When America’s leading literary critic, Yale Professor Emeritus Harold Bloom, was asked to define literary greatness, he did so as follows:
“I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and works canonical. The answer, most of the time, turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that assimilates us so much so that we stop seeing it as strange. Walter Pater defined romanticism as the addition of strangeness to beauty … when you read a canonical work for the first time you meet a stranger, astonishing wonder rather than the realization of an expectation. {Great works} have in common their strangeness, their ability to make you feel strange at home. “
I have felt at home in the weird and strange world of bodybuilding for two decades and Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding has made me feel strange at home. It took a stranger in a strange land to write something fresh and vital about the art and science of physical renewal. This is not old wine in new bottles, it is something strange, different and completely new. Bodybuilding in abstract and in practice is both repulsive and seductive: as competitive sports bodybuilding is a formless form, puffy appearance is heralded as a benchmark, pompous grooming trumps functional value. We have foundational-level grassroots adherents who combine progressive resistance training with cardiovascular training and nutrition. In its simple form, bodybuilding is the healthiest, healthiest, most effective and balanced fitness system known to man. The true bodybuilder seeks synergy and balances three components (diet, cardio and weight training) in a delicate and precarious ballet. If handled with skill and precision, the results are profound and successful application produces a complete physical transformation. Pavel is not a bodybuilder, which is, exactly, defies description, yet he has written a profound book, a genuinely bizarre treatise on the art and science of physical transformation. His book is both profound and puzzling. His workbook is strange, in the best sense, in the sense attributed by Harold Bloom and Walter Pater.
I was left with an unsettling feeling after reading Beyond Bodybuilding. His perspective is unlike anything I have encountered. As an athletic scribe with three decades under my belt, I have seen and read it all; however, this is unlike anything I have encountered and it puzzles me. I am not easily shaken. This 327-page workbook could only be written by an outsider, someone with enough distance from mainstream orthodoxy to see clearly. Someone who doesn’t care at all about fitting in with who he is; rather, like Faulkner, it establishes an entirely new reality. Those of us inside the box couldn’t have written anything more than a clever recap and recast of the contents of the box. Only someone outside the box, someone who has not yet been chosen, could write what Tsatsouline has written … a strange tome that brings a new perspective to bodybuilding. This is not a book for the elite; this is a book for everyone. This is a book for the serious individual without a lot of baggage or preconceptions; This book is for someone looking to improve their physical situation in life. Pavel’s particular and peculiar circumstance led him from Ukraine to Santa Monica. What better geographic dissimilarity to generate something strange, fresh and different?
By combining empirical experience with a thirst for knowledge, and with a decade of experience, he is on the mend and his voice is clear, resonant, and worthy of being heard. Ken Kesey once questioned Sonny Barger, the top dome of the Hell’s Angels about exactly how he selected Hell’s Angel’s. “We don’t select them, we recognize them.” And so it is among the athletic elite. Pavel’s effortless entry into the stratosphere of athletic talents in this country did not hinge on grudging acceptance, rather on obvious recognition from a peer. Academically you have done your homework. How well I remember that you visited me many years ago here at Mountain Compound. He was exposed to my own kind of strangeness and at the end asked, “So Marty, old collective farmer, where are the books, magazines and periodicals?” I laughed and led him to a musty attic where there were lots and lots of old Strength and Health magazines, Muscle Mags, Muscle Builder, All American Athlete, and Iron Man, plus my autographed copies of Paul Anderson and Bill Pearl books. . He asked if they could give him a few hours to peruse, reflect, and absorb. I insisted that he borrow what he considered essential and he treated the materials with reverence, as if he had struck a mother lode. His thirst for knowledge was and is insatiable.
“Influence anxiety paralyzes lesser talents but stimulates genius … strong writers do not choose their main predecessors; they are chosen by them, but they have the ingenuity to transform these predecessors into composites.”
I wholeheartedly recommend Beyond Bodybuilding – I see it as a summation of the accumulated knowledge that Pavel Tsatsouline has gathered up to this point in his (still embryonic) career. Here lies strange work filled with bizarre and exotic tactics: janda crunches, mallet leverage exercises, fingertip chin-ups, bent presses, one-arm straddle-style deadlift, rack partial deadlift Power, Kettlebell Workouts, Full Contact Barbell Twists, Pinch Grip, One Finger Partial Deadlift, Progressive Movement Training, Secret Underground Russian Fatigue Hypertrophy Cycles, Renegade Lunges, Neck Planks, Loaded Passive Stretches , dragon walks, deck squats, “Russian laundry” grip work … roll and roll. All told through the strange prism of a Russian Spetsnaz commandos 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 vast repository of empirical knowledge and combines it with abstract theoretical data. Every imaginable angle, nuance, subtlety, wrinkle, innovation, twist, technical explanation, and plan of attack is discussed and described. Every part of the body is covered and a plan is provided for how to build and strengthen every conceivable muscle goal.
The detail and description are tremendous. The mix between text and photos is perfect; the clarity of the description of the exercise leaves nothing to the imagination. Of course, this Opus Magnus is strictly limited to progressive resistance training of all kinds and variety (nutrition and cardio are mentioned in passing), however this bizarre and comprehensive work must be seen and read. Once a notoriously difficult music critic described his ecstasy listening to the Miles Davis quintet, “this is the musical equivalent of a freezing shower: initially shocking but ultimately invigorating, refreshing and regenerating.” If you are serious about physical renewal and want a new approach to progressive resistance training, if you crave the physiological equivalent of an ice cold shower, put down your hard-earned disposable income and buy Beyond Bodybuilding. Take the financial leap and then turn this accumulated abstraction into concrete reality. Once you have this strange fruit in your possession, it is up to you to bring the mountain of information into play. The harsh reality of the gym floor beckons.