Power to the People: a Strength Manifesto
Generally speaking, the best over-all exercises you can do today replicate the type of manual labor our ancestors engaged in a century ago, or less. Even the little abdominal wheel (as seen on TV!) works the same muscles of a chambermaid scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees (in Edouard Muybridge’s series of photos in the 19th century, there is a figure study of a contemporary housewife with a well-defined six-pack–which you can be sure she didn’t get at the local Y!)
Perhaps the single most common lift to just about everybody is the deadlift. Whether it’s a loaded barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell or a box of stuff in your basement, it consists of squatting down to get a hold of a dead weight and standing up with it without herniating your discs or your “inguinals”.
At the turn of the 20th century, it was an extremely popular thing to do at the local gym–though they preferred calling it the “health lift” (not so much of a stigma there). This was “the” lift to do: unlike the other power lifts, there was never a need for a spotter or special equipment, like the squat cage, rack, or bench; either you could lift it or you couldn’t, and that was that.
There was a “floor press” in those days: lie down on the floor, roll a loaded barbell over your chest, do x-amount of presses, and wriggle out from under it(really, the only person I could possibly see benefiting from floor or bench presses would be a do-it-yourself auto mechanic, who might need the strength to push an axle off his chest, after the thing had rolled off its jacks.) Doing squats required that you upend the weighted bar and hoist it onto your shoulders and have at it. All this seemed to be too much work.
If you wanted to advance beyond the deadlift, you could go on to the Olympic lifts–the snatch, the clean and press, or the clean and jerk. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The deadlift–and its variations–lies at the foundation of Pavel Tsatsouline’s groundbreaking work: “Power to the People–Russian Strength Secrets for Every American”. And whether or not you ever intend to do a deadlift, this book is a must-read for anybody who ever lifted a weight.
Putting it simply, the core secret of strength outlined in this book, which forms the basis of every one of Pavel’s books that follow, is namely, this: the formation of strength at its very source is the central nervous system that our muscles are plugged into. It is this that we are training whenever we lift a weight–firing up the neural synapses–and lies at the heart of real strength. Muscular development is merely a by-product of that strength: muscle tone is defined as tension in a relaxed muscle– the kind of tension that comes from neurological activity, and not energy exhaustion. This is the reason why, among other things: 1) a 132-pound Bulgarian lifter could snatch more weight than 350-pound “wonder of nature” Paul Anderson; and, 2) why a 120-pound housewife can lift a car off her children, if necessary. The sources of real strength, without the bulk is to lift heavy with low reps, and never to failure.
This book has revolutionized the way I look at strength and muscular development.
Your time is too valuable to waste on excessive reps and sets with teeny-weeny weights, on machines that unnaturally isolate your muscle groups from one another. This is the book to buy, read, and re-read. Don’t lend it out to anybody! Tell ‘em to get their own: from www.dragondoor.com
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