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Influencer StackWhat the influencers actually use.

Pavel Tsatsouline

Strength coach · StrongFirst

Former Soviet special forces physical training instructor, born in Belarus, who carried Russian kettlebell and Spetsnaz methods into the United States and then to a wider public. He is the CEO of StrongFirst, the school of strength he founded, and has worked as a subject matter expert to the US Marine Corps, the Secret Service and the Navy SEALs. His books include Kettlebell Simple & Sinister, Power to the People! and The Quick and the Dead. The method is deliberately narrow: a few lifts, low reps, long rests, no training to failure.

Entries
25
Does
0
Recommends
24
Discusses
1

The gear and products they use

All 7 products in this stack

Protocols

16 entries

Repeatable, mostly free routines with a defined trigger and dose.

  • Resistance trainingRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    His line on gym time is blunt: you have one goal there, get strong, and everything else is distraction. He tells readers to drop what a colleague calls random acts of variety, skip corrective work nobody prescribed, and spend the hour on a few time-tested lifts.

    Source: StrongFirst: No Distractions, The Occam's Razor Training Plan
    Backed by 41 of 54 stacks
  • Zone 2 cardioRecommendsFREE, no cost

    He leans on the talk test, taken from a pre-war Oxford professor who told mountaineers to climb no faster than they could talk. Running just under the lactic threshold, where short sentences are still possible, is in his account the most useful pace for building endurance.

    Source: StrongFirst: Lift No Faster Than You Can Talk, an excerpt from S&S 2.0
    Backed by 12 of 54 stacks
  • BreathworkRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Two breathing practices turn up in his answers. The biomechanical breathing match pairs a sharp nasal inhale on the way down of a swing with a forceful exhale on the way up, and is how they strengthen the breathing muscles, he says. A breathing ladder, from a colleague, counts rest between sets in breaths, which he says disciplines you to slow down and stop panicking.

    Source: The Tim Ferriss Show: Pavel Tsatsouline transcript
    Backed by 6 of 54 stacks
  • RunningRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    Running in his version gets interrupted. Shadow box, then stop every so many phone poles for a pistol squat or a couple of one-arm push-ups, no rest and only a rep or two. He describes this roadwork as adding the high-force component missing from steady cardio, and says plainly that it does not replace dedicated strength training.

    Source: StrongFirst: StrongFirst Roadwork
    Backed by 5 of 54 stacks
  • Pull-upsRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    For lats that hold up in a fight he points at the pull-up, programmed as five descending sets a day with a rest day every sixth. He wants the rep finished with the chest hollow and the neck touching the bar, then lowered under control to fully straight arms.

    Source: StrongFirst: The Fighter Pullup Program Revisited
    Backed by 3 of 54 stacks
  • DeadliftRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    His father Vladimir pulled another American record at 75, and the program he coaches him on is published in full: deadlifts twice a week, one light and one heavy, plus parallel grip pull-ups, hanging leg raises, fist push-ups and goblet squats. The cycle is Marty Gallagher inspired, worked back six to twelve weeks from a target on the last heavy day.

    Source: StrongFirst: Be a Man Among Men, My Father's Deadlift Program
    Backed by 2 of 54 stacks
  • Minimalist trainingRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Six weeks, four exercises, is the dare he sets: kettlebell swings, Zercher squats, handstand push-ups and weighted pull-ups, nothing else. He borrows the not-to-do list from Tim Ferriss and fills it with gear elite strength athletes never touch, exercises with vague goals, and anything done by people wearing gym gloves.

    Source: StrongFirst: No Distractions, The Occam's Razor Training Plan
    Backed by 2 of 54 stacks
  • Anti-glycolytic trainingRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Instead of teaching people to tolerate more acid, he wants them producing less. Anti-glycolytic work in his description runs on creatine phosphate and an aerobic system clean enough to refill it, with the talk test as the check: if short sentences are not possible before the next set, lactic acid is building faster than the body clears it.

    Source: StrongFirst: Lift No Faster Than You Can Talk, an excerpt from S&S 2.0
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Grease the grooveRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Get strong and symmetrical first, then grease the groove with all sorts of jumps, is the order he sets. He leans on Soviet coaches for the pattern: many short practices spread through the day with long enough gaps to recover, sub-maximal rather than all-out, and quotes a high jump coach whose athletes jumped stairs, fences and into bed.

    Source: StrongFirst: The Case for Grease-the-Groove Jump Training
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Kettlebell swingRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    Swings are half of Simple & Sinister, and he prescribes them near daily rather than saving them for hard days. He points to a StrongFirst team leader who identified 100 swings three times a week as the dose that gives the most for the least, and notes Tim Ferriss got what he wanted from 150 to 300 a week.

    Source: StrongFirst: A Kettlebell Simple & Sinister Excerpt
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Long rest between setsRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Rushing from set to set is, in his telling, why plenty of people never get strong. Following Matveev he sorts rest into ordinary, stress and stimulation intervals, and argues most sets deserve an ordinary rest, where you actually feel recovered, or a stimulation one far longer than instinct suggests. Density work he compares to fast food.

    Source: StrongFirst: The Patience of Strength, the Russian Science of Rest Intervals
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Progressive muscle relaxationRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Asked how to switch off, he offers Jacobson's progressive relaxation, tensing and releasing muscles in a set order until the tension becomes obvious, alongside the Soviet school habit of shaking the limbs loose between efforts. Facial tension is the one he tells people to watch through the day, because it costs a lot of effort.

    Source: The Tim Ferriss Show: Pavel Tsatsouline transcript
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Stopping short of failureRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Writing up Alexander Faleev's routine, he puts it flatly: never train to failure, never attempt a rep you are not certain of, and ideally leave one in the bank. Faleev's own line is to save your strength for the next set. Maxing in the gym gets rejected on the same grounds, since it tests strength without building any.

    Source: tim.blog: Pavel, 80/20 Powerlifting and How to Add 110+ Pounds to Your Lifts
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • The 5x5 methodRecommendsFREE, no cost

    He credits 5x5 to Reg Park and calls it one of the most reliable ways to build strength in existence. His version starts with a weight good for at least two strong sets of five, adds reps only when you are sure of them, and trains a lift three times in two weeks.

    Source: StrongFirst: StrongFirst and the 5x5 Method
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • Turkish get-upRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

    The get-up is the second of the two Simple & Sinister lifts. He teaches it alongside the swing through what he describes as an accelerated learning sequence refined over years of teaching, with the goblet squat and several stretches brought in to open the hips.

    Source: StrongFirst: A Kettlebell Simple & Sinister Excerpt
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks
  • High-intensity interval trainingDiscussesFREE, no cost

    Conditioning by burn gets pushed back on: hard-living types wreck themselves in the glycolytic pathway, he writes, and there are other ways. His alternative is a kettlebell circuit of clean, press and squat, one side then the other, at a pace holdable for twenty or thirty minutes, credited to a StrongFirst team leader.

    Source: StrongFirst: Strength Aerobics, A Powerful Alternative to HIIT
    Backed by 6 of 54 stacks

Habits

2 entries

Daily practices held long enough to become default behavior.

  • Daily minimum workoutRecommendsFREE, no cost

    Three exercises every day is what he calls the program minimum: the one-arm swing, the get-up and the goblet squat. They are the highest yield of the lot and the ones with the steepest learning curve, in his account, and he guarantees a great return on the investment.

    Source: The Tim Ferriss Show: Pavel Tsatsouline transcript
    Backed by 6 of 54 stacks
  • Training as practiceRecommendsFREE, no cost

    StrongFirst practices rather than works out, in his framing, and he ties it to flow: keep the load between the floor of boredom and the ceiling of anxiety, treat the session as a quest for technical mastery, lift competently and avoid failure. Skills with layers to peel, he argues, can hold attention productively for decades.

    Source: StrongFirst: The Will to Happiness
    Backed by 1 of 54 stacks

In their own words

Checked word for word against the linked source

Stack notes are paraphrased. Anything in quotation marks is a short excerpt copied from the transcript it links to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.