This is my notes and thoughts on the book Simple and Sinister by Pavel Tsatsoluline. It's a fitness book about using kettlebells to get fit. The core idea is to simplify and to do as little as possible to get the biggest gain. It's an interesting idea coming from a place where I tried to do a lot. He isn't trying to say that everything should be simple and this definitely isn't a get fit quick scheme.
The point is that many people overwhelm themselves with too much and there are simple ways of getting strong. He also highlights that his method with kettlebells is for people who want to have time left in the day and not feel burned out from just exercise.
I really liked the focus on treating the kettlebell as a form of practice and not a work out. I'm still struggling to make that switch but the idea is neat. It's one that tracks with how I treat programming. It isn't something I do for fun but to practice and get good at the thing. I want to get good at the kettlebells and I want the control he describes.
The books is short at 250 pages and each chapter starts with a quote. I enjoyed reading the quotes and I think it's a neat way of tying in things from different places to major thoughts in the book. I also liked how he highlighted core ideas in the text with special quote areas. This isn't new but it is one of the few times where it really helped.
The book also really leans into being from the Soviet world and there constant references to soviet scientists and the toughness of the Russians. I'm not how much of it is real and how much is played up for the audience. He also drops the word sissy quite a bit but I don't get the vibe that the man has some sort of toxic masculinity. It really does feel like he's using it to mean a specific archetype of person. Not sure about it thought. He mentions how blue collar america treats soft hands as being a sign of weakness whereas Russians pride themselves on it as ripping callouses is a stupid way to miss training.
I also loved the Do or Die comparison to the Russian version that is Die but Do.
The Russian version demands that you do it even if it kills you. The American version let's you get out of doing something if you die. That was an entertaining read.
Reading the book gave me a clearer idea of the program, much more than the reddit post so this was a great investment. I also did my first proper session now and I can relate much more to parts of the book now. I think after a few weeks, it would be good to go back and skim through the book as I think there is stuff I can only pick up after having some time with kettlebell.
Set aside 20 to 30 minutes and practice—as you would rehearse playing a musical instrument, fully absorbed in the task and committed to getting better rather than doing time and marking off a certain number of reps.
Evaluate your performance as one would in gymnastics, figure skating, or platform diving—on skill and style alone.
A single get-up rep on one side lasts about 30 seconds.
You are to do nothing else during this practice—only lift the kettlebell and move for active recovery. There is no chatting, looking at members of the opposite sex, watching TV, fooling around with your phone (absolutely no phone), taking a drink of water, or going to the bathroom: just training. Your session is barely half an hour long; stay focused.
Start each S&S practice with three circuits of five reps of each exercise.
Arm-wrestling is a blue collar sport. Competitors would not be caught dead moisturizing, exfoliating, and practicing other metrosexual nonsense.
That mind game would not have worked on a girevik. The manliest men of the kettlebell begrudgingly take care of their skin because bleeding callusses do not build character, they just they waste valuable training time.
Moisturize your mitts before going to bed, hopefully with something manly like Cornhuskers Lotion.
Do not let me catch you wearing those sissy gym gloves! Thin cotton gardening gloves with the fingers cut off are acceptable.
There is nothing like a big ball of iron overhead to teach you about physics. You will instinctively know you had better place your foot or hand just so—or else.
Science and experience teach us that prolonged isometric contractions build muscle.
If you let the wrist bend back, you are telling the world you have never been in a street fight, you big sissy.
“Breathing behind the shield” enables high trunk stability, typically associated with breath holding, while keeping the oxygen flowing.
Gaston Glock, an engineer with no firearms experience, decided to try his luck. As the story goes, a couple of colonels sniggered that “a man who made curtain rods for a living” did not stand a chance. Herr Glock got mad and went to work. They say he test-fired his prototypes with his left hand. That way, if a gun blew up he could still work on blueprints with his right.
This amateur proved the experts wrong. Unburdened by an insider’s knowledge of what was possible and impossible, Glock designed a simple and sinister tool that had a lot fewer parts than its competitors.
Like its Second Amendment counterpart, the PM was designed by an outsider.
All of your attention is on technique and power, and zero brain cells need to be involved in analyzing the workout and planning how to change it. What an opportunity to become an ultimate technician!
Train almost daily, taking an occasional day off when your body or your schedule insists.
Do all your prescribed daily swings and then your get-ups.
Always do 100 swings: 10 sets of 10 reps.
Even if you are full of energy every day, do two-arm swings at least once out of every three sessions.
So, on one-arm swing days, do 10L—rest—10R—rest x 5. On two-arm swing days, it is 10T x 10.
To reiterate: Do NOT do 10 reps left and 10 right back to back; set the kettlebell down and recover between the sides.
Replace “S” with “S+” 20 reps at a time—one set of 10 with the left and one with the right. On two-arm swing days also upgrade two sets of 10 to “S+.”
Pavel Macek warns: “Many folks struggling with grip add extra grip training—only to get worse. Grip is neurologically very demanding; it needs rest, it needs lighter sessions, and the two-arm swings facilitate this. Less is, in this case, often more.”
Once or twice a month, take on any physical challenge that will test your spirit without breaking your body.
Note: I am not talking about meeting the Simple timed target—100 swings in five minutes plus 10 get-ups in 10…yet. I am referring to lifting the Simple weights for the above sets and reps in a time determined by the talk test. Let us refer to this milestone as Timeless Simple. In the same vein, when you can do it with Sinister weights, you will have reached Timeless Sinister.
When you own Timeless Simple, advance to “Go,” collect $200, and proceed to Part III, Sinister, for further instructions.
Muscles are given to a man not for admiration but for work.
Justa recalls, “After a couple of hours of this, I was a wreck, physically and mentally, and I kept seeing a picture in my mind of the guy who usually did this job. He was skinny as a rail and he never even worked up a sweat when he was doing this job…”
but to the point where I could do the movement over and over again for three to five hours if called upon.
A few decades ago, Soviet scientists brought a bunch of sturdy farm boys to the city with the intention of turning them into weightlifting champions. To the authorities’ big disappointment, the collective farmers did not do any better than the city-slickers. Not worse, certainly, just not better.
All weakness is a weakness of will.
Toby Keith: “I’m not as good as I once was, but I am as good once as I ever was.”
That was it. The injured sailor was training in a restrained manner, saving himself for when it mattered—in combat. Training in a “punch the clock” manner, but always mentally ready to “flip the crazy switch” is the choice of a professional warrior.
Carl Jung observed, as did many before and after him, “Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
Learn or remind yourself how to stay comfortable while being miserable.
The swing is a perfect exercise for a Monty Python–type with a strong spirit but a broken body. Bud Jeffries writes: The swing allowed me to work around a significant knee injury and a significant shoulder and biceps injury I got from grappling. The swing will allow most people to work around a wide range of injuries or keep going even with “high miles” because it doesn’t force you to move into extreme positions. There
Take on any physical challenge that will test your spirit without breaking your body.
You might be wondering, why wait until you own the Simple kettlebell? Why not swing hard against the clock right off the bat? Because that would be stupid and irresponsible.
To use a boxing analogy, a novice has no business doing hard rounds on a heavy bag like a pro.
Experiments on weightlifters revealed that 100 reps per exercise class per training session was the maximal total before this bias toward endurance became severe.
Another vital reason to keep the rep count low, per set and per training session, is to leave enough energy for other things—practicing sport skills, being ready to fulfill your duty on the battlefield or just enjoying your day and not dragging your tail through it. Bulgarian elite gymnastics coach Ivan Ivanov believes that the purpose of a training session is to “store energy” in the body rather than exhaust it. That is a powerful mindset. In Ivanov’s experience, 100 repetitions per explosive movement hit the spot—and these must be done daily.
Think of the S&S regimen not as a workout but as a recharge.
In contrast, “recharge” is the name Russians gave to an invigorating morning exercise session. Out with a workout, in with a recharge!
The bottleneck is not the program, but the practitioner’s ability to stay on task and not get distracted by the pop fitness noise.
Most people who live by the clock are miserable sorts of critters. But living by the sun, that is something different.
Before World War II, Oxford professor John Grayson taught mountaineers to “climb no faster than you can talk.” This rule of thumb would eventually come to be known as the talk test.
A failed talk test indicates that the creatine phosphate tanks have not been adequately refilled and the next set will rely heavily on glycolysis.
For American readers, a proven passage to recite for the talk test is the Pledge of Allegiance: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Pavel Macek, who has met the Sinister swing golden standard—10x10 with 48kg within five minutes—at a bodyweight less than 150 pounds,
In the name of “progressive overload,” most trainees ambitiously add weight and reps or reduce their rest periods. This leads to quick gains, followed by the mother of all plateaus or, worse, injuries and overtraining. In response, coaches developed deloading tactics: light days and weeks. These tactics work—but they are anything but simple or foolproof.
On the other hand, if you do not overload, you do not have to deload. That is the beauty of step loading. Select a comfortably hard training load (weight, sets, reps, rest periods) and stay with it until it feels almost easy—you own it. Only then move up.
Elite gymnastics coach and author of excellent book Building the Gymnastic Body, Christopher Sommer, calls this type of progression by a different name—“steady state”—yet it is the same good ole’ step loading:
Sinister Anna scoffs, “Spending months swinging 16kg for men...no bueno.”
Back in the Soviet Union, the classic kettlebell set for men was an ultra-minimalist 16, 24, 32kg and no one was asking for more choices.
Less choice, less mental RAM going out the door. The more you choose, the less you have left to push the workout… No choice. More work.
Simplify, simplify. —Henry David Thoreau One “simplify” would have sufficed. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, in response
“The bike is efficient—and fat people can ride it forever.”
Famous economist Milton Friedman was visiting a construction site in a country with Soviet-influenced economic policies. It was in the 1960s and Friedman was shocked to see only shovels and no mechanized equipment. He asked the government bureaucrat who was giving the tour about it. The latter smugly replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.”
The swing is a yang exercise; the get-up is a yin. It stands to reason the speed recommendation for swings is reversed for get-ups—go slow.
Doing a kata more slowly, without tension, allows you to dwell on your weaknesses and correct them.
Giving 100% tends to trigger excessive muscle tension that acts like a brake.
For instance, a sprinter is instructed to run 30 meters loosely, without tension, but with an 85-90% effort. He is not told his time. Then the task is repeated, this time with the instruction to run all out, at maximal speed. Afterward, the athlete is told his results and, as a rule, the first number is better.
“turning laziness into technical mastery.”
Research shows that the stronger the muscle, the less it has to contract to produce a given amount of force. This may sound obvious, but it is profound. Fifty percent of very strong is strong. Fifty percent of weak is irrelevant.
It does not matter if you can do 1,000 punches if none of them can knock out your little sister.
As bluntly put by Steve Baccari, “Don’t worry about strength endurance. You have no strength to endure.”
It is equally important that you not only maintain high speed, but finish each rep with a powerful glute cramp and abdominal brace. In addition to building power for knockout strikes and winning deadlifts, this exaggerated glute contraction protects the hip joints and spine. If you can no longer pinch your cheeks, the gig is up. Ditto for your abbies: Failing to tense them at the top of the swing not only robs your power, but also endangers your spine.
The inhales must be so sharp that your nostrils stick together, like you had a nose job.
The idea is to do a set, take a number of breaths based on some ratio to the number reps you just did, then do the next set. As you will rapidly discover, the way to survive is to slow your breath down as much as possible, to get maximum air, and to increase your rest period between each set. If you panic and breathe quickly, your rest period is decreased
On the other hand, the only timing involved is your breath—and the idea is to “cheat” as much as possible by drawing out the breaths and increasing the rest periods.
Inhale through your nose, always with the talk test, and if possible, when timed.
Kettlebell high-rep ballistics are the closest you can get to fighting without throwing a punch.
Russians have an expression, “Die but do.” They amuse themselves comparing it with the American “Do or die.” Where a Yankee gets off the hook from fulfilling his orders if he croaks, a Russkie may not use death as an excuse.
Joking aside, there comes a time when you take a step away from your “punch the clock” training and push the pedal to the metal.
It is vital that you do not fall for the “high intensity interval training” propaganda and do not start treating these smokers as the main event rather than the occasional side dish they are intended to be.
Pavel Macek recalls, “32 felt like 24 when my main training weight was 40—I could do the [five-minute Simple] test any time with 32.”
Even on the days when you hold nothing back, never compromise quality to beat the clock. You may not, under any circumstances:
When you have parked the bell, suppress the urge to pant. Breathe deep, purging the air from the bottom of your lungs and then filling them fully, from bottom to top.
It could not get much worse, he decided, which showed how much he knew.
learning is rooted in repetition,”
meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once…”
The discovery of iron brought grief to men.
Take a detour into barbell strength. Build a respectable deadlift, military press, and squat—Zercher or front. Once you can deadlift 500 pounds, you will toy with the 106-pound Beast.