it."
The point is, if you look
at the training of the strongest people in the world, be it weightlifters,
powerlifters, strongmen, whatever, there’s one universal truth. They always
lift heavy, in terms of percentage of one rep max, they always keep their repetitions
low, and they never, ever train to failure. The exceptions you can count on your
fingers without taking your shoes off.
Look at Ed Coan. He can do
a set of three in the squat with 875 pounds, but he could have done five reps.
He does three and calls it a day. If he was dumb enough to listen to these high
intensity idiots, he would have used a lighter weight, say 660, and done 12 reps
to failure. Then the ambulance would have to be called because he would have blown
out a hamstring. That would be the end of the greatest powerlifter in the
world.
T: Isn’t intensity important for weight training?
Pavel: That’s correct, but the mainstream definition of
intensity — a percentage of momentary ability — is very ephemeral. It’s
meaningless. Dmitri Mendeleyev, Russian chemist and the author of the periodic
table of elements, said that science does not start until you start measuring.
The only way you can measure intensity is through the percentage of your one
rep max, period.
If you look at the studies
going back to 1962, you shall find that there is only one variable that matters
and it’s the absolute value of tension. Not relative tension, like how hard it
feels, but the absolute tension, how much force the muscle is exerting and the time
the muscle spends under tension. Failure, fatigue and exhaustion do not factor
in. In fact, when you train to failure, because of something called the Hebbian
mechanisms, you train yourself to fail. You grease the failing groove of the
nervous system. As Dr. Terry Todd, the father of American powerlifting, said,
"Don’t train to fail, train to succeed."
So the next time you get
brainwashed by the HIT Jedis, go into a powerlifting gym or a weightlifting gym
and watch how the best people train. You’ll find a ton of weight, very low reps
and no failure. Why low reps? Safety. It’s the tension of the supporting
muscles that protect you. Low reps are generally much safer even if you’re
using a heavy weight.
Twenty-rep squat programs
are great. They’re worth doing once in a while, but don’t make it the mainstay
of your training. You can’t have the focus with so many reps. You don’t respect
the weight and you get hurt. People squat heavy with no problem, then blow out
their backs loading a 45 pound plate. Why? They don’t respect the weight. It’s hard
to respect something light. When you learn to keep your whole body tight — and you
can only do it when the reps stay low — that’s when you can really achieve maximum
safety.
T: But how are we supposed to build muscle with low
rep training?
Pavel: I shall sum up the energetic theory of muscle
hypertrophy without using any big words: If you get a pump with heavy weights
you shall grow. You need the volume to really deplete the muscle, but you need
the tension to increase the amino acid uptake. Now if you lift really heavy
like a powerlifter and rest for five minutes in between sets, you have the
tension but don’t have enough fatigue. If you start using the little color coded
dumbbells and do a hundred reps, you have the fatigue and the pump, but not the
tension. You may build some "virtual" muscles, but nothing else.
But if you set it up like
this, if you use a heavy weight and do reps of five (not taken to failure) with
only one or two minutes of rest for up to twenty sets, you’re going to be able
to use a heavy weight and get a great pump. Every bodybuilder who’s tried this approach
has reported sensational gains.
Just to give you an
example, I was in the Muscle Media/EAS compound a couple of months ago. I put
David Kennedy, the science editor, through a bench press workout that used this
format and the high-tension techniques. Today his bench is going through the
roof and his pecs are getting huge. It’s a lot more enjoyable way to train,
too.
It’s almost like you’re
posing under the barbell. Ironically, bodybuilding posing is so much more
effective for getting definition than any high-rep program people do. That’s
another mistake comrades make. They think high reps get them cut up. There’s
nothing about high reps that makes you cut up. If you feel the burn that’s just
exhaust fumes from your muscles, lactic acid. It doesn’t mean a thing. Muscle
gets that "cut" look first of all when it’s very dense (heavier
training, myofibrillar density etc.). Second of all, there’s great resting
tension and that comes from high tension training such as heavy iron and posing.
So if bodybuilders would
lay off their leg extensions for sets of twenty and instead go cramp your quads
and pose them, they’ll get a lot better gains.
T: In your book and video Power to the People!, you
talk a lot about two lifts — the deadlift and the all-but-forgotten bent press,
or side press. Why the emphasis on those two lifts?
Pavel: The deadlift is the working class answer to the
squat. The squat is a wonderful exercise, but it’s like a clean and jerk. You
just don’t go out and learn to squat on your own. People complain about their
blown out knees and their hurt backs. The proper squatting form that involves
keeping your shins vertical, keeping the normal curve in the spine, not letting
the knees bow in, keeping the whole body under tension, etc., it’s something
that takes a lot of time to learn.
Most squatters don’t have
the slightest clue how to carry the bar on their backs. It kills their wrists
and it kills their shoulders. So the squat is a great exercise, but just like
you don’t learn how to do gymnastics by yourself, you don’t learn how to squat
without expert hands-on instruction. It can take years to learn. Besides, it
requires a power rack and a spotter. Rephrase that, it requires a competent
spotter.
With the deadlift on the
other hand, you can drop the bar if you want to. You don’t need a spotter or a
power rack. It’s also a much more natural movement. In our ontogenesis or
development, there’s a reflex for the deadlift; it’s just extending your body.
It’s very quick and easy to learn and it’s a skill you use everyday. Plus, you
work more muscle groups. You work your shoulder girdle, your traps, your
biceps, your forearms and your grip. Also, for athletes from sports where
hypertrophy in the legs is not recommended, the deadlift is a great exercise.
UFC champ Ken Shamrock is among the smart combat athletes who chose the dead
over the squat.
If you are a bodybuilder
and your legs are your strong body part, consider deads as your only leg
exercise. I coached Jim Wilke, who went on to become one of the top natural bodybuilders
in Minnesota, and it worked like a charm for him.
T: Okay, so what about the side press?
Pavel: The old-fashioned side press, or an overhead press
with a sideways lean, is great for the shoulders, lats, and waist, but it is
just a cherry on top of the deadlift sundae.
T: So if a person is super busy and can only get two
workouts per week, they need to use the side press and the deadlift.
Pavel: A bodybuilder could make it the bench press and
the deadlift. It’s the most comprehensive workout you could possibly hope for,
especially if you use all the high-tension techniques we’ve been talking about.
You’ll be able to use every muscle in your body at the same time.
T: Is soreness necessary?
Pavel: Nobody knows. People have gained with soreness and
without soreness. One thing is for sure, you can’t use soreness as an indicator
of progress. The only meaningful gauge is the increase in your strength or your
muscle mass. Soreness doesn’t mean a thing. For athletes and hard living
comrades, so to speak, soreness is not an option either.
If there’s a hostage
situation, a tactical officer can’t say, "Sorry, Captain, I did my squats
two days ago and I can’t walk." That’s not an option. If you can’t perform
on a dime, if you’re all stiff and tired, you’re lunch. Evolution is still at
work. You must eliminate the soreness.
Let’s say you’re a martial
artist. Martial artists are enamoured with high reps and low weights. They are
under this impression that heavy weights build huge muscles. So these fighters
are so exhausted from their silly fifty rep squats and thirty rep bench
presses, that they have no energy left for their martial arts practice. They
can’t punch, they can’t kick, and before you know it they give up strength
training, if you can call that strength training in the first place.
If they go to low rep,
heavy, non-exhaustive training — three sets of three or five sets of five —
they would not get sore. This is what I teach to SWAT teams to keep them ready
for action around the clock. If you are into combat sports, read the March 2001
issue of MILO and watch the Rapid Response videos of a PT training course I
gave to Texas SWAT teams.
T: You’ve written a popular book on ab training.
Where do people go wrong when it comes to abdominal training?
Pavel: Everywhere! Number one is this ridiculous notion
that you have to use high reps to get cut up. Getting cut up is a function of
resting tension in the muscle and low body fat. That’s all there is to it.
Think of Bruce Lee who did a lot of isometrics, the ultimate high tension
training. The guy was wiry, lean and hard. Some women will start doing high-rep
programs thinking they’re going to cut up and some of them instead start gaining
mass, especially glycogen and water.
You get so beat up from
high reps you can barely sneeze. It’s like rigor mortis. So go heavy. Use a
heavy weight but don’t get a pump. That means you keep your sets low and you
rest a lot. Three sets of five is more than adequate for the abs, but the
secret is to find a very challenging exercise. One option is to use a ton of
plates or even a loaded barbell, as many of my powerlifting buddies do, and do
sit-ups with it. But who really wants to do a sit-up with 225 pounds? It’s
awkward, plus the technique has to be really precise. So you may want to choose
a drill with poor leverage instead, e.g. the Janda sit-up or the dragon flag.
The other problem is
exercise selection. There is this notion that abs can be isolated from the hip
flexors by eliminating the movement in the hip joint, like they do in the crunch.
It’s a big joke. It’s like saying that you are what you eat. You are a bagel. Doesn’t
work like that.
You can only inhibit the
hip flexors neurologically. Eastern European Professor Vladimir Janda developed
a special sit-up where your training partner places his hands under your calves
and pulls back. You attempt to sit-up while steadily pushing against his hands.
This activates the hip extensor muscles. Reciprocal inhibition takes place and
the hip flexors relax. Back stress is eliminated and the abs are isolated!
[Editor’s note: Read our
Evolution of Ab Training article for more info (and pics) of the Janda sit-up.]
So if you want to train
your abs well, first of all do the power breathing techniques we’ve discussed
and second, do Janda sit-ups. That’s the cornerstone of all ab training. In addition,
you may want to add some other drills, but certainly not crunches. They belong in
the junk pile of history next to Communism.
T: Your Ab Pavelizer device simulates a Janda sit-up,
but you don’t have to have a
partner, correct?
Pavel: Yes it does. As my friend Clarence Bass stated on
his web site, a partner tends to help you and the device doesn’t. The Pavelizer
is my creation so it’s just as indifferent to your pain as I am. If you can do
five reps with it, you are a stud. This is the only ab training device that’s
catching on in the powerlifting circles. Normally you don’t see a powerlifter
using an ab device; it’s like seeing one wear pink tights. But the powerlifters
like it because it’s so damn hard. Unlike a regular sit-up, it teaches you to
contract all your midsection muscles the way you should for a deadlift, squat
or overhead press. It teaches you to get tight under a bar.
[Editor’s note: Chris
reviewed the Pavelizer in issue #121’s Stuff We Like column. There he said it
was an good device but the workmanship was on the shoddy side. However, Chris
says it has since been redesigned and the overall quality and usability has
been much improved.]
T: Let’s talk about stretching. In your book on
stretching, Relax into Stretch, the first words in the book are,
"Stretching is NOT the best way to become flexible!" Explain that.
Pavel: The traditional Western approach to flexibility
has failed because it started with the assumption that muscles and connective
tissues need to be physically stretched. The premise that you need to stretch
if you want to be flexible is wrong. Try this test. While standing, extend your
leg out to the side at a 90 degree angle and place it on a table or chair. Now
put that leg down and do it with the other leg. It’s easy. So what stops you
from spreading both legs at the same time and doing the splits, or what Russian
ballet dancers call "the dead split"? It has nothing to do with
"short" muscles.
No muscles run from one
leg to the other! No tendon, no ligaments, nothing but skin. So why can’t you
do the splits? Fear and tension. The muscles tighten up and resist lengthening.
Russian scientists call it antagonist passive insufficiency. It’s not short muscles
or connective tissue that makes you tight; it’s your nervous system!
If you spend a lot of time
walking or sitting a certain way, your muscles accept that length as normal. And
whenever you try to elongate the muscles beyond that, the stretch reflex fires
and it reins the muscle right back in. The key to exceptional flexibility is to
control the stretch reflex, learn to override it and learn to relax the muscle
into the stretch. Your muscles are already long enough to do the splits; they
just don’t know it yet. So just like with strength training, I teach people to
run their muscle software by manipulating tension and breathing.
T: Why should bodybuilders stretch?
Pavel: There are many reasons. For example, in my book I
demonstrate a stretch for the hamstrings that’s favored by Russian
weightlifters. If you’re one of those people who have a hell of a time keeping
the arch in the back during deadlifts, squats or good mornings, that’s the
stretch that’ll teach you how to do it. Russian scientist Robert Roman
determined that you lose 15% of your pulling strength if you pull with a
rounded back.
Also, if you improve the
flexibility of your shoulders you can squat in greater comfort. If you increase
the flexibility of the spine, you’ll bench more weight because your rib cage is
much more open. There are also some esoteric forms of stretching that can make
you stronger or bigger, such as loaded passive stretching.
T: What’s that exactly?
Pavel: Yefimov found out in 1977 that this type of
stretching was really effective at increasing your strength. It’s literal
stretching. You use fairly light weight and you let the weight stretch out the
muscle after a set. For instance, between sets of barbell curls you sit on an
incline bench and let two dumbbells stretch your bis. Don’t try to relax or contract
the muscle. You just let it hang for about ten seconds. That sort of thing makes
you stronger, although no one is sure why.
If you’re a lifter, you’ll
find that an intelligent approach to flexibility is going to increase your
total. For instance, some lifters can’t lock out a deadlift because their hip
flexors are too damned tight. The right stretching can help you get your numbers
up so you can drive without the emergency break on. Last year I helped Eddy
Coan with his adductors and hip flexors; now he sent one of his powerlifting
buddies to my booth at the Arnold so I could fix his sumos.
T: Describe your infamous "ladder" drills.
Pavel: It is the Soviet Special Forces favorite for
upping strength endurance. They are required to perform 18 dead hang pull-ups
wearing a 10-kilo (22 pound) bullet-proof vest. One of my SWAT cowboys worked
up to forty consecutive pull-ups with this technique.
If done with a partner, it
works like this: I do a pull-up, you do one. I do two, you match me, etc. until
one of us cannot keep up. Then we start over. One rep, two reps, 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10...
(start over) 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... (start over) 1,2,3,4,5. We totaled hundreds of
pull-ups almost daily without burning out, and the extreme PT tests of our service
were a breeze. You should stop each ladder one or two reps short of your limit.
In other words, if you can work up to ten reps at the top of the ladder, it’s
best to stop at about eight, and then begin at one again.
You can perform these by
yourself as well. Basically, you do a rep, rest a few seconds, do two, etc.
until things get hard but not impossible. Then you start at one again and work
up. You may do another round of ladders later in the workout. A couple of
months later your armpits will chafe.
T: I’ll have to try that. You have a new video out on
kettlebells. What’s so great about these things?
Pavel: Kettlebells used to be a favorite tool in many
countries, including America. A kettlebell is a large cast iron basketball with
a handle. You can do the same things with it as you can do with dumbbells, but
better.
T: Why better?
Pavel: For example, when you perform curls with a bar or regular
dumbbells, the resistance drops off at the top of the exercise. With the
kettlebell, the center of gravity is displaced, so you get a peak contraction.
It forces you also to flex your wrists. Developed wrist flexors means big
biceps. You may have noticed how arm-wrestlers are flocking to my booth. World
champ Mary McConnaughy gave two thumbs up to K-bells and so did many others.
With pec work, you can do
flyes with kettlebells and still have resistance at the top of the movement.
Try the Scott or the Arnold press with kettlebells and you shall see why they
are also superior for shoulder work. Kettlebells also teach you the proper
squat form. Overhead squats is one of the best ways to improving your squatting
technique. But most people can’t even get started; they can’t hold the bar far
enough back. Do it with the kettlebell and the center of gravity is displaced
and will help you improve your shoulder flexibility. World powerlifting
champion Amy Weisberger just tried them at my booth and immediately saw their
value.
Kettlebell lifts like the
one arm snatch and the repetition clean and jerk make great working class
alternatives for the Olympic lifts. These are great exercises for athletes. And
I mentioned before, for reasons not completely understood, repetition clean and
jerks as well as snatches with a relatively light weight develop absolute
strength.
Another thing I like about
kettlebells is the dinosaur factor. They’re just damn nasty and evil. Guys are
scared of them!
T: You’ve been criticized for writing in your Power
to the People book that a person only needs to use one or two exercises.
Pavel: That only comes from people who don’t understand
how to use the high tension techniques. My buddy Marty Gallager, who used to
coach the Powerlifting Team USA, doesn’t work his abs. He says if you can pull
a 500 pound deadlift you don’t need to work your abs. If you work heavy and
learn how to use the body properly, you can do that. You can get great results
from an abbreviated program.
My book has two uses.
Beginners and people who like the efficient use of time may just use the
minimalist program in it. Advanced bodybuilders can follow any program they
like and just add in the high tension and power breathing techniques from the
book.
T: Every time I read your stuff you shock me with
something. Let’s hear one of your ideas about training that would shock T-mag
readers.
Pavel: There is a belief that you have no business coming
back to the gym until you can better yourself. You must have complete recovery,
they say. This is totally ridiculous. This is called distributed loading and
it’s something that’s fine for beginners, perhaps for intermediate athletes,
but not for advanced athletes. The alternative is concentrated loading. You
build up the fatigue then you back off and taper.
For example, the Russian
national powerlifting team is benching up to eight times a week. Obviously,
they do not completely recover, but they build up the volume and the fatigue, then
have some unloading workouts, high volume, low volume, high intensity, low intensity,
then medium etc. There is such a thing as continuity in your training. As long as
you keep stimulating the nervous system with the stimulus, even if your body is
not totally recovered, you’re going to make much better gains. Once in a while
go easy, once in a while go hard… this is where instinctive training comes in.
Some pseudo-scientific
authorities make fun of bodybuilders who train instinctively. But sometimes it
really does make sense. Today you may be able to do five sets of five in the
bench. Tomorrow you can come back and do three triples with the same weight. You’re
not totally recovered, but you’re greasing the same groove in the nervous
system. Then maybe you can bench again the third day, really beat it up, and
then take two days off. That’s something to consider.
T: So sometimes, as long as you’re not going to
failure, you can train the same muscle group two days or more in a row? Okay,
you’ve shocked me. Thanks for the interview, Pavel.
Pavel: Anytime, Chris.
The next day at the Arnold
expo, Pavel put me though some unique kettlebell lifts and showed me a few
"vibration drills" to increase speed. Overall, I was impressed. Do
all of us at T-mag "buy" all of Pavel’s theories regarding to
bodybuilding? Not by a longshot. Will I incorporate many of Pavel’s techniques
into my current program? You bet, already have in fact, and with great results.
After all, I want to be buff and functional. The body of Arnold and the
practical strength and speed of Bruce Lee? Yeah, I can dig that.
My
friend Pavel Tsatsouline, the Russian trained Master of Sports who invented the
Ab Pavelizer (see article No. 47), says the way to do more chin-ups is to
"grease the groove" by doing lots of chins every day. According to
Pavel, repetitive and reasonably intense stimulation strengthens the nerve
impulse to the muscles involved, making them stronger and more enduring. The
technical term, says Tsatsouline, is synaptic facilitation.
Being
a low-volume, high-intensity guy, I would normally dismiss such advice as
mindless overkill. But I know for a fact that the Eastern Europeans, who have
dominated Olympic lifting for many years, train heavy two or three (or more)
times a day. For example, Galabin Boevski, the 152-pound Bulgarian lifter who
snatched a record 358 and clean & jerked 432 in winning the 1999 world
championship, does three workouts a day, using maximum poundages and a limited
number of exercises. In the morning, he works up to maximum singles in the
snatch, clean and jerk and the front squat. In the afternoon, he does it again,
sometimes lifting more than in the morning session. He finishes with an evening
session, where he repeats snatches and front squats, again lifting maximum poundages.
The next day he does it again! (For further details, see the March 2000 issue
of Milo, www.ironmind.com)
I’m
convinced this is true, because among other things, I have a copy of Milo
publisher Randall Strossen’s 1998 Bulgarian-training-hall video, which shows
Boevski in several back-to-back training sessions; in one session, he
repeatedly attempts to snatch 353; he kept trying the weight until his coach,
Ivan Abadjiev, made him stop. This is a huge weight for a man weighing only 152
pounds. As noted above, his snatch the next year with 358 was a new world
record. The next morning, he was back in the training hall doing a clean and
jerk with 419. Later in the day, he was shown doing a front squat with over 200
kilos or 441 pounds. So, yes, it’s true; these guys lift huge weights, several times
a day, day after day.
Unappealing
as such training may be to people who have a life outside the gym, it obviously
works – at least for elite athletes such as Boevski, who are willing and able
to spend the years necessary to develop the capacity to survive and benefit
from this level of training.
Plus,
Pavel persuaded his 60-year-old father-in-law, Roger Antonson, to do chins
every time he went down into his basement; each day he would do between 25 and
100 chin-ups. After a few months of such training (and a few days of rest),
Roger knocked off 20 chins, more than he had been able to do 40 years earlier
in the Marine Corps. That did it. I decided to test Pavel’s formula:
Specificity
+ frequent practice = success.
I
limited the experiment to chin-ups, because I didn’t want to disrupt my normal
training routine – which is both productive and enjoyable (see Challenge
Yourself) – and I didn’t want to overshoot my recovery capacity. Pavel says the
key to synaptic facilitation training is to gradually buildup both volume and
intensity, but avoid overtraining. He recommends "training as often as
possible while being as fresh as possible."
Pavel
says each set should be terminated well short of failure, because "pushing
to exhaustion will burn out your neuromuscular system and force you to cut
back" on volume. He recommends doing multiple sets of as many chins as you
can without struggling, spaced out over the course of the day. That makes
sense, of course, if the objective is to up the volume as much as possible without
causing burnout.
As
regular readers know, my heavy training days are Saturday and Sunday; I
generally walk Monday through Friday. After a few weeks of adjustment where I
tried doing chin-ups Monday through Thursday, I settled down to chins on Tuesday,
Wednesday and Thursday. I chose this schedule because it allowed me to rest the
day before and the day after my main workouts. It worked surprisingly well.
Frankly, I enjoyed the extra effort during the week; it was challenging, but not
enough to wear me out. Except for a few aches and pains in my shoulders at
first, it felt good.
I
usually did three sets of chins each day (morning, noon and late afternoon) and
occasionally an additional set in the evening. I start out doing sets of 10
reps, and over the course of four weeks worked up to 12 chins per set. At the
end of the fourth week, I rested on Friday, as usual, and tested myself during
my regular Saturday workout: I did 16 chins. "No problem," I wrote in
my trading dairy.
I
backed off a bit in week 5, doing three sets of 10, and 11 sets of 11 for a
weekly total of 151 chins. I did the same routine in week 6, and then moved the
reps per set back up to 12 in week 7. I tested myself again at the end of week
7: 18 chins this time. Dairy notation: "Good job. The best I’ve done in a
long time. Seventeen chins is the best I can remember doing in recent years –
and today was easier." Synaptic facilitation seemed to be working.
In
weeks 8, 9 and 10, most of the sets I did were 12 and 13, with a few sets of 14
chins in the third week. Then, I tested myself for the third time: 19 chins.
"Good effort," I recorded. "The best in a long time."
I
took a week off at that point, which didn’t seem to help. As Pavel probably would
have predicted, I felt rusty when I started doing chin-ups again the next week.
"I believe the week of rest hurt my performance," I wrote in my
dairy.
When
I got going again – it didn’t take long; only a few days – I added a new
wrinkle to increase intensity: I
lowered myself very slowly on the last rep of each set. Pavel says
emphasizing the negative "blasts the groove" or, technically
speaking, it stimulates "synaptic potentiation." Pretty fancy, huh? Whatever,
there’s no doubt that doing a slow negative on the final chin produces a very intense
contraction. Pavel warns against doing more than one negative-emphasis rep;
doing more would unnecessarily extend recovery time and reduce the volume that
can be done without overtraining. That’s why I kept the reps to 13 and 14 for
the most part and only did 15 a few times in the final three weeks of the
experiment. I thought doing a slow negative on the final rep of each set would
be enough added stimulation to move me up to 20 chins, which would be the most
I’ve done since I won the state pentathlon championship in high school.
Success!
I did 20 full-range chin-ups, the best I’ve done in years. (Photo by Carol
Bass)
It
worked! I replicated the experience of Pavel’s father-in-law. The last couple
of reps were hard, but I did 20 good chin-ups. The experiment was successful.
So,
what’s to be learned here? What's the take-away message? Personally, I found my
little experiment quite instructive. As explained in Challenge Yourself, both
volume and high-intensity training (HIT) work, but for different reasons.
Synaptic facilitation is probably one of the mechanisms at work in the volume
approach.
Does
that mean I plan to pile on the volume in my own training? No way. In my view,
training like the Bulgarians would be a big mistake, for me and for most
people. It would take the joy out of training. If one could survive the volume
(a very big if), you probably wouldn’t have the time or energy to do anything
else. But the idea of narrowly-targeted synaptic facilitation training, using carefully
selected individual exercises, has definite appeal. The key, it seems to me, is
to derive the benefits without overwhelming your recovery capacity and turning
your life topsy-turvy.
In
addition to chin-ups, parallel-bar dips seem like a good candidate for synaptic
facilitation training. Almost any exercise, of course, should work. For
example, Paul Anderson years ago applied a form of synaptic facilitation
training to the barbell squat – with spectacular results. (See article No. 38, "Paul
Anderson, King of the Squat.")
If
you try it, be careful. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.