The Quick and the Dead Read online

  The Quick and the Dead

  Total Training for the Advanced Minimalist

  By Pavel Tsatsouline

  Published by StrongFirst, Inc.

  9190 Double Diamond Parkway

  Reno, NV 89521, USA

  StrongFirst.com

  Editor: Laree Draper • www.otpbooks.com

  Design: Rachel Darvas • [email protected]

  Photography: David Stocco • [email protected]

  Leopard cover photo: Stuart G Porter/Shutterstock.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tsatsouline, Pavel.

  The Quick and the Dead: Total Training for the Advanced Minimalist

  I. Strength training. 2. Fitness. 3. Physical education and training.

  © MMXIX Power by Pavel, Inc. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission by the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  DISCLAIMER

  The author and publisher of this book are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any injury that may occur through following the instructions contained in this material. The activities may be too strenuous or dangerous for some people. The readers should always consult a physician before engaging in them.

  To KT

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: The Tale of Two Leopards

  Part I: Fast First

  Earn Your Leopard Spots

  Fast First

  Acid, the Enemy of the Quick

  Adrenaline, the Hormone of Prey

  The Quick and the Dead

  Part II: The Ferocity of Life

  A Long and Winding Road

  The Three Energy Systems

  The Emergency System

  Intensity Is Not the Effort, but the Output

  Sweet Spot in Time

  Fast 1Os—an Explosive Equal of Heavy Fives

  10x10, Reloaded

  The Melody Is in the Rests

  A Rugby Lesson

  The Finishing Touches

  Part III: The Power Drills

  The Power Drills of Choice

  The Swing: Violent as a Hunt in the Savannah

  The Pushup: a Classic, Remastered

  The Snatch: Hail Tsar!

  Part IV: Happy Hunting!

  Circuit Training, Limited

  Where Is the Cardio?

  The Delta 20 Principle

  Built to Last

  The Schedule

  Q&D, the Summary: Swings and Pushups

  Q&D, the Summary: Snatches

  Each Chooses for Oneself

  Epilogue: Animal Supreme

  Acknowledgements

  References and Notes

  Prologue: The Tale of Two Leopards

  The antelope was grazing, oblivious of the superbly camouflaged cat stealthily closing in. The predator flowed like mercury, hugging the terrain.

  It was a busy day in the savannah, but only one pair of eyes was tracking the leopard. My friend George had put in his time in Africa fighting poachers and he knew how to see without being seen. Recently he had been entertaining himself timing big cats’ hunts.

  The blurry spot in the tall grass became a straw-colored streak. The antelope made a desperate run for its life, a run that was blissfully short. The panthera leaped. Her jaws, powerful enough to crush thick bones, closed on her prey’s neck.

  It was over in 16 seconds. The proud hunter stood tall, surveyed her surroundings the way a big boss would, and made a brief “fast and loose” victory dance. Then she picked up her dinner, which was bigger than herself, and climbed a tree with it.

  “It would be like you climbing a tree holding me in your teeth,” commented George, who has good 50 pounds on me. And that was no feat for a leopard that can climb with carcasses three times her bodyweight.

  Then George told me of another leopard hunt he had witnessed, very different from the first.

  The male cat did not have it easy. Age was taking its toll and one of his front paws was infected.

  A thorn was wedged in it, a common hazard to alpha predators in the wild.

  He also made his kill, but, as he was slower, he had to work harder and longer to bring the antelope down. Then he was unable to get to a tree fast enough to stash his cat food—and was attacked by a pack of opportunistic hyenas.

  The tom fought hard and well and the hyenas ran off with their tails between their legs. George stopped his timer at four minutes.

  Luckily, the hyenas did not return. Exhausted, the old tom lay panting on the ground. Can you even imagine a cat panting? It is below the dignity of a cat.

  Finally, the old leopard got his bad breath back and dragged his dinner to the safety of a tree.

  A few months later, George watched the same leopard retire to a cave to die. That is what they do.

  Part I: Fast First

  Earn Your Leopard Spots

  The second leopard hunt exemplifies the mentality of today’s “high intensity interval training.” Dramatic, inefficient, costly. I admire the old cat’s tough style, given his circumstances of age taking its toll—but his heroics are not something to emulate on a Wednesday night at the gym.

  In contrast, the Quick and the Dead regimen (Q&D) was inspired by the first cat. Not a single set exceeds the duration of her ferocious 16-second kill. Power undiluted by fatigue is not heroic; it is professional.

  The Q&D protocol was designed to maximize your performance at a lowest biological cost—and to leave you fresh and able to perform at a high level, physically and mentally, at any time.

  You will get powerful. Very powerful.

  While power is awesome for its own sake, training it in a particular manner also delivers a wide range of “what the hell effects.” Muscle hypertrophy. Fat loss. Endurance. Anti-fragility. Anti-aging.

  Plus, Q&D will enable you to make greater strength gains if you are also lifting.

  Q&D can be a minimalist’s stand-alone, total training method.

  Or make a quality addition to any athlete’s regimen.

  Q&D does not beat up the body and takes only 12–30 minutes per training session, two to three times per week.

  Q&D was designed to minimize detraining when circumstances force you to lay off or cut back. If you get a hare-brained idea to take an entire month off all training and then go back to your boxing class and pretend you never left, you will suffer less than expected.

  A US special operator I will call “Mark” is an accomplished boxer, wrestler, and powerlifter. His strength has enabled him to stay in the fight into his mid-40s. Then he added a Q&D swing and pushup plan to his training—back when it was called “StrongFirst Experimental Protocol 033.”

  I have completed the six-week 033C template. I did it as a warm-up for my powerlifts three days a week, always for 30 minutes. I noticed a speed increase in all my powerlifts and pain relief of all of my injuries.

  I also found an increase in endurance while doing combatives. And as my hips developed more explosive movement, my speed came up, creating increased striking power. The big game changer I noticed was my hip movement in grappling. I am able to maximize force through explosive hip movement, coincidentally making me less tired.

  I am more efficient with energy by driving my hips and getting “heavy” on my opponent. Combining that force with leverage has me launching big dudes like children. By getting my hips under and driving up versus using my arms and back during takedowns and throws has made me more efficient and explosive.

  Also, I am more cognizant of my breathing. I am using more
“breath behind the shield”[ 1] as I roll versus using the more traditional skip breathing. I am less hypoxic and have better clarity of my opponent’s body position and movements.

  I lost nine pounds and, based on my visual composition, I would say it was fat loss. I gave up sugar at the same time, so I would say it is a combination of factors. My arms have definitely gotten bigger.

  Overall, I found the 033C enjoyable and meditative. I was able to go into a flow state and felt I could go on forever. After not touching a kettlebell in a few years, I felt this was a great way to get things going again.

  I need to get a larger kettlebell!

  Q&D is every bit as applicable to the female of the species as it is to the male.

  Did you know that in a lion pride, it is the lionesses that do most of the hunting?

  I come from a culture with strong women. They fought alongside the men in World War II, making history as snipers and pilots. My grand aunt was a highly decorated vet. She was in her third year of med school when the Nazis invaded. Young Natasha joined up and spent the four years of the Great War on the front line as a nurse. When she returned home after the war and finished her education, she became a civilian aviation doctor. A majority of doctors in the Soviet Union were women, by the way.

  On a lighter side, a Russian wife asks her husband, “Do you love me?” He answers, “Not only do I love you; I also respect and slightly fear you.”

  Other than opening doors for them, at StrongFirst we do not treat women any differently than men. We do not disrespect them with any nonsense about “long, lean muscle” or “shaping the female problem areas.” So when Italian athlete Ilaria Scopece, SFG/SFB, approached Fabio Zonin for training advice while preparing for an important competition, the Master SFG gave her the same 033 plan that became Q&D.

  Ilaria weighs as much as a 48kg Beast kettlebell—only she is a lot more dangerous. Scopece is the number-one ranked professional light flyweight boxer in Europe.

  Starting with 15 reps in the 30-second timed test with a 20kg kettlebell in the one-arm hard style swing, in a few months Ilaria did 21 reps. That 40-percent increase would have been notable on its own, but the fighter did it with 24kg—a 20-percent weight increase.

  Ilaria Scopece, the number-one ranked professional light flyweight boxer in Europe and a StrongFirst certified instructor.

  Ilaria’s performance is identical to that of a 200-pound man doing 21 crisp and perfect one-arm swings with a 48kg Beast in 30 seconds.

  Where in the pre-test she lifted 300 pounds of iron in half a minute, in the post-test the lady put up over 500. For perspective, her performance is identical to that of a 200-pound man doing 21 crisp and perfect one-arm swings in 30 seconds with a Beast.

  But kettlebells do not strike back. Ilaria’s performance in the ring is far more important than her swing and pushup numbers. Her boxing coach put her through a test: 10 rounds, alternating between two experienced sparring partners, both 15-percent heavier than her.

  “While sparring with my partners, I realized I had even greater speed and explosiveness and I was able to maintain this for the whole match…I had gas to sell.”

  In her next fight, Ilaria knocked out her opponent from Eastern Europe 37 seconds into the first round.

  We have many great stories like these.

  But The Quick and the Dead is not for everyone.

  Q&D is not for beginners. When we tested various experimental plans, we discovered that while everyone improved on Q&D, to our great surprise, experienced athletes improved the most. Fighters, military special operators, professional baseball players, motocross riders, and guys who could press the Beast for reps made much more dramatic progress—in both absolute and relative terms—than ladies and gents who were still working their way up to the Simple standard of Kettlebell Simple & Sinister.

  While this should not make any sense, we concluded there were good reasons for this paradox.

  First, Q&D training demands a foundation of strength. Without a rock-solid midsection that comes from paying dues to heavy metal or high tension, there is no way of expressing one’s max power. As Dr. Fred Hatfield quipped decades ago, “You cannot shoot a cannon from a canoe.”

  Second, power is a learned skill. A low-level athlete seems to need the artificial resistance of muscle congestion to exert against. He or she is unable to just explode against a moderate weight. As a result, a relative beginner lacks the intensity needed to produce the desired metabolic events, finds the Q&D protocol ridiculously easy, and only nets a partial adaptation. S&S, which on the power-to-acid continuum lies somewhere between Q&D and HIIT, is the perfect program for this athlete.

  Finally, it is a matter of personality. While some individuals are “cats,” most are “dogs” or “persistence hunters.” Solitary cats are masters of brief and explosive bursts; persistence hunters wear their prey down. Dogs feel the burn somewhere in between.

  That said, even if you are not a “natural cat,” you have a lot to gain from training like one—at least as your secondary modality. We have seen high-level athletes get excellent results from adding Q&D to their endurance training.

  In addition to watching out for your health, Q&D will improve the quality of your life.

  “Metcons” ravage your system with acid, free radicals, and toxic ammonia. They deplete your muscles’ energy pool in a manner similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and leave your carcass sore, tired, and injury prone. They burn you out mentally, wreak havoc with your hormones, and make you feel like hell. Are you willing to pay such a high price for getting “in shape”?

  And if you are, say, a first responder, is it fair to the citizens you will be saving?

  Fast First

  You can be anything you want. A warrior. An athlete. A hard man or woman ready to handle whatever life throws at you. But you must be strong first.

  Once you are strong—even kind of strong—consider shifting your focus to power.

  P = F x v

  Power equals force multiplied by velocity. It demands a precise blend of strength and speed.

  Why should you train power?

  First, for its own sake. Being powerful is awesome.

  Second, for an impressive array of “what the hell effects” (WTHEs) that come with it.

  As demonstrated by science and experience, an advanced minimalist will substantially improve in all key fitness components by power-centric training. And a serious athlete will spike performance in any sport, while reducing the total amount of training.

  High-level Soviet athletes from different sports were subjected to a battery of tests of different qualities. As expected, most severely lagged in attributes outside their specialties: Weightlifters and gymnasts had no endurance and endurance athletes no strength. Sprinters were outliers who stood out with their all-around development; their strength was not far behind that of strength athletes, plus they had respectable endurance.

  Having compared what training foci on different attributes—speed, power, strength, and endurance—can do for other qualities, renowned biochemist Prof. Nikolay Yakovlev concluded that:

  The most multipurpose loads are speed and power. They trigger biochemical changes that are a foundation of not only speed but also of strength and endurance...Strength loads create biochemical preconditions for the development of not only strength but, to some degree, speed...Prolonged steady state loads develop only endurance for extended work.

  Yakovlev collected fascinating data comparing the effects of these different types of training on muscles. It revealed what pure power training can do for all-around fitness. Take a look at some of the good professor’s numbers.

  Myosin is a contractile protein, the “piston” part of the muscle cell that moves and produces force. The above numbers declare that quick lifts can build muscle just as well as “grinds.” And they do it with much lighter weights: Max power is expressed at a third to a half of maximal strength[ 2] and is typically trained with resistance just slightly heavi
er than that. Do not be surprised that such light weights stimulate fast fibers; the faster the movement, the less force it takes to recruit them.

  When it comes to hypertrophy, we cannot ignore testosterone. Although we know a lot less about the influence of different hormones on body composition than pop fitness publications would have us believe and even less about the effects of different types of exercise on the endocrine system, it is well established that increasing testosterone by hook or by crook helps build muscle. A number of studies have shown testosterone shooting up in the aftermath of power exercise, for instance over 15 percent after five sets of 10 light jump squats. Scientists generally agree that, “High power resistance exercise protocols…produce acute increases of testosterone…[that] may partially explain the muscle hypertrophy observed in athletes who routinely employ high power resistance exercise.”