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Beyond bodybuilding

I have been at home in the strange, odd world of beyond bodybuilding for two decades and Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding has made me feel strange at home. It has taken a stranger in a strange land to write something fresh and vital about the art and science of physical renovation. This is not old wine in new bottles this is something strange and different and entirely new. Bodybuilding in the abstract and in practice is at once both repulsive and seductive: as a competitive sport bodybuilding is form without function, bloated appearance is heralded as benchmark, pompous preening triumphant over functional grit. On a fundamental level grassroots adherents combines progressive resistance training with cardiovascular training and nutrition. In its simple form bodybuilding is the healthiest, sanest, most effective and balanced fitness system known to man. The true bodybuilder seeks synergy and balances three component parts (eating, cardio and weight training) in a precarious, delicate ballet. Handled deftly and precisely, results are profound and the successful application produces complete physical transformation. Pavel is no bodybuilder – what he is, exactly, defies description – yet he has written a profound book, a genuinely strange treatise on the art and science of physical transformation. His book is both profound and baffling. His workbook is strange, in the best sense, in the sense Harold Bloom and Walter Pater ascribe to.

I was left with an unsettling feeling after I read Beyond Bodybuilding. His perspective is unlike anything I have ever encountered. As an athletic scribe with three decades under my belt, I have seen and read it all; yet this is unlike anything I have encountered and it jars me. I am not easily jarred. This 327-page workbook could only be written by an outsider, someone with enough distance from the prevailing orthodoxy to see clearly. Someone not at all concerned with fitting in with what is; rather, like Faulkner, he establishes an entirely new reality. Those of us within the box could not have written anything other than a clever recapitulation and recasting of the contents of the box. Only someone outside the box – someone not yet co-opted – could write what Tsatsouline has written…a strange tome that brings a fresh perspective to bodybuilding. This is not a book for the elite; this is a book for Everyman. This is a book for the serious individual without a lot of baggage or preconceptions; this book is for someone seeking to improve their physical lot in life. Pavel’s particular and peculiar circumstance led him from the Ukraine to Santa Monica. What better geographical dissimilarity for spawning something strange, fresh and different?

By blending empirical experience with a thirst for knowledge – and given a decade of seasoning – he is coming into his own and his voice is clear and resonant and worth hearing. Ken Kesey once quizzed Sonny Barger, the Maximum Domo of the Hell’s Angels on how exactly he selected Hell’s Angel’s. “We don’t select them, we recognize them.” And so it is amongst the athletic elite. Pavel’s effortless entry into the stratosphere of the athletically gifted in this country was not contingent on grudging acceptance rather on an obvious recognition of a peer. Academically he has done his homework. How well I remember him visiting me many years ago here at the Mountain Compound. He was exposed to my own brand of strangeness and at the end asked, “So Marty, you old collective farmer, where are the books, magazines and periodicals?” I laughed and directed him to a musty attic where stacks and stacks of ancient Strength and Health magazines, Muscle Mags, Muscle Builder, All American Athlete and Iron Man lay, plus my autographed copies of books by Paul Anderson and Bill Pearl. He asked if he might be given a few hours to peruse, ponder and absorb. I insisted he borrow what he considered essential and he treated the materials with reverence, as if he’d hit a mother lode. His thirst for knowledge was, and is, unquenchable.

“The anxiety of influence cripples lesser talents but stimulates genius…strong writers do not choose their prime precursors; they are chosen by them but have the wit to transform these forerunners into composites.”

I wholeheartedly recommend Beyond Bodybuilding: I view it as a summation of the accumulated knowledge Pavel Tsatsouline has gathered to this point in his (still embryonic) career. Herein lies strange work full of strange and exotic tactics: janda sit-ups, sledgehammer leverage drills, fingertip pull-ups, bent presses, straddle-style one arm deadlifts, power rack partials, kettle bell drills, full contact bar twists, pinch gripping, one-finger partial dead lifts, progressive movement training, secret underground Russian fatigue hypertrophy cycles, renegade lunges, neck planks, loaded passive stretches, dragon walks, deck squats, “Russian laundry” grip work…on and on it rolls. All told through the strange prism of a Russian Spetsnaz commando trainer who now lives on the beach in Santa Monica and exemplifies the Horatio Alger/American Dream better than any American I know. Harold Bloom would be proud. Tsatsouline offers his ample storehouse of empirical knowledge and blends it with abstract theoretical data. Every conceivable angle, nuance, subtlety, wrinkle, innovation, twist, technical explanation and plan of attack is discussed and described. Every body part is covered and a blueprint provided for how to build and strengthen every conceivable muscular target.

The detail and description are tremendous. The mix between text and photos is spot on; the clarity of exercise description leaves nothing to the imagination. Granted this Opus Magnus is strictly limited to progressive resistance training of all type and variety –nutrition and cardio are mentioned in passing – regardless, this strange and comprehensive work needs to be seen and read. Once a notoriously difficult music critic described his rapture upon hearing the Miles Davis quintet, “this is the musical equivalent of an ice cold shower: initially shocking but ultimately bracing, refreshing and regenerative.” If you are serious about physical renovation and want a new approach to progressive resistance training, if you yearn for the physiological equivalent of an ice-cold shower, then lay down your hard-earned disposable income and purchase Beyond Bodybuilding. Take the financial plunge then turn this accumulated abstraction into concrete reality. Once you have this strange fruit in your possession it is up to you to put the mountain of information into play. The harsh reality of the gym floor beckons.

By Marty Gallagher