On Striving to do Fewer Things Better In my recent Go Heavy or Go Home essay, I discussed Pavel Tsatsouline’s “7 rules of Russian training.” The last of the rules is “You must strive to do fewer things better.” In this essay, we will look at the importance of this rule and some various training strategies to accomplish it. I often write about the different reasons that lifters don’t get the results out of their training that they’re looking for. Not using the right movements, following so-called bro-split routines that are also coupled with too many machine and cable exercises, along with jumping from program-to-program are just a few of the workout ideas that I’m apt to rail against. For these reasons and some others, there are a lot of average gym-goers—even ones who have been “training” for years on end—who don’t look like they lift. The best programs often involve doing...
Budo, the Pursuit of Excellence, and the Goal of Practice There are many who take up Budo for the wrong reasons. Often, especially for young men, it has something to do with wanting to be tough or the desire to be the “baddest man” in the neighborhood or something of a similar nature. Many who do take up the Budo for this reason, however, find that it ends up giving them something much more than they had realized at first. It not only gives them purpose, but it aids in killing the ego rather than building it up. In my last “regular job,” after I had retired from working in Engineering and before I took up my love of writing as a full-time profession, I worked at a non-profit with “at-risk” young men, ones who had been in some kind of trouble with the law or who had been incarcerated for one reason or another. The non-profit I worked for helped them to find jobs in various sectors and then trained them i...