Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1399 - Pavel Tsatsouline
Uploaded: 2019-12-12T20:00:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1399 - Pavel Tsatsouline' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1399 - Pavel Tsatsouline' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1399 - Pavel Tsatsouline

all right here we go what's up man how are you Joe great to be your show it's a
pleasure it's
a pleasure to meet you and an honor I've been following your work for a long
time man I mean
I was first introduced to you and your methods by Steve Maxwell who was a you
know a huge proponent
of the kettlebell and then I started getting into your videos yeah yeah very
good and I started
getting into your videos and I've read your books and so thank you it's an
honor my pleasure how
long have you been teaching and practicing with kettlebells since you're a
little something like
that medium that's it it's kind of like baseball you know it's pretty common in
Russia in the
Soviet Union yeah it is why didn't it catch on here until you came over here
you know what I
don't think people really tried I don't think people really understood that it
would catch on
and I did not think it would happen either so I'm sitting with my friend Marty
Gallagher having
stakes years back Marty is a former coach for powerlifting team USA and coach
of some top lifters
and you were just trading old war stories talking about stuff and I told him
about kettlebells he
says well you've got to teach Americans how to do that and I said Marty you don't
understand this
stuff is too hard nobody's going to want to do this and he said you don't
understand people want to do
this and I wrote an article for based on Marty's suggestion for Milo so Milo
was a publication niche
publication for strange guys who lift rocks and bend things and break things
and so on and so forth
and so that was the start of it and and after that I told my publisher about it
and he said well come
on let's just make kettlebells and teach people I told him the same thing you
don't understand that
people will not want to do this this is too hard and but he convinced me and
they convinced me and
the rest is history why did you think that it was popular in the Soviet Union
but wouldn't be popular in
America you know this is something that you just see it's very common thing Joe
so you just see this you
don't think much about this who knows yeah but it was popular over there yeah
and it says at least
since at least seventeen hundreds or possibly before that but this country is
so performance oriented and
so sports oriented and so competitive why wouldn't you think that that would be
sort of a natural
training modality that would they would immediately adopt it you got me there
so
you just just in the US some years back decades before there's some some kettlebells
were used by
some old-time strongman like Zig Klein for example and there was a company
named Milo no
relations to the magazine really like about hundred years with Milo why oh Milo
is the guy who carried
the uh the calf so if you go if you look um okay the progressive overload is
usually explained as this
legend of Milo of Crotona so this guy started carrying a little calf on his
shoulders and he would carry
the calf every day so the calf would grow and eventually the guy became very
strong so that's why that name
is present in in the strength game so back then today it is it just one of the
finest publications on
strength training mostly niche things again like gripping what if anyone's
actually done that what
carry a calf not work it would not that isn't amazing that something can grow
physically faster than you
can keep lifting it absolutely can but you know your typical training plan that
people say I'm gonna have
five pounds on my bench press today I'm gonna do this every week and then by
Christmas I'll be the world
champion and it just doesn't work so the rate of adaptation is such that your
body just cannot do
that and it's cyclical in nature so you have to to put it in the Milo terms you
have to after you carry
the calf for a while it grows you have to back up to a lighter calf and start
you know start building up
again why we do not know exactly so for some reason that unidirectional
adaptation just in one you know
we're getting stronger at the bench press or what have you we're carrying the
calf it just cannot
proceed indefinitely there's some fatigue of some endocrine mechanisms some
genetic mechanisms we do not
know that but tactically we do have tricks of the trade to be that to work
around that and there's a
number of ways of doing that the oldest way of doing that and it's very smart
still very smart for a lot of
people they would call this i think possibly constant weight training or
something like that
but the soviets described it as step loading so let's look at your typical let's
look at your typical
beginner somebody in the gym and so the person starts lifting whatever weight
for whatever reps and the
next week let's say next week he has five pounds and he does it again and he
does it again
well the soviets figured out that it's much better for him to stay at the same
weight for several weeks
and then make a bigger jump hmm so what you're doing pretty much is you are
the making adaptations more stable and it just happens on the cellular levels
membranes become
stronger and so on but old timers just they would say that you're solidifying
the gains
so the way that many old timers trained is they would just take the same weight
and they're staying with the same
weight for a long time in the beginning it's challenging
and then it becomes kind of comfortable that becomes almost easy
and never jump up so that's just one way of doing it
and today it's not unprecedented either if you look at
chris summer he's a gymnastics coach he used that with gymnasts it's very
common
i use that tactic with my the latest edition of my kettlebell simple and
sinister
because it's much more reliable than just progressive overload and also because
psychologically
first of all it weeds out the impatient people so you're told to stay with the
same load for a while
some people automatically say oh forget it i cannot do that well i don't want
these people
fall in my stuff anyway and second so you're staying with this weight or these
reps for some time
in the beginning they challenge you and then sometime goes by and suddenly they
don't anymore
so it's just very much there's a very clear clear sense of accomplishment so
this is called step
loading or using the old timers old timers terminology the constant weight
training
if you look at the other ways of making progress so another approach is called
cycling
and cycling so the one that i just described that would really be if we could
artificially stop
the growth of the calf like okay stop growing for a while which we can't but
the cycling this is where
i mentioned earlier this is where you go back to a lighter calf so the classic
american powerlifting
uh training template this is cycling so the history of cycling is very
interesting again what cycling is
cycling is in the simplest possible terms you take 12 weeks you start with
light weights you build up
until you go really heavy and that was the predominant strength training system
in the 70s in the 80s
and that was the strength system behind the dominant american powerlifting team
so lifters like eddie cohn
kirk kawaski lifters like don austin who is uh or lamar gant whose deadlift
records still stand decades
after they use this classic cycling so the classic cycling you start with the
moderate moderately challenging
load then you keep proceeding go heavier and heavier and heavier then you
compete then you start over and
to give you um to give you a very simple tactic that's something that your
listeners can use in their
training whether they follow the cycling format where they do something else is
that russian scientist
discovery that your endocrine system pretty much can take uh two two weeks out
of four of heavy loading
that's just the way it is there are some exceptions if you but forget
exceptions generally just two weeks
of heavy loading and if you look at the classic power lifting cycles by let's
say marty gallagher so for
four weeks you do sets of eight four weeks sets of five four weeks sets of
three and in week one you start
out with the way that's comfortable in week two moderately challenging in week
three you hit your repeat
your previous pr for these reps and in week four you set your new pr and then
you jump to the next rep count
all right so as you see in this particular template you have two weeks two hard
weeks of training out of
the month and that's just one of the many ways of doing that pardon me i got
distracted so i want to
to talk about the history of cycling yeah so bill star who's a huge name in the
game he he was a former
top weightlifter in the united states back in the 60s later on very successful
coach strength coach and
author the strongest shall survive his uh book on strength training for
football remains one of the best
strength training books and bill star recalls that american lifters started
getting a whiff of some
russian paradise programs so what's prioritization prioritization the simplest
terms is planning your
training according to certain principles to end at peak performance so that's
just the really kind of a
50 000 level 50 000 foot definition and they did not have their full full
information about how it was done
so they just decided to do exactly that and that was a very successful very
successful purchase strength
training it does not necessarily work for everybody there are some reasons for
that mostly because of your
sport competition if you're an athlete but it's extremely effective as was
shown on the platform
and finally so first we discussed step cycling step loading which is constant
training second we discussed
wave cycling which is just cycling right wave loading and the third one would
be the variable loading
and variable loading is extremely unique it's unlike something else so here's
how variable loading works
in variable loading you have certain load parameters like for example you will
know that your average
training weights will be 75 percent of your maximum you will know that you will
perform for example 300
squads per month or whatever so these numbers are arrived at experimentally
over decades and what variable loading does
as opposed to the traditional methods traditional progressive overload
is that the jump in volume for example from one training unit to another one
day one week one month and so on
it's at least 20 percent so the jumps are really high really high
the variable loading was developed by professor arkady varabyev who was a olympic
weightlifting champion and he was
the premier sports scientist so he argued that in nature most changes are
discrete they're not gradual they're
discrete so whatever whatever adapt adaptation take place in your body the same
thing whatever happens with many
physical processes chemical processes and so on so he concluded that training
has to be highly variable
so you understand what i mean that it's a 20 percent minimal change we call
that delta 20 principle
it doesn't mean it's constantly going up that's just not possible it goes up
and down it just keeps
whiplashing so if we use if we go back to the traditional cycling as an example
the traditional cycling so it's a
linear build up back up a little linear build up back up a little in contrast
variable overload it's it's
going crazy it's completely insane in fact this is a little entertaining
experienced strength coaches and especially people with some sort of a
background in mathematics
they're able to dissect and analyze training plans from other coaches you can
look at a plan you can take
an experienced powerlifting coach show him a program from another coach and the
coach will be able to tell
whether this will work or not who this will work for and so on and kind of
figure out what
figure out what's under the hood right there so there's a very clear pattern
variable overload so it's like a photograph it's very clear variable overload
if you start analyzing the
pattern looking at the program so for example barish shako he's uh he's a