Subject: Intro to Pavel’s new book

KETTLEBELL AXE

Russian coach Andrey Kozhourkin made a 50,000-foot observation on the two diametrically opposed philosophies of training.

 

The traditional one is pushing to the limit: “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

 

The alternative is to train to “avoid (or at least delay) the unfavorable internal conditions…that lead to failure” or reduced performance.

 

Let us use strength training as an example. Most bodybuilders and recreational athletes use the first approach. They train to failure.

 

In contrast, strength athletes such as weightlifters and powerlifters choose the second. Thousand-pound squatter and a leading authority on strength training Dr. Fred Hatfield famously proclaimed that one ought to “train to success.” The differences between the Western and Eastern European powerlifting methodologies notwithstanding, the strength elites in both parts of the world share the same conviction that failure is not an option.

 

In endurance training, the first philosophy represents the consensus and orthodoxy. Coaches expose athletes to lactic acid baths so they can tolerate more acid. This is what the inventor of Nautilus exercise machines, Arthur Jones, called “metabolic conditioning.”

 

Yuri Verkhoshansky went the other way. The great scientist best known in the West as the “father of plyometrics” explains his train of thought:

Endurance traditionally has been associated with the necessity to fight fatigue and with increasing the athlete’s organism’s tolerance to unfavorable changes in the internal environment. It was thought that endurance is developed only when athletes reached the desired degrees of fatigue… Such views linked endurance to a fatalistically inevitable decrease in work capacity…and lead to a passive attitude towards endurance development…to “tolerate” and to put up…rather than to actively search for training means that reduce fatigue…

 

[Yet] the goal is not taking the athlete to exhaustion to accustom him to metabolic acidosis…but just the opposite…

 

…another training principle was proposed to improve endurance: improving the capacity to avoid the factors which provoke fatigue instead of improving the capacity in tolerating it. This training principle was named “anti-glycolytic”: …a “minimization” of the glycolytic mechanism involvement in the energy supply...

Thus, anti-glycolytic training (AGT) was born in the heyday of the Soviet sports machine.

 

“Anti-glycolytic” means “against glycolysis.”

 

Glycolysis is the body’s sugar-burning, acid, acetone, ammonia, and free radical spewing energy system beloved by the “metconned.”

 

In contrast, the other two main energy systems—alactic and aerobic—are efficient and clean burning. Plus, the aerobic system can tap fat for fuel.

 

Originally, Verkhoshansky intended anti-glycolytic training to be a sport-specific endurance training method for elite athletes. The scientist applied AGT directly to competition events, albeit done in more challenging conditions—faster, heavier, steeper. Through a brilliant application of biochemistry, the athletes were able race faster while producing less soul- and performance-crushing lactic acid.

 

The scientist also started prescribing AGT to power exercises like jump squats with a barbell or a kettlebell. Then a colleague of his, Prof. Victor Selouyanov, who would become an AGT mastermind, went all in, expanding the method into general physical preparation.

 

This subtype of anti-glycolytic training—power exercises targeting type IIX fast fibers—is what we call AXE: Aerobic Exercise for IIX fibers.

 

(At StrongFirst, this method used to go by the name “A+A,” a snappy acronym for “alactic plus aerobic” by Al Ciampa, SFG. Then we realized that “A+A” should be used as an umbrella term that encompasses other types of anti-glycolytic training.)

 

Unexpected collateral benefits—the “what-the-hell effects”—of AXE have made it a perfect general training method for any athlete. For example, Selouyanov discovered that in addition to doing its intended job of making the fast twitch fibers more enduring by making them more aerobic, AXE made these fibers bigger, stronger, and faster.

 

One of Verkhoshansky's goals for his method was to shift the metabolism from carb to fat burning. Traditionally impossible with high power exercise, through a biochemistry loophole AXE makes this dream come true.

 

Thanks to the efforts of these scientists and their associates, anti-glycolytic training born in the 1980s in a country that no longer exists delivered performance breakthroughs to XXI century Eastern European national teams in an extremely diverse array of sports: judo, swimming, cross country skiing, rowing, bicycle racing, full contact karate…

 

StrongFirst is proud to bring this extraordinary training system to you.

 

May it make you live up to these words from The Call of the Wild:

Your muscles are surcharged with vitality, and they snap into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streams through you in splendid flood, glad and rampant…

KETTLEBELL AXE
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