Ep 55: The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline

This episode was a real treat. It was one of the most enlightening and lucid conversations about physical training I've ever had. Show notes and links from this episode can be found here http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Pavel Tsatsouline is Chairman of StrongFirst, Inc. http://www.strongfirst.com/ and was born in Minsk, USSR, which is now part of Belarus. In the 1980s, he was a physical-training instructor for Spetnaz, the elite Soviet special-forces units. Pavel is now a subject matter expert to the US Marine Corps, the US Secret Service, and the US Navy SEALs, and he is widely credited with introduced the now ubiquitous kettlebell to the United States. Over the last several years, Pavel has become a friend, and his input was critical to the success (and experiments) of The 4-Hour Body http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030746363X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=030746363X. Whether you've heard of him or not, prepare to have your mind blown, and I don't say that lightly :) All episodes and show notes can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Why don't you, Pavel, if you don't mind, just tell me about what you had for breakfast this morning as a sound check?

• 0:04Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Sound check, breakfast, coffee.

• 0:07Tim Ferriss?

  Optimal minimal.

• 0:11Pavel Tsatsouline?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:18Speaker 03

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  What if I could be optimal? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:33Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show, 99designs, which is your one-stop-shop for all things graphic design-related. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The Four Hour Body. As always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, and you can find all of the links and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out, or you can go to fourhourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback? If you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show.

• 1:12Tim Ferriss?

  Ping me on Twitter, @TFerriss, that's twitter.com/TFERRISS, or on Facebook, at facebook.com/timferriss, with two R's and two S's.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where, of course, I try to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they be billionaire investors, chess prodigies, athletes, and everything in between, to pull apart, tease out, the tactics and tools and resources that you can use. And this episode was a real treat. I had so much fun with this. It was easily one of the most enlightening and lucid conversations about physical training I've ever had. And we covered everything, meaning strength, flexibility, endurance, and beyond. And my guest is none other than Pavel Tsatsoulin, and yes, that is how you say it.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  He is chairman of Strong First Inc. and was born in Minx, not Minks, Minsk. I always have so much trouble saying that, not that I say it that much. USSR, former USSR, which is now a part of Belarus. In the 1980s, he was a physical training instructor for Svetna's. That's also another one I want to mispronounce always. It's not Spetsnaz, Svetna's, the elite Soviet special forces units. Pavel is now a subject matter expert to the US Marine Corps, US Secret Service, and the US Navy SEALs. And he is also, perhaps you know this or not, he is widely credited with introducing the kettlebell to the United States. The ubiquitous kettlebell, which is called kettleball by almost everyone. Maybe that should be changed, make things easier.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  In any case, over the last several years, Pavel has become a friend of mine. I'm honored to call him a friend and his input was critical to the success and many of the experiments of the four hour body. Whether you have heard of him or not, stick with this interview, prepare to have your mind blown, and I really don't say that lightly. You're gonna enjoy this and you will have a lot to take notes on. And there will of course be tons in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. But without further ado, here we go. Please meet Pavel Tsatsoulin.

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  Pavel, welcome to the show.

• 3:36Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you, Tim.

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so thrilled to have you and I thought we would start with the, the answer to a question that I ask all of my guests, which is, how do you pronounce your name properly?

• 3:48Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Pavel Tsatsoulin.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  Tsatsoulin.

• 3:50Pavel Tsatsouline?

  That's right.

• 3:51Tim Ferriss?

  And you'd mentioned before we came on, what you tell people at Starbucks if you order coffee and what is that?

• 3:59Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It just has to be Pablo, coffee boy Pablo. There's no other way.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  And I I've really admired your work and expertise and also just your method of of teaching, quite frankly, for so many years. And I was having trouble piecing together how we first came in contact. Of course, I was well aware of your work prior to us having us having any direct contact. But do you recall how we how we came to know each other?

• 4:29Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Yes, I do, Tim. As you, I'm a big fan of simplicity in my life and different aspects of my life. And Four Hour Work Week really resonated with me. And at that point, I remember writing an article, and I entitled that article Ferris Bueller's Day at the Gym. And I sent you that article and submitted it for a blog.

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, that's right. That's right. Okay. And that that really set a cascade of events in motion. And I became very, very fascinated. I mean, of course, like a lot of people, I think I was initially exposed to you as the strength trainer who used the word comrade a lot, and really hadn't hadn't delved into a lot of the details of your strength training specifically, which we'll, of course, get into. And I guess there are two questions I'd love to ask. But the first is, what do people consider you, the people who know you well, what do they consider you world class at?

• 5:35Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, I have been able to take very complex subjects, take them apart, and put them back together in a manner that's very simple, that can be delivered to regular people without losing the essence of what these of these systems. So I'm talking about specifically serious strength training. I'm talking about both programming, and I'm talking about what I would refer to as the body language of strength.

• 6:05Tim Ferriss?

  And could you explain for people who are perhaps not not inductees into the world of strength training yet, what do you mean by programming?

• 6:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Programming, planning your training. You go from A to B. You want to add 50 pounds to your deadlift. This is what you do. And unfortunately, the world of programming is very confused. Well, the whole world of fitness is very confused. And again, what I attempt to do is to bring principle-based training. So when you understand the principles, applications are many. Applications are easy.

• 6:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And I think that's where I feel such a such a degree of kinship with what you try to do with these subjects, because of course, whether I succeed or fail, and sometimes I do both, it's very much what I try to do with the subjects that I tend to obsess on. And for those who aren't familiar with your background, you've worked with many different types of elite athletes and also special forces and so on. Would you mind just giving a little bit of background on your bona fides, so to speak, some of your your background as it relates to to training?

• 7:15Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Sure, Tim. I used to be a PT training instructor, physical training instructor for Spetsnaz, the Soviet Special Forces. And my education is in sports science. And I did, over the years, train a number of high-end units in the West. I've been a subject matter to US Marine Corps, to the US Secret Service, to US Navy SEALs and others. And my methods are used officially by some very high-end military and counterterrorism units in two countries that are main allies of the United States. What I do, pardon me?

• 7:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sorry. No, I was just, my brain erupted with something nonsensical. Please continue.

• 8:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So what I do is I take methods that perform very well in very rugged environments, and I take these methods and I apply it to other environments. So if somebody decides, I just want to change my life, I want to get stronger, I want to have a better game of tennis, I want to succeed in a given sport, I take these same methods that have been tested by operators at war, and I bring these people the same methods.

• 8:29Tim Ferriss?

  And just to drill into that, because I've seen the many, I'm sure at this point, thousands of photographs that are sent to you by deployed troops overseas or people in special forces of their kettlebells or their rigged gyms with makeshift pull-up bars and whatnot. What is it that you have to keep in mind when you're designing? Or why have your methods had such appeal for elite military? What are the things that you've considered perhaps that other people have not for those types of trainees?

• 9:08Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, Tim Plutarch, who said thousands of years ago that the training of a soldier and the training of an athlete is radically different, that an athlete has the luxury of a pampered lifestyle and the soldier doesn't. So this is pretty much the difference. So what you want to do is you want to build the training that becomes, in the words of one of my favorite authors, Nassim Taleb, "anti-fragile." It's a type of training that thrives on a very harsh environment that's really robust in these different environments. And that's pretty much the difference. How do we do that? We have to strip all the non-essentials down, pretty much what you do in your work with

• 9:52Pavel Tsatsouline?

  different, with business, with lifestyle, and so on. And once we get down to the things that really matter and we apply them, then everything suddenly becomes very simple.

• 10:03Tim Ferriss?

  Have you spent any time with Nassim?

• 10:06Pavel Tsatsouline?

  No, I have not. I'm looking forward to meeting him.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  I should introduce you guys at some point. He's exactly what you see is what you get if you've read his books, and I think you guys would really hit it off. The...

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  You know, what you just said brought to mind a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who was formerly Navy SEAL and now he's doing things that he can't tell me about. Not that he could tell me much about what he did before, but he, and actually, not to be named, but now that, now that I think of it, you introduced us.

• 10:41Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Let's call him Victor.

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  Victor, yes. Victor, amazing guy. And Victor is, is the most efficient trash compactor I've ever seen in my life. He, he can eat anything and make fuel out of it. And he was, he was criticizing in a very good natured way, some of his colleagues, because he said, well, you know, you know, some of the guys that I, that I work with out in the field, you know, some of them are the bodybuilder types and they get really grumpy if they can't have their protein shake every two or three hours. And he said, I view it as a real competitive and practical advantage that I can, I can consume anything and then go for a 30, 40, 50 mile run.

• 11:22Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, and Victor, for his strength also, that gentleman is exceptional, both in his strength and his endurance, but for his strength, he relies on the nervous system, not so much in the muscle tip. And again, that's what's so, this was so different. You can, if you look at a typical person, and how do you get them stronger? Let's say that you have a four cylinder engine. And what the person would do is they would make that, you know, six cylinder engine. But before you're firing in two, now you're firing in three. But if instead what you do is you learn to fire in all four. So there are ways of training your nervous system to engage your capacity so much more fully. And if you look at high

• 12:03Pavel Tsatsouline?

  level performers at light body weight in some fields, let's say a very high level martial artist, somebody very skinny, breaking a stack of boards, or very skinny guy like Lamar Gant, deadlifting five times his body weight. So this is so much about the concentration of mental force. And for your listeners, I could give a very simple example, how you can use, you can do that in your gym. Let's say that you perform, try it with the simplest exercise possible. Try it with a dumbbell curl or barbell curl. Because I know your sissy's out there, you'll do that. And.

• 12:39Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So let's say that you're going through your curls and things are suddenly starting to get tougher. So when they suddenly start to get tougher, I want you to just crush the dumbbell or the barbell or the kettlebell, whatever it is that you're curling, just white knuckle, white knuckle pressure. And what you will see is you're gonna, definitely gonna be able to get several more repetitions out. And I'm gonna give you two more techniques in addition. Once you have practiced that, then on the next set, in addition to crushing the bar on the way up, also contract your glutes as tight as possible, like somebody's gonna kick you in the butt, very, very tight, so you're just like crunch a walnut.

• 13:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And at the same time, tighten your abs as if somebody's gonna kick you, which, you know, somebody might. So if you do that, if you do these three things, if you contract your glutes, contract your abs, contract your grip, everything that you do, absolutely everything, is gonna be greatly amplified. And this is just a small example of the skills of strength that I do teach.

• 13:47Tim Ferriss?

  And, and we're gonna, we're gonna dig really deeply into this because I, I have personally reached a point where I want to return to the training of a, an athlete who's trying to optimize relative strength as opposed to just packing on slabs and pounds of muscle, which quite frankly, just my frame and my joints and my, my entire system is, is, is finding aggravating to sustain, just the, the full-time eating and-

• 14:18Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, the full-time eating, Tim, that's what gets you.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God, it's the worst. Especially as someone who has, depending on how you look at it, like the most acute form of conditioned, like body dysmorphia or orthorexia possible through, you know, decade of wrestling.

• 14:35Tim Ferriss?

  My eating habits are really astonishing, sort of like a German shepherd is like broken into the pantry and eating sticks of butter on more than, more than a few occasions. But the, the question I wanted to ask you, uh, uh, next is, what are the biggest misconceptions that people have about Pavel Tatsulin? And I am training myself to say Tatsulin because I've heard everyone say Tsatsouline. So I'm trying to correct that. But what are the biggest misconceptions that people have about you?

• 15:00Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, Tim, they call me the kettlebell guy. They call me the father of the kettlebell, which I appreciate very much. I did introduce, together with my business partner, I did introduce the kettlebell to the west. And right now, the kettlebell has become mainstream. But what I'm really all about is about the principles, the underlying principles of strength training, the underlying principles of power generation. And it doesn't really matter what modality you use, whether you use the kettlebell, the barbell, your body weight, whether you're arm wrestling, fighting, lifting rocks, it really doesn't matter. So I am not about the kettlebell. I am about the principles that make us strong.

• 15:39Pavel Tsatsouline?

  What I have done is I have reverse engineered the way the strongest people move naturally. And I have brought it to the people. I've shown to people how to move in this manner and how to shave off years, and if not decades, of training to progress to a much higher level.

• 15:57Tim Ferriss?

  You, you've worked with some incredible strength athletes. Would you mind mentioning, uh, some of them? And some of them you've co-authored books with, but, uh, who are, who are some of the strength athletes that you've collab, or, uh, strength trainers that you've collaborated with?

• 16:10Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Andy Bolden, uh, Andy Bolden, uh, he's, uh, the first person to deadlift over a thousand pounds. He is, uh, he's an amazing athlete. He's a very, very smart trainer. So Andy Bolden and I, we have written a book together called The Deadlift Dynamite. And, uh, the reason Andy and I have written this project together is again, Andy's a very smart trainer and his particular style of deadlift looks exactly like the kettlebell swing that I teach. So it's again, that fit of the body language. I have, uh, written a book called Easy Strength with Dan John. Dan John is a strength coach extraordinaire. You would really love interviewing Dan on the show because- He's a beast.

• 16:54Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Dan is, and he's so, again, he just gets past the fluff. He gets to the things that matter. And Dan does not try to impress you. Dan tries to get the results. So Dan and I, collaboration with Dan over the years, we have taught each other a lot and our views and strengths are very similar, even though they are colored in some way. So that's why we have written this book called The Easy Strength. And so Easy Strength was about making yourself strong for your sport, not making lifting your priority. That's what Easy Strength was about.

• 17:35Tim Ferriss?

  And just since you brought it up, what are some of the things that you've, what would be an example or examples of things you've learned from Dan?

• 17:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Dan has a terrific concept of the quadrants, the four quadrants. On one grid, you're going to see the level of development, the level, on the other one, you're going to see the level of specialization. It's really quite hard to explain that over audio. But if you look up, type in Dan John and quadrants, that's a terrific concept. So what that allows you to do is it allows you to place yourself today in the particular quadrant according to your status, according to your goals, and select the correct type of training for yourself. That alone is going to save years of preparation for you. So that's just one of the many things.

• 18:29Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Dan and I have exchanged these little tactical tidbits and details over the years. And I highly recommend Dan John's work to anybody, anybody who's an athlete or anybody who thinks of himself or herself as an athlete.

• 18:45Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd love to, I want to personally give a few examples of just how quickly or how significantly you can shave off what people assume is required to make massive gains. You introduced me to Barry Ross in Los Angeles and that became the effortless superhuman chapter in The Four Hour Body. And I was able to put, I would have to say, it must have been between 100 and 150 pounds on my deadlift in less than three months.

• 19:16Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I'll stand it too.

• 19:18Tim Ferriss?

  It was just, it was crazy. And Particularly when you consider the inputs or the total amount of time under tension and actual lifting frequency in time, it really, I've seen, just given that we are cut from the same cloth and that we try to distill very complex things and use 80/20 analysis and so on, I've seen a lot of disproportionate outputs for inputs, but it really just, it really blew me away. And the testing of assumptions where in that particular case, it's a deadlift-based protocol that's using what many people would consider the weakest range of motion, so from the floor up to the knees effectively, really impressed me. And then to highlight your, a couple of the points you made earlier, the crushing with

• 20:01Tim Ferriss?

  the grip and the abs and the glutes. I recall when I did RKC1 and RKC2, for those people not familiar, the Russian kettlebell certification 1 and 2, which was a tremendously positive experience for me. Thank you, Tim. And encountering Max Plank, if I'm getting, that is his last name, right? Am I getting that right? Is that Max, Big Max? He was, I believe that's the fellow that, whose name is, it's coming to mind, but there were a few people, yourself included, who, I did not pass all of the tests for RKC2 the first time around. And one of them,

• 20:46Tim Ferriss?

  if I'm remembering correctly, was cleaning and pressing a kettlebell that's roughly half your body weight. Mm-hmm. And I, I, I was, I guess I ultimately made the three attempts and I failed on the first two attempts. And with a few minor corrections, just moving my weight slightly back towards the heels, cleaning with my elbow closer to, basically dropping my elbow a little bit lower, and then really focusing on the grip, I was able to press it. And the third attempt was, felt easy, and it was just astonishing. Also, some of the demonstrations that you've done in front of trainees, where you've taken people out of the crowd and said, "All right, who's somebody who would consider there?" And I'm paraphrasing here, but your

• 21:31Tim Ferriss?

  maximum press, X number of kilos, and then you'd bring them up and in front of everyone in the, within five minutes or so, you'd increase their press by whatever it might be, five, five kilos or 10 kilos. You once mentioned to me in a casual conversation, I called you for some type of training advice, or it might have been via email. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you said when in doubt, train your grip and your core. Is that

• 21:55Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Correct.

• 21:55Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that? Because I think it's, it's very, it's not advice that many people have received.

• 22:02Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, Tim, there is such a thing is called irradiation. So the phenomenon irradiation, what it really means is if you contract a muscle, the tension from that muscle is going to spill over to the neighborhood muscles. So for your listeners, I'd like to try this. Make a fist. Probably going to feel tension in your forearm. Now make a tight fist. You're going to feel tension in your biceps, triceps. Now make a white knuckle fist. You're going to find that tension is going to spread into your shoulder, your lat, your back, and so on. Okay, folks, you may relax now. And the same thing happens. So certain areas of the body have this great, great overflow of tension. So the gripping muscles are amongst them.

• 22:44Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Why? In part because they have such a great representation in your nervous system, in your brain. And as for the abs and as for the glutes, that has a lot to do with creating your interabdominal pressure. So what does this mean exactly? Visualize your muscles as speakers. And visualize your brain as the gadget that plays the music, whatever it is these days, iPad, iPhone, whatever. And record player, doesn't matter. And the amount of your pressure, the pressure in your abdomen, the interabdominal pressure, that's the amplifier, that's the volume control. So by increasing the pressure in your abdomen, it's like you're training up the volume. And vice versa.

• 23:29Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So when you're trying to stretch, when you're increasing your flexibility, if you see somebody, they're trying to do a split and you see

• 23:37Pavel Tsatsouline?

  it's, the person is creating high interabdominal pressure. And that just increases the tension of the muscle. Instead, what you need to do, you need to Completely release and let go and bring it down. So for strength, we do the opposite. We have special techniques where you increase that pressure and maximize your power. So that's, those are just a couple of the different ways we can increase the strength. And that's what you've seen by certification. FYI, I am no longer with that organization. So my company today is called Strong First. And SMD certification, that's that same curriculum that you have, that you have learned back then.

• 24:17Tim Ferriss?

  And the, just to, to touch on two points and then we're going to, uh, jump into more training and, and ask about how you would rank certain aspects of what people would traditionally consider perhaps fitness. Uh, the, what would be, uh, good, what would you, what would you recommend as good methods for developing, uh, the grip and, uh, core or abdomen, uh, for, for those people listening? If they wanted to take a simple protocol and perhaps experiment for the next few weeks, what, uh, is, is there any basic approach that you might suggest for those two things?

• 24:57Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Sure, Tim. It can be done in conjunction with a full body training regimen that uses, let's say, kettlebells, climbing ropes and so on. But if it is not, then what I recommend that you do is you get some grippers. So the company is called Iron Mind, ironmind.com. And they carry hand grippers. One thing you need to understand is these are not those little sissy plastic grippers you get at a, you get at a store. Uh, these are heavy duty grippers. They go up to 365 pounds. There's a couple of people in the world have done that. And, uh, they also do have, they also do have resources on how to do that. But even without reading how, I can tell you how to train.

• 25:40Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So get yourself a couple of grippers, use their chart, the recommendations that Iron Mind offers. And, uh, start training them in the manner that I refer to as, uh, grease to groove. Grease to groove is a highly simplified training methodology that's been derived from Soviet weightlifting methodology. So in a nutshell, this is what you do. Throughout the day, every day, whenever you feel fully recovered, so you have to have at least fifteen minutes of rest between sets, you know, maybe thirty, maybe even more, is you're gonna do a set, and you're only gonna do about half the repetitions that you're capable of. So, for example, you picked up a particular gripper, you start squeezing it, and you probably

• 26:24Pavel Tsatsouline?

  could do it ten times, but you only do five, and you put it down. Let's say you later on pick up a gripper that's a little heavier, maybe you could do three reps with it, but you do only one. And in this particular manner, you accumulate reps, and you keep going and going and going. And everybody tells you that's impossible to get strong in this particular manner, yet science and experience shows that this makes you strong. This makes you strong fast, this makes you strong in a safe manner, and this makes you, you can apply this particular methodology, again, I call it Garista Guru, to any strength exercise or any strength endurance exercise.

• 27:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Just to give you an example of its effectiveness, my father-in-law, former Marine, at the age of sixty-four, started following this routine, he was able to do about ten pull-ups at that point. In several months, he was up to twenty, when he tested, and he could not do that many as a young jarhead. So, you young bucks out there, you can definitely get this done. So this is how you guys are gonna train your grip, with these grippers. Carry with you throughout the day, you're not gonna get sweaty, just whenever you feel like it, just take it out and squeeze. As for training your abdomen, there are many different methods of training the abdomen, but you have to abide by the following rules. You have to keep the repetitions to five and under, no more than five reps.

• 27:49Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Anything more than five reps is bodybuilding. And you need to make a focus on tension, make a focus on contraction, as opposed to on reps and fatigue. Just to give you an example of the plank, you know, the plank is a kind of a fashionable exercise in the core training circles. And by the way, we don't use the word core, that's thrown first, why don't we use the word core, because, well, because people who use the word core, they do things we don't like, we don't like at all. So, we just say... We just say midsection. And so the plank, so traditionally they would put you in the plank and you're supposed to stay in this plank for a couple of minutes. And what's happening is you see this poor person who cannot even assume the proper posture to start with.

• 28:35Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And then as fatigue sets in, other muscles, wrong muscles start kicking in, the back starts arching, the butt starts shooting up. And what you're doing is what Gray Cook calls putting fitness on top of dysfunction. And what we do instead is if we do a plank, we call the hard style plank, we would do a plank for no longer than 10 seconds. And when you do the plank, you try to contract everything, absolutely everything. When I showed that.

• 29:03Tim Ferriss?

  Everything hitting the shins, your forearms, your neck, everything.

• 29:06Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Everything but your neck and face, everything below your neck, you're going to contract. It's not for folks with high blood pressure, heart condition, and that's true for pretty much any type of training. But for everybody else, it's an extremely powerful tool. So you get down on a plank, you make fists, okay? You contract your abs, you contract your glutes, you contract your entire body. You pretend that somebody's walking in a walk by and kick you in the ribs, which again, somebody might, at least at my course. And Andy Bolton and other top powerlifters, two of whom I've taught this technique, they swear by this. Because this is the abdominal training for strength. This is not just some nonsense that you do cranking out the reps. So to sum up your abdominal training, find whatever abdominal exercises that you like.

• 29:51Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It can be the plank, it can be some kind of a setup, it can be something from your book, The For Our Body. It can be something from my book, The Hard Style Abs, it can be something else. That's not important, as long as it's a good exercise that's been recognized that it does work. And three times a week, do three to five sets of three to five reps. Okay, folks, just remember this, three to five sets of three to five reps. Focus on contraction, don't focus on fatigue, don't focus on the reps. And I promise if you do these two things for several months, you work your grip in this matter, you work your abs in this matter. Everything that you do today is going to be stronger.

• 30:35Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I don't care what it is, it's a bigger deadlift, it's a tennis serve, it makes no difference, you're going to be stronger.

• 30:41Tim Ferriss?

  And in the case of the the ab, let's just the the midsection and we're working with the plank, if people decided they were going to keep it simple, just so they can remember it and do three sets of three reps, three times a week, let's just say Monday.

• 30:58Pavel Tsatsouline?

  For the plank, let's do just three sets of 10 seconds.

• 31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 31:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Three sets of 10 seconds, 10 seconds, three times a week.

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 31:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And try to contract everything below your neck.

• 31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And I just as as further exhibit, exhibit A, I've always had, and I'd be curious to dissect this just for a second, but I've always had difficulty with pull ups. I have a relatively strong pull from say, the floor, in large part, thanks to wrestling and other types of strength training, but also the Barry Ross protocol. When it comes to pulling myself up to a bar, though, I can, I can use weight for low repetitions, but I've never been able to do higher repetitions very well. And I did this greasing the groove, walking around San Francisco for a few weeks, where

• 31:47Tim Ferriss?

  anytime I passed construction scaffolding, I would jump up and there are enough crazy people in San Francisco, fortunately, or unfortunately, that it didn't really raise any eyebrows. They're like, oh, it's just some crazy guy doing pull ups with a backpack, whatever. And I would do two or three pull ups and then I'd just continue on my way. And it was, it was astonishing. I didn't really test my max repetitions, but how, how much my velocity, I guess my, the equivalent of bar speed increased over that period of time, I mean, it really became much, much more explosive. It was, it was just astonishing. And, but for people who have perhaps trouble with higher repetition pull ups, how would you troubleshoot that?

• 32:34Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, Tim, I guess first of all, it depends what higher repetitions mean. If it's, if your goal is twenty or twenty-five strict pull-ups. Yeah, let's, let's use that. Then, yes, that's one thing, because if you go beyond that, and in Russian, in Russia, they even have specialized competitions where they do strict pull-ups for some crazy insane reps. Then, training becomes so weird and so state-of-the-art, then you better not even bother. Right. But, most people don't need to do that. So, if you want to be able to do twenty or twenty-five pull-ups, you can achieve that level purely by training your strength. Which means that you never even have to do more than five reps in training. And just whenever you go out and test, then you're going to get those reps.

• 33:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Here's something, here's a note about strength endurance. The more resistance that you're overcoming in your endurance effort, the more strength helps. So, what does that mean? It means that if you're strong, that is, let's say you have a good deadlift. That's going to help you carry beer kegs to the second floor. But, on the other hand, it's not necessarily going to help you, uh, hammering a nail all day, if that makes any sense. Right. Because hammers light, beer kegs are heavy. So, when you're doing a twenty-five repetition effort, the weight is significant. It's still a significant percentage of your one rep max. So, that can be bumped up purely just by, by getting stronger.

• 34:02Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So, that'll be my recommendation. For people who have a hard time doing pull-ups to start with, I would recommend, uh, start by learning to get tight through their abs. That's very important. There was an article a couple of years ago saying that women cannot do pull-ups, which is, of course, absolute nonsense. Uh, in Strong First Organization, we have some ladies who can do, uh, you know, we have a lady in Boston, Amanda Perry, who can do strict dead hang fourteen pull-ups, neck to the bar. So, the way we do pull-ups is no kipping, no swinging, pause on the bottom, and you have to touch your neck to the bar. So, she can do fourteen, for example.

• 34:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So she's a much better man than most we've met and that's the way.

• 34:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just for those people who have not tried this, having gone through some of this training with Paul, if you have just done, if the difference between doing a strict pull-up or what you envisioned to be a strict pull-up where you kind of throw your chin up above the bar height versus pulling in to touch your neck slowly to the bar is so different as to, it's not a difference in degree, it's sort of a difference in species. But anyway, I challenge, I challenge everyone to try that. It's really challenging.

• 35:28Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well Tim, for people who are, for people who have a hard time just to get started in pull-ups, and again, that's true for some ladies, many ladies, that's true for a number of gentlemen as well. A lot of the problem is they're unable to contract their abdominals strongly enough. They're unable to even assume the strong posture. Remember I told you earlier that I reverse engineer what the strong people do naturally. So if you watch a gymnast perform any kind of maneuvers in the rings, let's say, you will see something called the hollow position. So what's the hollow position? The hollow position is, the body is like your tail is tucked in and your body kind of forms a, it's like a dish. Your body looks like a dish, pretty much. So if you want to learn to do pull-ups, first you need to master the hollow position. It's very easy for you

• 36:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  to type in, you type it into your search engine, the hollow position, find a picture, see what it looks like, and just practice this hollow position, this hollow rock. Listen, the exercise is called the hollow rock. I explained it in my book, Hard Style Abs, but I'm sure you can find it anywhere else. And so you practice this hollow rock, and this hollow rock is going to not only strengthen your abs, but it's also going to teach you how to acquire that position. And then after that, you can start working with assisted reps. And that's a very big difference. We're not talking about negatives. We're not talking about forced reps. We're talking about assistance reps, assisted reps. So what's the difference?

• 36:56Pavel Tsatsouline?

  The difference is, an assisted rep feels like a moderately challenging rep that you do on your own. So your training partner or your trainer is gonna push you in your mid back and enable you to do that with some degree of difficulty, but definitely not make you struggle. And when they've done a study on young gymnasts years ago in the Soviet Union, and they used this type of methodology, they called it "artificial controlling environment", where the partner allows you to do a perfect repetition, but in a way that doesn't really kill you, that it doesn't make you struggle. They found that the speed with which they progressed was absolutely remarkable.

• 37:39Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So, practicing your hollow rock, don't forget your grip, and then start three times a week with the help of your training partner, do, let's say, three to five sets of three to five reps of assisted pull-ups. And I just wanna reiterate again that low reps are key, guys. If you wanna be strong, you need to keep your reps at five and under.

• 38:01Tim Ferriss?

  And at five reps or under, is what you're really working on, sort of, it's... And I'll get out of my depth and into yours pretty quickly, but the sort of neural pathways and the recruitment of motor neurons and sort of firing capabilities and so on?

• 38:18Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Pretty much, you're gonna have, you're gonna have a high level of neural adaptations, and you're also going to build some muscle as well. So you're gonna build the high-thrustle motor units as well, but not, it's not a bodybuilding protocol. You'll build some muscle, but it's not really the end, the end goal itself. So, you are trying to, also, you're trying to avoid the fatigue, you're trying to avoid the burn, because whenever you start experiencing the burn, that's from something called the hydrogen ions. That leads to a whole lot of problems for you. So one of the problems is it interferes with the command that your brain sends to the muscle to contract. And another problem that it creates, these hydrogen ions literally are destructive.

• 39:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So if you leave them around the muscle for too long, they really start destroying your muscle. So just keep those reps under and five, three to five. Don't worry about getting bulky. You're not going to get bulky. It's not going to happen. And approach your training as a practice. So this is another very important point, Tim.

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is a super important point. No, I'm glad you're bringing this up.

• 39:24Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I hate the word workout. The word workout does not exist in the Russian language. We talk about a training session or we talk about a lesson. We never talk about a workout. Just think of what does the word working out, what is it, what do you envision?

• 39:40Tim Ferriss?

  Sweating and grunting and.

• 39:42Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Let's see, let's see how much I can punish myself and drain myself. So the goal is not to get stronger. The goal is just to get worn out. And there are simpler ways of doing that. Run up the mountain. Okay? So no, the idea here is practice. Strength is a skill and as such it must be practiced. And if you approach it in this manner, not only you're going to get stronger so much faster, but you're going to truly enjoy your training process. Training should be something that should be enjoyed.

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  No, this, this, this rings so true to me and it was really a revelation just coming from the masochistic world of the few sports that I practiced and it certainly did not get to a world-class level, but competed on a national level in a few different sports. And the, the mind shift from depleting your reservoir or reserves as much as possible to identifying the skills and practicing them, even if, if you feel better at the end of a workout than at the beginning, was really a huge shift for me in a few places, certainly in strength training. I think that Barry Ross's protocol was eye-opening in so much as, just like you mentioned,

• 40:50Tim Ferriss?

  put 100, I think it was around 120, this is all detailed in the four hour body, so I'm losing the specifics, but about, about 120 pounds on my max deadlift through, through the full range of motion, not just the range in which we were practicing. In a short period of time and gained fewer than 10 pounds of additional muscle. And you probably enjoyed your training too. Loved it. Oh, it was just amazing. I mean, felt on fire. I mean, partially because you're, you're, you know, blowing a foghorn into your nervous system's ear when you do it. But the, the, the other area, and I think this, this is such a fantastic principle that applies to so many different areas, was in the world of swimming. And some people might recall,

• 41:32Tim Ferriss?

  if they followed my stuff for a while, that I was not able to swim a lap in a proper pool until I was in my 30s. And what, what really shifted the mindset completely was going from swimming workouts and, and hiring coaches who viewed it that way, to looking at total immersion, where they really focus on the skill of deconstructing the biomechanics of swimming, challenging the assumptions of how swimming is taught. And it became this really joyful, wonderful experience. And I was able to go from basically zero laps to sort of 20 laps per practice in less than 10 days. So it's, it's such an important

• 42:14Tim Ferriss?

  shift, and I'm glad you brought it up, which, which kind of leads me to the next, the next question that, and it's about prioritization. So when people think of fitness, particularly non-athletes, I think that there tends to be a very scattershot approach. And there's a paradox of choice challenge that they have where they're, they're fed a lot of recommendations from many different people. And they have strength, and let's just talk, this strength, not necessarily muscle gain, but just getting stronger. They have hypertrophy, so increasing their muscular size, for lack of a better description, endurance, flexibility. How would you rank these in order of priority and why?

• 42:58Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, as long as the person has the required mobility and symmetry, the priority is always, and health, the priority is always strength. Strength has to be first. So, the first step that you do is you assess your mobility, you find specialists who can do that. FMS would be, FMS would be a recommendation of mine, Gary Cook's FMS.

• 43:22Tim Ferriss?

  Functional Movement Screen.

• 43:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Functional Movement Screen is gonna find out how mobile you are and also how symmetrical you are. So as long as that is dialed in, that is in place, you have to get strong. And strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities. And that's not a statement by me, that's a statement by Patrice Amati, the father of periodization, one of the greatest sports scientists ever. And greater strength increases your performance in absolutely everything. So you can see, of course, okay, of course, yeah, being stronger is gonna help you in, let's say, punching somebody harder or lifting something. But how is that gonna help me if I'm, let's say, a triathlete? How is that gonna help me if I'm a marathon runner? It is going to help you in several different ways.

• 44:08Pavel Tsatsouline?

  One is the perceived level of exertion is gonna go down. Several years ago, Norwegians did a very interesting study where they put elite endurance athletes, some were bicyclists, some were runners, on a pure strength regimen. That's four sets of four reps of heavy squats. It's about as pure strength as it gets. And in the end of the study, not surprisingly, all these guys were stronger, they could jump higher and so on, but they were not impressed with that. That didn't matter to them. What did impress them is they ran faster. Their times, their race times, went down. Because strength just makes, enables everything else.

• 44:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  If you're trying to, let's say, lose weight, being stronger is gonna help you do that because you're gonna have, you're gonna have a bigger furnace, you're gonna train yourself much harder on the exercises that are fat loss exercises. So it really doesn't matter what it is that you're trying to achieve, strength is the number one attribute you need to address. And that's why my company is called Strong First.

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I, I love. I love that you, one of the things that I love about you, Pavel, is that you say what you mean and mean what you say. And I just, there's a degree of clarity that I envy. And I might include it for people, but when we did our sound check, I asked you to do, give me an answer so we could test the audio, what you had for breakfast. And what was your answer?

• 45:44Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Coffee.

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  And that was it. That was the sound check. I love this, the simplicity. Now, speaking of simplicity, and also sort of undoing the confusion that a lot of people suffer from, what are the most counterproductive myths or misconceptions about strength training that come to mind?

• 46:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, the number one, Tim, I guess, is the idea that you have to go to failure every time you train.

• 46:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:12Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And I can tell you one thing, that the Soviet weightlifters, I have done a very thorough analysis of the Soviet weightlifting methodology from through the 60s through the 80s, the glory days. And I found that they typically did one-third to two-thirds of maximal repetitions per set. So what does it mean? If let's say that you're using a weight that's your 10 rep max, 10 is all you could do if you push yourself very hard. They would do three to six consistently. Now, you probably ask yourself, okay, I'm not a weightlifter. And what does this Soviet stuff from the 80s have to do with today?

• 46:55Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, two things. First of all, even though a person who is not a lifting athlete is not going to train exactly as a weightlifter or powerlifter, nevertheless, the methodology has to be derived from these sports, because these are specialist strength sports. So they just have to be adapted to your needs. Second of all, this particular Soviet methodology is still superior to this day. This is very interesting, but if you keep hearing about all this new world records set in the sport of weightlifting. Well, if you compare the world records of today to the world records of the 80s, you will see that in most cases,

• 47:34Pavel Tsatsouline?

  the records today are inferior to records in the 80s. How can that be? They accuse people of doing drugs, and they changed weight classes twice since the 80s.

• 47:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Of course, it's so wonderful. I'm so happy that today, nobody does drugs anymore. It's just terrific.

• 47:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So, if you look at, if you look at the lifts performed by Soviet lifter Yurik Vardanyan in 1980 at the Moscow Olympics, these lifts have never been exceeded, these lifts have never been approached. So this particular methodology does work extremely well. It's still the best methodology, period. Later on, the Soviet powerlifting team adapted this methodology for powerlifting with tremendous success. They dominate. And the same particular methodology has been adapted to bodyweight training, kettlebell presses, and so on and so forth. So it's the same thing that can be applied for everybody, because this is

• 48:34Pavel Tsatsouline?

  principle-based training. So, the major misconception is that you have to go to failure. So that if you just overcome that, and if you make it a habit to do one-third to two-thirds of the repetitions that are possible, and do more sets instead, you're gonna make much greater progress, you're gonna do it much safer, and folks, you're gonna enjoy the training.

• 49:01Tim Ferriss?

  And how do, how does the approach shift if your focus is maximal hypertrophy?

• 49:10Pavel Tsatsouline?

  If you're after maximal hypertrophy, it's volume. So they figured out in the Soviet Union that there's a direct correlation between volume and hypertrophy. So you just pretty much have to do more sets. You're gonna have to do more sets in the like sixty to seventy percent of your max range, and a whole bunch of sets of five and six, just many of them. And your rest periods might be compressed a little more. But that's it. If you do that, do this a couple of times a week, many sets of five or six, don't even worry about how many, just, just keep going. Don't kill yourself, enjoy yourself. Eat more, you're gonna get bigger. It's unavoidable. It's just as simple as that.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  And Jeff, I've, of course, I've, I've spoken with, with fans and written about the app, the applications of two-failure training for primarily hypertrophy, just because you're, you're doing so much with the sarcoplasm and maximizing the sort of cellular volume.

• 50:14Tim Ferriss?

  That the the challenge is not so much the training with hypertrophy, it's the eating. It's just, I mean, you really, you feel like the the Japanese hot dog eater Kobayashi after a while. It's just waking up in the middle of the night to eat meals and whatnot. It's that that's by far the most punishing aspect of it for me at least.

• 50:36Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It is, Tim, it is, and.

• 50:37Tim Ferriss?

  Any tricks there?

• 50:38Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Also, nobody knows. Also, nobody knows. Yeah, there are a couple of tricks, but there are no, I'll mention them in a second. Nobody does know exactly what happens on the cellular level when you try to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. Anybody who tells you that they know they, you know, it's just speculation at best. There are a number of theories. Some of the theories are more credible than others. But the fact is, we still do not know. And what makes this Soviet weightlifting methodology of the 80s so spectacular is that was a purely empirical methodology. They tried to explain what happens on the cellular level, but they didn't try too hard. It was pretty much a trial and error. They would analyze the training logs of successful lifters and successful competitions.

• 51:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  They analyzed this data, they made recommendations, and it's kind of chicken and egg. Where does this start? Scientists watching what the best lifters do, what the best lifters, the best scientists telling the best lifters what to do. It was kind of both, and they kept narrowing it down, narrowing down, narrowing it down. And this is how it works, but we still don't know exactly what happens there.

• 51:44Tim Ferriss?

  What is your, I want to, I definitely want to touch on the the tricks for not making yourself nauseous all day when you're trying to to pack on pounds of muscle, but before that, what is your favorite pet theory? What, even if it's speculative at this point, what is your preferred theory for muscular growth?

• 52:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Okay.

• 52:07Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Vadim Pratasenko's theory makes most sense to me. And according to this theory, when the muscle comes, the contraction comes to an end or close to an end, when you have depleted the creatine phosphate in the muscle, that's the primary stimulus for hypertrophy, according to him. And again, what could that possibly, well, how could that possibly do? And if the muscle contraction stops, not as a result of mounting acidity, and that's very, very important, but as a result of there simply not enough creatine phosphate, supposedly the cross bridges no longer can really disengage properly. So supposedly-

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  And by cross bridges, you're talking about the myosin acting?

• 52:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  That's right. Supposedly, this is what tears them apart. Supposedly, that's what causes the micro-trauma that makes the satellite cells do their thing. So that's one fairly credible explanation. I don't know if this is true or not, but training, in my experience, that Pratasenko's approach to training, where you're gonna hit it pretty hard, the set would probably be about 20, 30 seconds in duration, if you're trying to target your high threshold motor units. And then you're gonna have to stop. And you have to rest a long time between the sets. So this, it does make a lot of sense.

• 53:37Pavel Tsatsouline?

  There is another theory that works fairly well with it. Professor Viktor Silivanov, according to him, the role of creatine phosphate here is, once you deplete your creatine phosphate and you do have a lot of free creatine, which is, you know, pretty much a by-product. What that does is makes a membrane of the cell permeable to the hormones, anabolic hormones. Uh, very interesting. So as Hilyanov says, there are four prerequisites to muscle hypertrophy. One is obvious, is that's the presence of amino acids. The second is the presence of anabolic hormones, which obviously has to do with the capacity of your endocrine system, but also your training as well.

• 54:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Training stress does seem to do that. And third is the presence of free creatine as, again, the same thing. That free creatine is, a lot of free creatine is formed when the muscle's pushed hard, but not before it gets acidating. And finally, the fourth one is the presence of hydrogen ions, not, not for too long. So again, hydrogen ions, it's again, it's something that you get out of muscle contraction, any muscle contraction. And the service that they do for muscle hypertrophy, according to Silo Yanov, is just like the free creatine, they make the membrane permeable to the hormones. So then, then what happens is there's hormones, which are pretty much messengers,

• 55:06Pavel Tsatsouline?

  they go into the cell, and as they go into the cell, they get the whole process of transcription, translation, you know, protein synthesis going. The, also the very interesting element of Silo Yanov's theory and Silo Yanov's methodology, and again, something that sits well with me, I'm having observed training, effective training, is very long rest periods between sets. So Silo Yanov recommends five to 10 minutes of rest between the sets, and that rest has to be active. So you pretty much have to move around, so you don't just, you don't just sit. You just move, you wave your arms, you kind of shake your muscles, you shake your legs, you walk.

• 55:48Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And that's supposed to get rid of, they clear out the hydrogen ions as quickly as possible. Because having them there briefly is good, having them there for too long, it's not good, because they're literally destructive. It's a charged particle, that's what it is. And

• 56:03Tim Ferriss?

  So they're walking or are they on stationary bikes on like an aerodyne?

• 56:07Pavel Tsatsouline?

  No, you don't need a stationary bike. You just pretty much want to walk. There are, there's a particular type of relaxation exercises, Tim. We call them fast and loose exercises. All Russian athletes do. So pretty much what they are is if you may remember my kettlebell certification, I had people standing, kind of shake out their arms and legs.

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 56:25Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So you just pretty much shake your arms and legs and you just walk around. That's, that's pretty much what you do. So that's, that is Suleyev's theory, which also seems to make sense. Notice that in both cases for this, you are going to push yourself much closer to failure, to rep max. So when you're training just for strength, you don't need to do that. You just do one third to two thirds of your maximum reps. When you're trying to train for hypertrophy, yes, you can do just simply more submaximal sets, but sometimes you just have to push yourself harder. Not to failure still, but harder. And Suleyev also has the most fascinating slow to which fiber protocol as well. I'd

• 57:08Pavel Tsatsouline?

  like to tell your readers about it because there are a lot of misconceptions about training the slow fibers. Well, if you think about slow fibers, well.

• 57:15Tim Ferriss?

  Which most people associate with endurance.

• 57:18Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Yeah, exactly. And they do have endurance. That's true. But they're also, people think, well, they're thin, they're weak, they're small, and why should I do that? Why would any self-respecting power athlete, you know, demean himself training the slow fibers? So, and Suleyev has a very different point of view on this. First of all, if you look at back in the six, in some studies done in the 60s, if you compare the strength of your slow fibers and fast ones, they are just as strong for the same cross section. So which means that if you have a bundle of slow fibers, that's as thick as your finger, and you have a bundle of fast fibers, that's as thick as your finger, they're equally strong. Just, you know, this slower bundle is going to have more smaller fibers, but it doesn't matter.

• 58:02Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Number one. Number two, because their velocity of contraction for the fast fibers can be twenty, forty percent higher for the slow fibers, the presumption is, well, I need to move fast. I can't afford that. So, but Silianov's work has found out that even in sprint, fifty percent of the output is provided by slow fibers. And he says, even though in vitriol, that may be true, that these fibers are contracting faster, but in vivo, in real life, in sport activities, you're not really gonna go so fast. So that advantage is no longer, no longer valid. He has put experienced sprinters on a training protocol that hypertrophied

• 58:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  their slow fibers. And these sprinters improved their sprint for hundred meters on average from ten point nine seconds to ten point seven, just from, just from this slow fast, slow fiber hypertrophy. And there is additional benefits of hypertrophy for your slow fibers, something we can discuss a little bit later, if we talk, if you choose to talk about endurance, is these slow fibers come pre-equipped with mitochondria, which means they have a lot of endurance. So for other types of athletes, that can be very beneficial. So Silianov has this fascinating training protocol for training, for hypertrophy of slow fibers. So here's how this goes. He says, the biggest problem that you have is typically people

• 59:31Pavel Tsatsouline?

  just try to go and burn them out. Well, but all that does, again, that just the gig comes to an end because of the mounting acidity. That's not the right stimulus right there. You wanna make sure that you exhaust that creatine phosphate, get that free creatine flowing. So how do you do that? You create occlusion. So he would have you do a- Said occlusion. Occlusion. Yeah, it means basically shut, the contraction prevents the blood flow. Right. So it's a constant tension, what bodybuilders would call constant tension. And what you would do is you would do, let's say, squats, you go a little bit below parallel, you go a little bit above parallel, you're going slow, the timeframe is thirty to sixty seconds, that the duration. And you have to counter fail or close to fail.

• 1:00:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Now, this is again, this is what's really fascinating. After that, and this is what's so so different from the traditional slow twitch training, is you have to take that same five to 10 minute active rest. Because he says if you don't, that mounting acidity is gonna mess everything up. And on one day a week, typically you would do four to nine sets in this manner. And then three to four days later, you do a second day where you do one to three sets. So that's a protocol. One more time, super slow movement, no rest. Thirty to sixty seconds in duration. One day a week, four to nine sets. Three to four days later, one to three sets. Five to 10 minutes of rest in between active rest. By the way, active rest can also mean

• 1:00:56Pavel Tsatsouline?

  working different muscle groups. That's, that's very fine as well. And just to tell you how effective this protocol is. He put a number of athletes, experienced athletes from different sports on, who knew how to squat. On a back squat protocol, using these, uh, using these types of reps and sets and so on. And in eight weeks, these guys increased more than, added more than 25% of their back squat.

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  Holy crap.

• 1:01:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Yeah, and you realize these guys were not, these guys were not your typical American college subjects. You know, the guys with very fast thumbs, you know? Facebook people. No, I'm talking, I'm talking about athletes.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  And what, what percentage of their one rep max were they using for these 30 to 60 second sets? Cause that's a, that's a challenging micro range of movement.

• 1:01:48Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Okay, it's, the typical guidelines, you have to find it for yourself because that depends on your, on your fiber composition.

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:01:55Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Typically, it's about 30 to 60% for your lower body. And 10 to 40% for your upper body. So why is the difference? And the difference is, uh... Is determined by the fact that your upper body is more fast switch. So if you look at an average person, an average person is going to have about seventy percent fast switch fibers in the upper body and the lower body about fifty fifty. But, uh, so you have to use a lighter weight relatively speaking for the upper body to stay in that timeframe.

• 1:02:23Tim Ferriss?

  I see, got it.

• 1:02:24Pavel Tsatsouline?

  But it's a trial and error thing, it's just trial and error.

• 1:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  No, of course, and what would people, what would you suggest they Google or search for to learn more about this?

• 1:02:32Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Uh, nothing, I'm afraid, but I think that's

• 1:02:36Tim Ferriss?

  And that, that means don't search for quote, "nothing, I'm afraid," that means you can't search for it.

• 1:02:40Pavel Tsatsouline?

  But I'm gonna, but if you listen very carefully to what I said, they should have no problem doing that. I can give you a couple of exercises, uh, other exercises that you can do. So for the lower body, uh, you can use the back squat or you can use the front squat. And, uh, for the upper body, you could use something like the diamond pushups for the triceps. And what you need to do is you need to adjust the difficulty based on, adjust the elevation. Well, elevate your hands if you want it easier, elevate your feet if you want to make it harder. But again, the idea is to come to failure in thirty, thirty to sixty seconds. And, uh, for the pushup, you're gonna be working in mid-range. So you're never gonna come to lockout, you're never gonna come to the bottom, you're gonna slowly keep working, uh, keep working through that mid-range.

• 1:03:25Pavel Tsatsouline?

  If you want to do this for, uh, the upper body, it's probably the best idea would be some kind of a rowing machine. And again, you're gonna be working through the mid-range or curls. I hate to say it, but yes, curls. Silo Yanov, Silo Yanov has been extremely successful with athletes from very diverse sports. Uh, he's, uh, worked with national team for judo, sambo, uh, fulkanta, karate, bicycle racing, soccer, and these guys have seen terrific, terrific results from this. So, uh, you guys may want to give it a try.

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's the fascinating, the most unexpected aspect of that for me is the five to 10 minute rest sets. That's really fascinating. And I should also, I'd love to underscore one thing for people, and please correct me, Paul, if I'm getting this incorrect, but a lot of folks think about the burn as being a product of lactate or lactic acid, but it's actually a byproduct or a side effect, a primary effect of the hydrogen ions that you were talking about.

• 1:04:25Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It is.

• 1:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that that has a lot of

• 1:04:28Pavel Tsatsouline?

  There are some swelling, some nerve endings, or yeah, yeah, it doesn't, it really, folks, it really doesn't matter. The only thing that you need to realize is this, on this particular training protocol, you go for this burn, this burn is needed. The important thing is that burn is over after 30 or 60 seconds, and then you try to get rid of it as fast as possible. And for other types of training, if you're trying to train for strength, you want to try and to avoid the burn altogether. The burn is, the burn is your enemy.

• 1:04:56Tim Ferriss?

  So I have two, two, two questions on the details here. The first is, if free creatine, I guess that's just free creatine in serum, although I could be wrong in that, is one of the stimuli that produces the, the training adaptation, can you accelerate that or even catalyze it with supplemental use of creatine monohydrate, for instance?

• 1:05:23Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:05:24Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And then the second question is related to the, what some people have called the golden era of steroids, which was the 80s, right? So I guess what I'm very curious to know is why have the, why have the Soviets changed their approach, or what has caused the, what has, what has prevented them from attaining or surpassing the records of the 80s? And understood, obviously, that athletes are still using many different types of performance enhancing drugs, but what has changed? And why did they change it?

• 1:06:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, I think Dan John has said it really well. It worked so well, I got bored with it and I stopped doing it.

• 1:06:12Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And before, shortly before their death, not in the last decade, both Vasiliy Alexeyev, who is a great champion, and Arkady Vrabyov was a great champion and a sports scientist, they criticized his practices very, very heavily. Alexey Medvedev, who also has done the same thing. They said, basically, you guys are barking up a wrong tree right here. So I just think that people are trying to get fancy. It's funny that what's happening in Russia is probably reflecting that whole trend, Western trend, that Nassim Taleb called new mania. People love the new. Yeah.

• 1:06:56Pavel Tsatsouline?

  People just absolutely love the new. They're forgetting that what stuff that it worked much better. You could consider the results, the results were superior back then. The same thing, you can look at the powerlifting methodology, also going back to the 80s. The classic American powerlifting methodology, the classic cycling, as exemplified by lifters like Ed Cohn and Lamar Gant, and systematized by Marty Gallagher. Again, people are saying, well, we have better training methods these days, and they're showing you different numbers in the squats and the bench press and so on. To which I say, well, in the squat and the bench press, it has become impossible to really compare apples and apples

• 1:07:40Pavel Tsatsouline?

  because of all these crazy shirts and suits that people are wearing. Yeah, the gear. Exactly. But in the deadlift, you're still seeing, look at the record tables. The record tables, a number of the deadlift records are still set back in the 80s and 90s. And they're still sitting. These are all-time historic records. And even the advancement of some assistance gear for the deadlift and advancement of the longer bars, whipper bars and so on, yeah, it improved some pools, but still, many of these records still do stand. And the 80s is a fascinating era for strength.

• 1:08:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I wrote a blog a little while ago that I called it Forward to the Past. It was inspired by the upcoming 30th anniversary of the movie Back to the Future. And the point, and the point I made in there, look, you know, if Marty McFly wanted to travel, there are plenty of reasons to travel to today's day. But looking for strength advice, that he would have been much better off staying home. Because it's still in that weightlifting methodology of the 80s, the American powerlifting methodology of the 80s, this still remains superior. And that's not something you can argue.

• 1:08:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Ed Cohen, even for people who are not familiar, perhaps especially for people who are not familiar with powerlifting, I think would just be fascinated by, by Ed Cohen. What was it? He pulled, oh God, I'm blanking here.

• 1:09:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  901 probably is his best pull.

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's the one. At what body weight? That was 220 or something?

• 1:09:11Pavel Tsatsouline?

  901 at 220, that's correct.

• 1:09:15Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And Ed has said, Ed has said some work close to 100 world records. And, and he has competed in weight classes, you know, so many different weight classes over the years. And he also had a remarkably injury-free career, just really remarkably.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  His hips gave him, I mean, he's had, he's had hip issues since then. Do you think that's a result of sumo-style deadlift?

• 1:09:35Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I doubt it very much.

• 1:09:37Tim Ferriss?

  You do?

• 1:09:37Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I doubt it very much. I mean, deep squats, if you, if you talk to somebody like Greg Cook, if you talk to somebody, Professor Stuart McGill, you will find that deeper wide squats could probably lead to some problems. Sumo deadlift, it's extremely, extremely unlikely.

• 1:09:51Tim Ferriss?

  Very interesting. And one of the things that-

• 1:09:54Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And by the way, Tim, sorry to interrupt you. How many people do you know who don't sumo deadlift anything higher than a newspaper and have to go get, get their hips replaced?

• 1:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  No, exactly. And this is actually something I was going to bring up, which is when people see the Lyle Alzeyos of the world, the bodybuilders who get cancer and they go, oh my God, you know, the, the steroids cause cancer. And it's like, well, you have to look at it in the context of how many people out of a thousand- Would get cancer whether they're in the gym or injecting steroids or not to really have a fair assessment of causal factors, right? So your point's well taken. The thing, the

• 1:10:29Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Sorry to interrupt you. I'll interrupt you though, and I will say one thing.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  No, keep interrupting.

• 1:10:33Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Many of these guys, many of these guys who competed at a very high level in the 80s and the 70s are very healthy and doing extremely well. If you look at Gallagher himself, he's right now, he's in his 60s, he's very strong, he's very spry, fully healthy, hikes in the woods, you know, every day. If you look at weightlifters, well, forget the 80s, let's go back a little farther. Rudolf Blüchfelder, he was a Soviet German. He was an Olympic champion in weightlifting at the age of 37. And that's something that's never been replicated. Absolutely, it is incredible. Today, he's somewhere in his mid 80s.

• 1:11:18Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And every day, as part of his training regimen, he does jump squats with 200 pounds, 90 kilos. So he goes rock bottom in the squat and jumps up. And that's a guy in his mid 80s. And in fact, he looks so good. Some journalist came to interview him and said, "Uh, excuse me, sir, may we speak to your dad?"

• 1:11:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. Wow, something to aspire to. I've been, just on the weightlifter point, I've been spending time with an amazing gentleman named Jersey Gregorik. I'm not sure if that rings a bell, but he

• 1:11:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Yes, it does. He's a very nice man. He's a Polish, very accomplished lifter.

• 1:11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Very accomplished world-class weightlifter, I think primarily in the masters division. But he's, I'm speculating here, probably in his mid 60s. I'm spending time with him and he can still, you know, throw, I don't know the exact weight, but 200 to 300 pounds over his head in the snatch, no problem.

• 1:12:14Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Does Jersey still can do full splits?

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  He is amazingly flexible. I haven't asked him to do any Van Damme type stuff for me, but his hamstring flexibility, which of course is much more than hamstrings, but what I perceive, what a layperson would perceive as hamstring flexibility just blows my mind. It's amazing how flexible this guy is. So I'm very interested in the long game, but increasingly interested, you know, the older I get. I'm 37 and I can't, I'm certainly not going to be winning any Olympic gold medals anytime soon in weightlifting.

• 1:12:51Pavel Tsatsouline?

  My father took up powerlifting at the age of 71. He's 77 today. He deadlifted 413 pounds without a belt and he set, you know, several American records in his age group. And overtraining for five years, so he put on 20 pounds of muscle. If you look at my father, if you look at him from the back, you will think that this guy's got to be in his 40s. And he looks like a wrestler. He's just massive. And Stu McGill, when he examined him, says he's never seen such muscular development of a 70-year-old. And he started when he was 71.

• 1:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Would you consider the, and please disagree if this is not the case, but if you had to pick one movement for strength, longevity, would the deadlift be that movement? Or is it not possible to choose one movement? How would you try to answer that question?

• 1:13:46Pavel Tsatsouline?

  If you were to choose one movement, Tim, yes, I would choose the deadlift or I would choose the kettlebell swing. Obviously, the kettlebell swing is not something you can compete in and something you're not, it's not going to give you the same satisfaction of lifting heavy weight, but those are the two main full-body exercises, the full-body expressions of power that will go such a long way for you for longevity, strength, just the quality of life.

• 1:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  What are the biggest mistakes that people make with the deadlift? Whether that's technically or in programming, what are the biggest mistakes? And not asking you to repeat things you've already said, but is there anything top of mind that...

• 1:14:30Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, Tim, I think the very big mistake is because they think, okay, I have picked up things from the floor. This looks so simple. It's not an Olympic lift, therefore it's very simple. So I'll just start piling on plates and start training. The deadlift is a very technical lift. And even if you're just a recreational lifter, you owe it to yourself to learn to deadlift correctly. So that's, that's as simple as that. So I say that's, that's the primary mistake. And that mistake goes for every exercise that people do out there.

• 1:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I would highly recommend people check out your book with, now I want to say, with Mr. Bolton.

• 1:15:08Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Deadlift Dynamite.

• 1:15:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, really, very, very dense. Shifting gears just, just a little bit, dense in the best way possible. No, no fluff. I'd love to shift gears and just ask you a few questions about sort of your philosophies and your thinking, not, not so much the, the highly specific training questions. But when you think of, for instance, the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you?

• 1:15:39Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, I am fortunate enough to know many successful people. And I think that what separates them from the rest is the CEO of Strong First, Eric Froehlhard, he put it very well. He says, balance with priorities, balance with priorities. So Eric, yourself, and many others I'm fortunate to know, they exemplify success for me.

• 1:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  And the, how do you, what is the best way, what are the habits that you've observed that allow people to have balance with priorities? What are the, the things they do that other people don't do? Or maybe the things they don't do that other people do?

• 1:16:24Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, I think one is calm. These people are calm because people who are hyper, they get so trapped in their reactive mode, they get too trapped in the everyday minutia of their work and their existence. So they just do not pause and they do not think. Again, Eric has a great quote from a Vietnam era SEAL, which says, "Calm is contagious. Calm is contagious." So when the person is calm, then he or she has the time to meditate, reflect, set their priorities and set the balance.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that certainly holds true from what I've seen, and the opposite, of course, is true. Hysteria is...

• 1:17:11Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, he's just chasing the tail. Absolutely. Chicken little. This guy is falling. Yes, everything is urgent.

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like the internet in a nutshell right there. Do you have any morning rituals? What does the first hour or two of your day look like typically?

• 1:17:31Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I like to ease into my day. I will get up early, 6:00 AM typically, and my wife and I will just have coffee and read the newspaper and make small talk, and I really take my time. I pointedly read a paper, not watch TV, not get any kind of electronic news or radio. I really appreciate the calm of print because whenever you're watching TV, it's just the latest news, the breaking news, and it's again, that same tail chasing. After that, if I decide to lift, train with kettlebells, I'll go to the beach and do that. If I do not do that this morning, I'll just still go to the beach for half an hour.

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  What time is that typically?

• 1:18:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  That'll probably be about 7 o'clock, and I will take a dip, I'll meditate a little, I might stretch a little. So it's again, it's a time to, time to be composed. After that, it's a time to do creative work. So I will either write or I will do research. And when I do that, I very pointedly have the email down. So my whole email application is down. If I need to use the internet for some research, you know, the browser will stay up, but not the email. And my colleagues know to call me if they have something urgent. And not a lot of people call me because I have, my business card only has my email. So that's good.

• 1:18:59Tim Ferriss?

  So does it have your email and it says, please call if urgent with no phone number?

• 1:19:03Pavel Tsatsouline?

  No, it doesn't. No, my, obviously my colleagues do have that. So, and when I write, I will sometimes change the environment. I'd like to go to a coffee shop or go to a park or something. And I do have a particular method when I, when I write. So I will just select some topic and I work on this topic. And as soon as I hit the wall on this topic, I just switch to something else. I never fight the writer's block.

• 1:19:29Tim Ferriss?

  To a new topic.

• 1:19:30Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Absolutely. I just have a lot of different things, a lot of different projects, chapters, articles, books, whatever, going at the same time. And I'm very flexible about it and also do let my books evolve. And sometimes they evolve in a very unpredictable manner. The Naked Warrior started out as a book for strength training in the field for the military. And then it evolved in a sort of a manifesto for reverse engineering the body language of the strong. So I just kind of led that app. Towards the end of the day, it's make a call, make a call with my coworkers, take care of some business. Dinner with my wife and, you know, pretty much relax, read some, first read some nonfiction, then read some fiction.

• 1:20:15Pavel Tsatsouline?

  That's, that's a pretty standard day. I like my days.

• 1:20:19Tim Ferriss?

  I like the sound of your days too. The, the.

• 1:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do you listen to music? And if so, what type of music? Uh, what are the most frequently played songs or albums on your iPhone?

• 1:20:30Pavel Tsatsouline?

  My, my music tastes are, I like the yin and yang. I don't like stuff in the middle. So on one hand, I enjoy nineteen eighties heavy metal. I like Accept, Iron Maiden, Saxon. These are my favorite bands. On the other hand, I will listen to Jackson Brown, Carla Bruni, Yvonne Tang. So in my opinion, music has to be either yin or yang.

• 1:20:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's on or off. It's like everything you do.

• 1:21:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Seriously, if you think of performance, it's the same thing. The art of physical performance is the art of turning on the switch and shutting it off. For maximal strength, you have to turn it on. For maximal flexibility and endurance, you have to turn it off. And for a lot of sports, it's the ability to turn it on and off, on and off, back and forth, back and forth, tension, relaxation. So I do like these extremes in my music.

• 1:21:22Tim Ferriss?

  So, right, so you're either, you're either Vivaldi or Pantera and no, no, no, no pop music.

• 1:21:28Pavel Tsatsouline?

  No, this stuff in the middle has no rights to exist.

• 1:21:34Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, when you're writing, are you writing, uh, do you write on a laptop? Do you write? And if so, do you use Word or some other program? Uh, or are you writing in a journal? How are you jumping between these various articles that you're working on?

• 1:21:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  To my writing Word. And, uh, what I do is I have a very peculiar type of organization of data in my mind. In my mind, I have many different shelves with many different projects and many different research studies and so on. So I can kind of see in my mind what connects with what. I see the pattern. So I can go back and forth. And I really think that, uh, the computer doesn't enable me to do that so much easier. And I'm generally not a fan of technology. But I have to say that the word processor, it's one piece of technology that I'm a very big fan of. I think on the page. I don't think in my mind, I think on the page.

• 1:22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, that's something that I've, I've heard from a number of good writers is that they, they have to write to clarify what they're actually thinking. It's not like they form the thought and put it down. They use the process of writing to clarify their thinking. Uh, do you, do you have a private journal or anything like that?

• 1:22:51Pavel Tsatsouline?

  No.

• 1:22:51Tim Ferriss?

  You do not, okay. And just since I love talking about this, but I won't take too long. A recommendation that really was a game changer for me is using a program called Scrivener in place of Word. And Scrivener, as it sounds, what that allows you to do, it was originally designed for movie scripts, I believe, for screenwriting. And what it allows you to do is have all of your various documents, which would each otherwise be a separate Word file, in a table of contents on the left-hand side of the screen, which you can move around and modify and put into folders, which I've used for all of my last three books.

• 1:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  And then you can look at two different pieces of writing on the right-hand side. So what I'll typically have is a folder that's all research documents. And I will have a split pane on the right side where the top is what I'm working on, what I'm actually writing, and the bottom right is the research document. So rather than having a million windows open with different Word documents, and as you've probably experienced, once you have enough of those open, eventually it just craps out on you and jumps off the cliff. I don't think I've ever had, in however many years I've used it, Scrivener fail on me. And it's because it strips out a lot of the bloat. But you might really, I don't have-

• 1:24:16Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you, I'll definitely try it.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a fun program to play with, and I don't have the mental... I have too many plates spinning at once in terms of articles if I'm working on a larger project like a book. So Scrivener helps me to codify that, which I find very helpful. How do you change your... Do you change your typical routine on the weekends? Is there anything that you do differently on the weekends to decompress or otherwise?

• 1:24:42Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Not a lot. Go to church, go for a hike with my wife Julie. But otherwise, pretty much every day I try to have a balance of work, a balance of family, a balance of recreation, and a balance of self-improvement.

• 1:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking on the last point, self-improvement, what are things that you're currently trying to or would like to improve about yourself?

• 1:25:10Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, about myself, that would be private, Tim. You know, I think that

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's just us girls. It's just between us.

• 1:25:18Pavel Tsatsouline?

  You know, I think that oversharing is one of the major malfunctions of the modern world. So I think I'm gonna keep this one to myself, but I'm gonna tell you what I'm trying to improve professionally.

• 1:25:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, that's fine.

• 1:25:31Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I have, as I mentioned again, I have been able to dissect the very successful weightlifting methodology of the 60s and through 80s, which is extremely complex methodology. And I've been able to bring it down to the underlying principles and codify it and write up algorithms. So what I'm doing right now is trying to bring this very sophisticated, very amazing system of training to regular people who just want to get stronger. So I am in this refinement phase.

• 1:26:06Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And to touch on that, just as a segue, I'd love to talk about flexibility, because I get a lot of questions about flexibility. I don't consider it my area of expertise, so I constantly refer people to your work. But

• 1:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to hear you talk about where flexibility fits into the picture or when it does. Because I think for me and for other people, there's a lot of confusion around mobility versus flexibility. One of the questions I get most often, for instance, is how do I get to the full side splits? They want to go between the chairs like Van Damme. And, you know, is that is that a a worthwhile goal? Is it a terrible goal? There's a lot coming at you at once. But how does flexibility fit into the picture or not for what types of people?

• 1:26:58Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Okay, well, first of all, let me tell you about the goal of the split, whether if you choose to achieve that. It's achievable. I will tell you a great success story. He's one of the strong first instructors and he is truly a product of the system. The gentleman's name is Steve Freeze and he's a music professor. He was severely injured. His lower back was herniated, very bad. He spent eight or nine months in bed and Percocet. It was very bad. And then he decided to become a man, decided to train seriously for strength, for flexibility, train like a real athlete, after getting the proper medical clearance and so on, of course.

• 1:27:41Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So, fast forward to today, Steve Freedes, who is fifty-nine if I'm not mistaken, he holds a number of American records for his age group in the deadlift, and he deadlifts without a belt. And Steve Freedes, fifty-nine-year-old man, who used to have horrendously messed up back, can do suspended side splits, just like run down. So, uh, you big sissies out there think that you're too old or too whatever, you know, you just gotta, you just gotta shape up.

• 1:28:14Tim Ferriss?

  All right, touching, touching on the, all right, I will, I'll, I'll raise my hand, I'm one of those sissies.

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

  If, if, and I've, I've had this, I think there are many to-dos that are, there's the, there are the nice-to-have things, then the must-have things, and for me, it's been at least a decade, maybe twenty years, where I've had these suspended side splits on the to-do list, and it just gets, it gets renewed, you know, it's kind of like, uh, car insurance, like I renew it every year, but I never really make any use of it, so.

• 1:28:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, we'll deal with that, we'll get you there. You know, it's, whether it's a worthwhile goal or not to pursue, yeah, obviously there's the obvious just because it is there, and there's no way of judge that kind of goal. Somebody climbs to the mountain, somebody, uh, somebody learns to do a side split. Is that something that you need to do for your performance, outside of several sports like Taekwondo or gymnastics? No, you really don't. Is that going to improve your well-being? I do have to say that the sense of freedom that you have in your hips, when you consistently can do a full split. It's really pretty awesome. To have that feeling of freedom in the hips, you can only know that freedom

• 1:29:31Pavel Tsatsouline?

  if you also have known what not to have it, if that makes any sense.

• 1:29:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right, of course.

• 1:29:35Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So I will periodically, you know, for a while, I kind of would not treat it too seriously. Take some time, you know, stretch very lightly, kind of stay my, keep maybe at seventy percent. And I'll just make the push again and bring it back. And I always really enjoy that feeling of freedom. So that's, it's, it's a decision though. But let's talk about this mobility and flexibility business. Let's talk about how people should proceed about it. So mobility, pretty much, we're talking about the full range of motion in the joint when the length of the muscle is not an issue. So let's use an example of a full squat. Okay, so if you're in a full squat, uh, you know, not a whole lot of muscles are preventing you from hitting that range of motion. So there may be a possibility that you need to just pretty much get your joint moving smoother.

• 1:30:20Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So what does that mean? Folks, it just literally means, uh, just doing a whole bunch of squats very slowly. And not very slowly, just slowly and building up progressively range of motion. Uh, I'm also an academician, I'm also the famous Soviet scientist who was a kind of health guru. He would perform these movements every day. He would perform a hundred squats every day and a hundred other, of other things. If you're not up for doing that, you just simply hold on to the doorway. So you just unload yourself partially. You shift your weight more to the heels to make it easier on your knees and you start squatting. And don't go to pain, you know, be very progressive, go as deep as you can, eventually go deeper. Just do multiple sets.

• 1:31:04Pavel Tsatsouline?

  If, and the same thing is true really for, pretty much for all the other joints. But obviously hip joints, that's, that's a big one. And everybody needs, everybody needs this type of training.

• 1:31:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I like a very simple joint mobility protocol. Obviously, you can make this as complex as you want, seriously. And many people have. But like in my book, Kettlebell Simple and Sinister, that's my latest book. I give this protocol where there are just, just a couple of different exercises you do. One exercise you do is you just kind of move the exercise, move a weight around your head in a circle, a halo, loosen up the shoulders. Another exercise you do is a very particular type of squat, kind of prying goblet squat. That's a terrific exercise. So you can do search online, prying goblet squat.

• 1:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people, I remember the first time I heard you say that. I embarrassed myself at the certification because I thought you were saying goblin squat. And I asked you what a goblin squat is. So for, it is a goblet, like drinking out of a goblet.

• 1:32:07Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Goblet squat, the name by Dan John. And it's, it's a terrific type of a squat. That's literally squat for the people. See, the problem with the squat exercise is most people are, don't know how to move well. They're tight and you try to put the bar in their back and they just cannot do that. So the goblet squat is kind of a squat for the people that Dan developed. And the prying that is added to that is something that really allows you to increase your mobility and flexibility. So what you need to do when you're trying to get, get your flexibility increased, let's say that and mobility, let's pick any exercise that you're doing, any kind of stretch that you're doing, whatever it is.

• 1:32:49Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So there are certain rules that you need to abide by. And I call these the three S. So use your strength, find space and spread the load. Use strength, find space, spread the load. So what does that, so what does that mean exactly, Tim? Well, let's use an example of the squat. Using strength for the squat means pulling yourself down into the squat instead of just dropping yourself. Using example of the split, instead of trying to drop yourself down into the split, you're very actively pushing your feet out like you're trying to spread the walls apart.

• 1:33:32Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So spreading the walls apart, that means you're using strength. Find space. So what does finding space mean? Finding space mean just pretty much kind of a prying and moving your body into the position and trying to find more space in the joint. And also try to loosen up the fascia, that sheet, that fiber sheet around your muscles. It's a very good analogy would be trying to pull a post out of the ground. So let's say you're trying to pull a post out of the ground. It's a concrete post. You pull on it hard and it's not gonna come out. And I can tell you because I have tried. Then I've What are you doing down in Southern California? Uh, no, no, that was not in California. Vandalizing parking lots? Before. But back in the past, we had a house and uh, we bought a house and there was some,

• 1:34:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  some things in the back that I wanted to demolish. So I'm trying to pull all these concrete posts. So I tie a nylon rope to this post, attach it to a crowbar, get a nice strong sumo deadlift position, I pull. Well, what happens is the nylon rope rips and I do a backflip into the pile of dirt. Because I'm very smart. I do this two more times. And then my wife Julie walks by, she says, you know, you could just kind of wiggle it around, pry it. I say, oh, that's right, honey. So the same thing is really with your flexibility. So let's, Tim, let's use the, and let's use the example of the straddle. Let's say you're trying to get the straddle. Instead of simply trying to force yourself down, so first of all Straddle meaning side splits? A side split, but maybe lying on your stomach.

• 1:35:02Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Or maybe sitting up, doesn't really matter, either way. So you look like a frog on its stomach. Pretty much. So what you're trying to do is what you're trying to do is not just force your way in one direction, but you're trying to kind of pry it and loosen up in every direction possible. So let's say that you are, uh, let's say you are resting on your forearms and you're trying to get into this, this straddle. So you're first pushing your legs out, but then you're also kind of tilting your pelvis back and forth. Then you're gonna try to kind of wiggle your butt side to side. Then you will try to turn your body one way. You're gonna try to turn your body the other way. So pretty much what you're doing is you're taking advantage of the fact that your fascia that covers your muscles, it runs in all sorts of different directions, kind of like plywood. So you need to loosen it up in a lot of different ways.

• 1:35:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So if you keep going in different directions all around, you will progress to this goal so much faster. So you use strength, find space, and spread the load. And again, spreading the load just pretty much means that you are not just trying to focus on that particular joint. So you're just spreading it all around. And relaxation is the absolutely, absolutely, relaxation and patience are the two things that are absolutely fundamental if you're trying to improve, get a high level of flexibility, like a split. You see, you get a recommendation, let's say, oh, uh, hold this stretch for, and they'll give you some duration, thirty seconds or whatever, like, how did they arrive at that number? I have no idea, just somebody decided, well, that sounds like a nice round number, let's recommend that.

• 1:36:32Pavel Tsatsouline?

  But what you're trying to do- It's disturbing how much of the world, uh, comes about that way. Well, it's like, how many glasses of water are you supposed to drink? It's just the same thing. And, so, yeah, hold the stretch for thirty seconds, but the fact is, you're trying to wear out your stretch reflex, you're trying to let the muscle relax, and depending on your fiber composition, depending on your mental state, emotional state, training history, injury history, that can take different time, so just don't worry about it. So you just get in this position, you kind of pry a little bit for a while, and then you just relax, and when you relax, you try to breathe through that tight spot. When I say breathe through, I'm saying, just listen to my breathing.

• 1:37:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  You completely release the tension, totally. If you do this, uh, which is pretty much what most people do when they're trying to stretch, you're tightening up the muscles. You just have to completely let go, you have to be patient, and you have to spend, you have to spend good half an hour, forty minutes on this type of practice a day if you really are serious about reaching that level. How, how long, I'm sorry? About thirty, forty minutes, but even if you don't, well, if, there are ways of doing it faster, Tim, but that involves isometric stretching, and that's a little bit more technically involved to talk about here on the show, but, uh, even if you do not pursue this extreme

• 1:37:58Pavel Tsatsouline?

  flexibility goal, even if you just wanna be flexible to whatever level you wanna be flexible, understand that the idea of relaxation, breathing, and patience are absolutely fundamental. You have to be patient. Flexibility training is not something you should ever do when you're in a hurry for some appointment. It's something you should save for the end of the day. Let's say you're watching some TV show. Just don't go and stretch, or you're reading a book. One of my colleagues, Dr. Mark Chang, a strong first senior instructor, he has these beautiful side splits. The way he worked up to his side split is he would just sit and read a book in a straddle on the ground. And then at some point, whenever he felt like he could, he just tried to spread his legs a little wider. And that's it. You go back to reading his book.

• 1:38:44Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So you see, acquiring flexibility, it's an exercise in patience. So if you do not have the patience, or if you do not have the time, I suggest you just give up.

• 1:38:56Tim Ferriss?

  And the isometric, just to touch on that, is that a variant? Or perhaps the same thing as PNF?

• 1:39:04Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Pretty much.

• 1:39:06Tim Ferriss?

  Like sequential sort of contractions and release?

• 1:39:11Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So here's how this works in a nutshell. Imagine that you are, let's say that you're stretched out far. And it feels like I cannot go any farther. The muscle cannot get any tighter. Then you slowly contract that muscle. Slowly, it's important for safety. And you build up the tension. And you hold that tension for a while. And then you release that tension. The important thing is again, release. And when you have released, you'll see this contrast. So in a way, you kind of climb from the fire into the frying pan. It's still hot, but not as hot. And you can eke out just a little bit more range of motion. So these isometric contractions can be added to any type of stretching. And the idea, the very important thing about them is you need to make them steady.

• 1:39:55Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Do not make them jerk in any way. The only thing about them that's sudden is that release. Otherwise, steady, steady, steady.

• 1:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  And when you're, when you're holding the contraction, and this is hard to quantify, but as a guideline, what percentage of maximal contraction is that?

• 1:40:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  You know, there are various, there are various methods. Some of them attempt for you to bring the tension to a very, very high level. Gradually, still very gradually, but very to a high level to the point where the muscle literally shuts down, something called a Golgi tendon, organ just fires, boom, muscle just goes. Uh, that's an advanced technique, it takes, takes a lot of practice. Uh, you can go, or you can just go for a very steady tension of about thirty percent and just try to stay there for pretty much as long as you can handle it. Just the important thing is that the tension doesn't diminish, you know, whatever, when you feel like the tension is about to diminish, whatever level that you've chosen, then you just release, and then you pry a little farther, pry a little farther.

• 1:40:55Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, Mark Chang has one of the most impressive Turkish get-ups I've ever seen.

• 1:41:01Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Right.

• 1:41:02Tim Ferriss?

  Very impressive, so for people who are not familiar with that move, uh, you could, you could certainly do a search and see some examples, that is a very, very, very technical move.

• 1:41:11Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And the Turkish get-up, the beautiful thing about the Turkish get-up, that someone like yourself, who is a minimalist, would appreciate, is you get done so much or so little.

• 1:41:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It's, it's one of those amazing, all-around, one-stop-shop exercises. And some food for thought for people in general, when you think about training, earlier we talked about very straight-ups, what to do in the program, is, training is just like a budget, budget for a person who has a regular paycheck. So, you have to decide, am I going to buy a couch, or am I gonna go on vacation? Am I going to get in debt and do both? Am I gonna buy a really good couch and not go on vacation, or buy a cheap couch and take a short vacation? Is this my point? So, there are a lot of choices, a lot of trade-offs, and these trade-offs have to do with both your time, but also with the capacity of your endocrine system. Your endocrine system can only handle so much training.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:42:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And all these different types of training that they, they are added up, and plus you also the stresses of your life, and so on. So, whenever you're deciding on what it is that you do for your exercise, you have to identify really what's important, stripped and unessential, and make compromises and sacrifices somewhere.

• 1:42:24Tim Ferriss?

  True for so many areas. I wanted to come back to something you said about oversharing earlier. And the, I guess it was the flaws or the dangers of oversharing.

• 1:42:38Pavel Tsatsouline?

  The malfunction.

• 1:42:39Tim Ferriss?

  The malfunction, even better, of oversharing. So that's, that's kind of my, my business model, I guess. But the, I'd love to hear-

• 1:42:49Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Jim, it's my opinion. I'm not judging.

• 1:42:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. You can feel free to judge. I think, I think that oversharing is a problem also. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on what Americans could learn from, perhaps, the culture you grew up in, in the former Soviet Union, or vice versa. Because I personally, and this is not meant as a slight at all, I have so much respect for so many people in the former Soviet Union. Most of my observations have been in the sports arena, a sports arena, I mean, looking at people like Konstantin Konstantinov, or Dmitry Klokov, or just these, these amazing specimens. But I have a very tough time when

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  I meet some people from the former Soviet Union socially with getting through the cultural differences. And I'm usually, I don't usually find that hard, unless there's a lot of vodka involved. But-

• 1:43:43Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, that's, that's the social lubricant. You just need to, you just need to drink more vodka. That gets carried on.

• 1:43:49Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what could, what could Americans learn from, from the culture you grew up in, or vice versa?

• 1:43:56Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Okay. Well, first of all, I'm speaking about the Soviet culture. I'm not talking about the current culture, the post-Soviet culture. Because unfortunately, this is my observation, that oftentimes when different countries learn something from America, they choose to learn not the things that were learning.

• 1:44:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Agreed.

• 1:44:17Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I really would like to see for Russia to learn about free enterprise, about fair competition, about freedom.

• 1:44:29Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And unfortunately, the things they're learning are not. These are like reality to me. That's what they're learning. Mm hmm. And that's that's not unique to Russia. That's that's pretty universal around the world for some reason. Instead of getting the best from America, people are just sort of getting the Las Vegas version of America. So. And what people can learn, what Americans can learn, is they can learn to limit their choices. You mentioned earlier the paradox of choice. The is it Barry Schwartz's book, right? That's right. It's a very good book. I enjoyed the book very much, and I think that is I think that is very true. When there are so many choices to exercise, these choices are difficult.

• 1:45:13Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It takes a lot of processing power. There is a great moment in a film Moscow in the Hudson, an old film with Robert Williams, where he walks into an American grocery store and he sees coffee everywhere. He says, coffee, coffee, coffee. He just passes up. So what is very difficult in this country is exercising the choice because options are just so many. And choices are difficult. And in fact, you will find out that a number of Eastern Europeans who have failed to assimilate, who failed to make the life in America are the ones who just have a hard time making choices. They're used to for a lot of choices being made for them.

• 1:45:56Pavel Tsatsouline?

  And there is obvious downside to that in terms of freedom. There is obviously an upside of it because there's there are fewer distractions. So you personally, not you, Tim, but the listeners, you need to figure out how to limit your choices and make these choices and stick to them. The Konstantinov and the Klocke and these other Russian athletes you mentioned, these guys do not train with three hundred sixty degree butt squeezing scat curl bench that you see in a typical gym. These guys have the basics and they just hammer, just they're absolutely hammering the basics. Um, the, I'm a big admirer of the free enterprise system.

• 1:46:37Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Unfortunately, as much as that's worked in so many fields and industries, it's completely failed in the exercise industry, fitness industry, because it's constantly chasing its tell tale with the novelty, the new, the best, the whatever. And it's a fad that just goes away again. But a simple fact is, certain things just do not change. What I think also, I think Americans could really learn is they could learn from themselves. They could learn from the past. I have a great idealized image of America that I did when I was growing up. And that came from, my favorite film is The Magnificent Seven.

• 1:47:21Pavel Tsatsouline?

  It's interesting that they showed that film when my dad was in the service and it was came out first. And then I saw it many years later, they showed it again. And I was just very impressed with this ethos that you could see there. These very strong, self-reliant people who don't waste words, who do not get stuck in a part of hierarchy, who sort of ride into the sunset. I think it's just very powerful. I think if America would just a little bit more reconnect with what makes it, makes it great, it wouldn't have to search elsewhere. Uh, we can talk about American exceptionalism, there is such a thing as American exceptionalism.

• 1:48:04Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Because no other country has that same sense of freedom, has the same opportunities, and that same spirit of everything is possible, no other place. So even people who go out and start criticizing America, that's usually it happens because of envy. That's really all it is. So maybe, let's just go back to the older times. Maybe some of them didn't even exist, the old west, whatever it is, where just people had the pride in being pioneers, the pride in just getting ahead. Or let's even look, Tim, let's even look in the fifties or sixties, like today.

• 1:48:47Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Where do the brightest young people, what do they end up doing? They end up designing apps, right? Well, in the 50s and 60s, they designed spaceships.

• 1:48:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:49:00Pavel Tsatsouline?

  So the dreams were just so much bigger and right now, oh, here's this hot new app. Oh, golly gee Martha. So let's just try to go back to what made this country great, to a grand vision and not just little petty little app stuff.

• 1:49:15Tim Ferriss?

  Who are some of the people for you, whether current day or hundreds of years ago or more, who exemplify the best of what America has to offer? If people listening were looking for role models to revisit or to try to emulate, who would you put on that list?

• 1:49:36Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I'll say the founding fathers, Ben Franklin, definitely.

• 1:49:42Pavel Tsatsouline?

  There are so many great people in American history that worth emulating. There's the great generation of the World War II. These were the quiet people who just went and got the job done and didn't whine and complain about the lack of opportunities and life is hard and we're having it so tough. There are many.

• 1:50:02Pavel Tsatsouline?

  I have, and just, you know, even people who are just even people who are younger. I have a good friend named Stoney. Stoney was a Marine, he fought in Vietnam and just Stoney is just such a great person who has such a positive outlook on life. He just is a true American. You will not hear him complain. He thinks that America is about great things and that's what, seriously, this is what disappoints me as a naturalized American, because I think America is so much bigger, so much better than it's, than it has been. So just look back into what was before.

• 1:50:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm of course born and raised here, but very much feel the same way. And it's been uplifting to me though to see that although the...

• 1:50:50Tim Ferriss?

  The kids building apps, some of which are very world-changing, I think, but many of which are not and are very trivial. If we look at apps as just the new software applications and mobile devices as the new computers, there are people changing the world, but there's also been a resurgence of of people aspiring to be like Elon Musk, for instance, who is building spaceships. And that's been really reassuring to me in some ways. But the Ben Franklin example, I think, is a great one. And for anyone who hasn't read the Walter Isaacson biography of Benjamin Franklin,

• 1:51:29Tim Ferriss?

  it's a fascinating, fascinating picture of a deep, very capable, but also hilarious figure. I wanted to, just in closing, a few more questions. But the first is, how do you personally limit your choices to avoid the coffee, coffee, coffee experience and the distraction? How do you, what are some ways in which you contain those choices in life?

• 1:52:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Tim, professionally, I use the same technique that you use for voting. I remember that you mentioned that you don't like following the current affairs before you vote. You just talk to a number of people whose opinion you respect and who believe the way you do. So I do the same thing in training, pretty much. So when I do, when I do research, most of my time is spent reading the classic Soviet texts and studies. And once in a while, I'll rise up my Periscope and I'll talk to several people I respect in the industry and ask, what's going on? What's new? And they will just brief me on that. Most of the time, frankly, nothing's going on.

• 1:52:45Pavel Tsatsouline?

  But, so this is an example of my technique. I am very ruthless about limiting my communications. I am very protective of my time to write. I'm very protective of my time to read and...

• 1:53:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  That's about it?

• 1:53:07Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's, I think this is a really important topic and I appreciate the answers and I also encourage everyone to think about how they can create their own choice minimal lifestyle so they can preserve their creativity and unique abilities for the

• 1:53:21Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Well, I think also we need to, we need to, we need to teach people around us, be it to understand that not to over communicate. It's again, it's an interesting modern phenomenon that it's play by play. Everything has to be play by play. It's like, you know, kids in a car, are we there yet? Are we there yet? No, we're driving, we're en route and no.

• 1:53:45Tim Ferriss?

  So, this has been really fun, Pavel. I really appreciate the time.

• 1:53:53Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you, Tim. My pleasure.

• 1:53:55Tim Ferriss?

  What are you up to, focused on currently? Where can people learn more about you? Where would you suggest people look to, to learn more about the things you work on?

• 1:54:05Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you, Tim. My company's called Strong First. Strongfirst.com is the website and we are about changing lives, making the world a stronger place through, through strength. So we teach various skills through courses, certifications and so on. So just please stop by at strongfirst.com and I also recommend you pick up a copy of my book, Kettlebell Simple and Sinister. And I can assure you that this book definitely fits with the spirit of this conversation. There's absolutely nothing fluff. No fluff there whatsoever.

• 1:54:39Tim Ferriss?

  And just, just to, to, to also add my, my own two cents related to my direct experience, Pavel's methods, your methods Pavel, and those that you've distilled from all of the, the minds and practitioners, the operators that you've researched and observed, really do work. So for, for those people who know me, I obviously conduct hundreds and thousands of various experiments. I mean, my, my house right now just looks like a laboratory slash pharmacy. There's so much crap strewn about related to all the various odd, you know, human guinea pig stuff that I'm doing. And I've really run the gamut and, and tested

• 1:55:23Tim Ferriss?

  So many things available out there and in a world that tends to complicate to profit, I think you really simplify to results and so I commend you for that and I've seen

• 1:55:33Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you Tim.

• 1:55:33Tim Ferriss?

  tremendous, tremendous transformations in my own life, thanks to a lot of your advice. So I really encourage people to check it out and this was, this was a blast. So hopefully sometime we can do a round two in person, but thank you so much for the time Pavel and until next time.

• 1:55:51Pavel Tsatsouline?

  Thank you Tim and power to you.

• 1:55:53Tim Ferriss?

  All right, same to you. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers and I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit and here's how it works and you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt, whatever, you go to 99designs.com, you describe

• 1:56:37Tim Ferriss?

  your project and then within a week or less, you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it. I have mentioned it before, including in The 4-Hour Workweek as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim and if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So check it out and until next time, thank you for listening.