When America’s leading literary critic, Yale Professor Emeritus Harold Bloom, was asked to define literary greatness, he did so:
“I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that cannot be assimilated or that assimilates us so much that we cease to see it as strange. Walter Pater defined romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty… when you read a canonical work for the first time you are met with a strange, a strange shock instead of the realization of an expectation. {The great works } have in common their strangeness, their ability to make you feel strange at home”.
I’ve been at home in the strange world of bodybuilding for two decades and Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding has made me feel strangely at home. It has taken 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, this is something strange, different and completely new. Bodybuilding, in the abstract and in practice, is both repulsive and seductive: as a competitive sport, bodybuilding is form without function, the bloated appearance heralded as a landmark, the pompous preening triumphant over the functional arena. We have a fundamental level grassroots following that combine progressive resistance training with cardio training and nutrition. In its simple form, bodybuilding is the most healthy, wholesome, 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. Handled with skill and precision, the results are profound and successful application produces a complete physical transformation. Pavel is not a bodybuilder – which, exactly, he is 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 disconcerting. His workbook is weird, in the best way, in the sense that Harold Bloom and Walter Pater attribute to it.
I was left with an uneasy feeling after reading Beyond Bodybuilding. His perspective is unlike anything I have come across. As an athletic scribe with three decades under my belt, I’ve seen and read it all; however, this is unlike anything I have come across and it blows my mind. I don’t get angry easily. This 327-page workbook could only be written by an outsider, someone with enough distance from the prevailing orthodoxy to see clearly. Someone who doesn’t care at all about fitting into who they are; rather, like Faulkner, he establishes an entirely new reality. Those of us inside the box could not have written anything more than a clever recapitulation and reformulation of the contents of the box. Only someone outside the box, someone who hasn’t been co-opted yet, could write what Tsatsouline has written…a rare tome that brings a new 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 looking to improve their physical luck in life. Pavel’s particular and peculiar circumstance took him from the Ukraine to Santa Monica. What better geographical dissimilarity to generate something strange, fresh and different?
By combining empirical experience with a thirst for knowledge, and with a decade of experience, you are becoming autonomous and your voice is clear, resonant and worth listening to. Sonny Barger, the top dome of Hell’s Angels, was once asked by Ken Kesey how exactly 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 the athletically gifted in this country depended not on grudging acceptance but on obvious acknowledgment from a peer. He academically he has done his homework. How well I remember him visiting me many years ago here at Mountain Compound. He was exposed to my own brand of strangeness and at last asked, “So, Marty, old collective farmer, where are the books, magazines, and newspapers?” I laughed and led him into a musty attic where stacks and stacks of old Strength and Health, Muscle Mags, Muscle Builder, All American Athlete, and Iron Man magazines lay, plus my autographed copies of books by Paul Anderson and Bill Pearl. . He asked if he could be given a few hours to read, reflect and absorb. I insisted that he borrow what he considered essential and treated the materials with reverence, as if he had struck a mother lode. His thirst for knowledge was, and is, insatiable.
“The anxiety of influence paralyzes lesser talents but stimulates genius… Strong writers do not choose their main precursors; they are chosen by them, but they have the ingenuity to transform these precursors into compounds.”
I wholeheartedly recommend Beyond Bodybuilding – I see it as a summary of the accumulated knowledge that Pavel Tsatsouline has gathered up to this point in his (still embryonic) career. Here lies an odd job full of strange and exotic tactics: janda sit-ups, hammer leverages, fingertip pull-ups, bent-over presses, one-arm straddle deadlifts, power-rack partials, exercises with Kettlebells, Full Contact Barbell Twists, Pincer Grip, One Finger Partial Deadlifts, Progressive Movement Training, Secret Clandestine Russian Fatigue Hypertrophy Cycles, Renegade Lunges, Neck Planks, Passive Loaded Stretches, Dragon Walks, deck squats, “Russian clothes” grip work… over and over again. All told through the bizarre 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 he knows. Harold Bloom would be proud. Tsatsouline offers his vast repository of empirical knowledge and combines it with abstract theoretical data. Every conceivable angle, nuance, subtlety, wrinkle, innovation, twist, technical explanation, and plan of attack imaginable is discussed and described. Every part of the body is covered and a blueprint is provided on how to build and strengthen every conceivable muscle target.
The detail and description are great. The mix between text and photos is perfect; the clarity of the exercise description leaves nothing to the imagination. Granted, this Opus Magnus is strictly limited to progressive resistance training of all kinds and varieties (nutrition and cardio are mentioned in passing), however, this bizarre and comprehensive work needs to be seen and read. Once a notoriously difficult music critic described his ecstasy upon hearing the Miles Davis quintet, “This is the musical equivalent of an icy shower: initially shocking but ultimately invigorating, refreshing and regenerating.” If you’re serious about physique renewal and want a new approach to progressive resistance training, if you crave the physiological equivalent of an ice cold shower, then ditch your hard-earned disposable income and buy Beyond Bodybuilding. Take the financial step and then turn this accumulated abstraction into a concrete reality. Once you have this strange fruit in your possession, it’s up to you to put the mountain of information into play. The harsh reality of the gym floor beckons.
