Russian Power Training Revisited

Slovenian powerlifter Erni Gregorčič at Worlds 2014 in Sydney, Australia

The other day, I received an email from a reader who wanted to know if I still felt the same way about strength training - specifically Russian strength training, for some reason - as I did years ago. He asked this, he said, because I hadn't published very much on the subject in the last couple of years. I replied that, of course, I still feel the same way about the efficacy of strength and power programs that I recommended 10 years ago as I do today.

There really is nothing new under the strength and power building sun.

With that being said, for those of you new to Russian-style training, here are the "rules" of Russian-style training as recommended by strength guru Pavel Tsatsouline*:

1. You must lift heavy.

2. You must limit your reps to five.

3. You must avoid muscular failure.

4. You must cycle your loads.

5. You must stay tight. Tension is power.

6. You must treat your strength as a skill and "practice" with iron rather than "work out".

7. You must strive to do fewer things better.

The only caveat I would add is that all rules can be broken under the right circumstances, but we'll save that for another post...

*As listed in Pavel's book "Beyond Bodybuilding"

Comments

The Squat and Grow Big Program

A Hybrid High-Frequency Regimen for Natural Mass-Building I have long been a fan of high-frequency training (HFT) and other methods of lifting that go against the stream of most modern training. This is especially true of strictly muscle-building methods. Perhaps it’s hubris on my part to think that I know better than bodybuilders lifting in today’s gyms, but I think there are better methods for the natural bodybuilder than what is currently used by the vast majority of lifters (at least in the West—bodybuilders in East Europe are another story). Infrequent training simply isn’t a good method for the majority of lifters if their goal is to gain muscle mass. And by “majority” I mean natural lifters. Steroids change the equation—and change it big time . Anabolic steroid use is often cited as the reason why bodybuilders from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s (before Dorian ...

Real Bodybuilding: Old-School Antagonistic Chest and Back Training

Before we get started here, I want to apologize for the delay in posts. I have been working on, and formatting, my e-books so that I can start selling paperback versions of the same books. Be on the lookout for those in the next week or two. With that out of the way... I have a semi-regular, semi-ongoing series which I have titled “Real Bodybuilding.” The first installment—which I never, by the way, planned on being the first in a series of training articles—was some scribblings and thoughts on how old-school, real bodybuilders actually trained before the advent of large doses of various anabolic steroids in bodybuilding (which changed everything). And after writing that one, there was enough interest in the topics discussed that I thought some follow-up articles and essays were in order. Before we go any further, here are the links to the past installments. Reading th...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan magazine. In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.” I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time . In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Search This Blog