Sometimes in order to think outside the box you need get back inside the box
16 June 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I got a nice note from Pavel Tsatsouline yesterday and it made me mull over why I so liked his approach to fitness, bodybuilding and strength training like a miner or a prospector Tsatsouline takes the time to reexamine all the little nooks and crannies and crevices where oddball ideas once popular and effective now lay dormant.
My Iron Mentor High Cassidy, in addition to being a teacher of troubled children, a superb bass player, fluent in German (what a joy it must have been to read Goethe, Nietzsche and Kant in the original tongue without lame interference from some milk-toast midget translator trying to interpret the thoughts of literary Gods) was generally considered the best writer on the fringe sport of powerlifting. On top of that he was a metal sculpture master. His creations were shown in galleries and were phenomenal. The subject matter was often dark and ominousnightmare creatures bought to life in shocking reality. One mini-monster stood three feet and had small boy proportion. This mini-monster was posed running and was built like the proverbial brick outhouse. Its head was a cross between a wolf and an alligator this beast was posed on the attack, claws and fangs bared. Hugh had mastered a technique that allowed him to replicate pelts and hair with metal and this allowed him to create realistic 3-D figurine creatures with all the heft and power that metal and iron can confer. His creatures were often monster prototype species and damned unnerving. The one I mentioned and he had dozen littering his farmette house in rural Maryland got inside my head and periodically, deep into my sleep, I would see this werewolf/crocodile at the foot of the bed, immobile. In my dream it would come to life and attack my private parts as he was the perfect heightoh man every time I went to train Id stare transfixed at this 100-pound ode to freaky ferocity and inwardly shutter. I had an insane compulsion to purchase this creature/freakimagine the movie creature in Leprechaun after five years on steroids. Thank god that purchase never came together!
Cassidy would cruise junkyards and search abandoned autos scouring for raw metal to work with. He could search junkyard for hours, not quite knowing what he was looking for but knowing what was of no interest. I amazed me how he could take some rusted, pitted, awkward piece of junk and convert it into the most sophisticated and intricate artwork. I always found it disconcerting, odd and counterintuitive that such a broad sophisticate as Hugh (who dressed down all the time and looked like a character out of Kerouacs On The Road or more accurately The Dharma Bums) could be such a Purposeful Primitive in his approach to weight training did I forget to mention that he was powerliftings first world champion and a hall-of-fame lifter who squatted 800, bench pressed 570 and deadlifted 790 wearing a tee-shirt, a pair of swim trunks, black socks and low-cut Chuck Taylors not even a lifting belt? He whipped two other hall of fame guys, John Kuc and Big Jim Williams, to win the title on that day in 1971. Yet, when it came to lifting this Yoda-like guy insisted we squat, bench press, deadlift twice a week heavy and if we had any time or gas left over we would blast arms. Train like hell twice a week, rest and eat lots of calories to recover from the physical shock of the previous session.
Cassidy taught us that it takes years to master the ultra-basics. The techniques of the key core compound multi-joint exercises are complex and have an infinite number of subtle variations. In my own case it took me ten years to achieve proper deadlift technique with maximum poundage. At 510 and 235 I pulled 705 for three reps, no belt. Not all that great in the big leagues but okay for a guy who didnt start powerlifting until he was 30. How can you spin off, Cassidy mused, to exotic strategies and techniques using untried and untested exercises when you havent mastered the big three: squat, bench press, deadlift?
Young people are easily distracted and led astray by new and different things they love to be on the MTV cutting-edge and that applies to fitness as well as well as pop culture. People desperately want to believe that the latest product or newfangled strategy can short-cut all the blood, sweat, tears and denial required to trigger a true transformation. Cassidy taught that to us and Pavel arrived at the same conclusion independently. Pavel passes on this message to his audience today and in such a way that the young and easily distracted relate to him. He satisfies his audience by providing them with a near-limitless number of Old School exercise modes and strategies.
Zen Master Suzuki once said, If you want to control your mind, give it a big pasture to wander in. Pavels Beyond Bodybuilding gives his audience a huge pasture to wander in but rather than litter the landscape with a bunch of new and untested go-go flavor of the month exercises, Pavel (like Cassidy combing those junk yards looking for dead rusted metal to transform into artistic gold) combs the graveyard of forgotten fitness modes and methods and resurrects those deemed worthy; but only after exploring them in depth himself. He has created a greatest hits of physical transformation catalog that covers light years of time and space. Everyone is in a mad dash to invent the latest and newest and most colorful fitness fad whereas Pavel is resurrecting the bent press.
While fitness experts attempt to dazzle you with miracle products of dubious merit, Tsatsouline is busy reintroducing kettlebells. Experts (product pushers) continually try and convince you that the latest harebrained fitness idea or product is a result of thinking outside the box and that in and of it self is meritorious. Cassidy would contend that before you are allowed to think outside the box you need first master the contents of the box. Pavel brings to the party the idea that discarded items once inside the box deserve to be reexamined. Many of these ancient ideas, modes and methods are relevant for todays trainee seeking physical transformation. Its good to see someone under the age of 40 carrying the Retro Banner forward; I was beginning the think the hard work pays off school of fitness was headed for extinction. As Pavel says, You must strive to do fewer things better. Sounds like something Hugh would say.
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