"Strength and Ease for Body and Soul."

William Wittmann, M.Ed., LMP
Life Coaching and CranioSacral Therapies

Why Is Functional Strength Better than Bodybuilding

My current exploration has just started. I am working with Pavel Tsatsouline’s strength training as laid out in his book: Power to the People. Pavel draws his information from his work in training elite troops in the Russian army and from a century of research in functional strength on both sides of the iron curtain.

Pavel raises the question: What are you lifting weights for? Do you want functional strength or to look good in a tank top three sizes too small? You can have both with Pavel’s program, but you won’t have the look of a body builder.

Functional strength is strength you can use in daily life, not just being able to work a muscle on a machine in the club to pump up. When we talk about aging well, functional strength is what we are aiming at. Being able to hoist children in our eighties. Being able to pull a 25# bag of birdseed out of the trunk of the car. Turn over a garden bed in the spring, or turn over a mattress. I want functional strength.

To achieve functional strength you need to carefully choose the form of strength training you do. (Note: This is a huge topic that whole books are written on – I will write a paragraph or two.) The three biggest pieces of this puzzle that I have put together are:

• Do weight lifting exercises that use multiple joints, use free weights not machines, dumbbells being the freest of the free weights. The lifts Pavel favors are the dead lift and the side press, a one-arm press. These two specifically have huge transfer benefits to the kind of lifting we do in real life. They will train you how to lift safely and with great strength. They may be all the lifts you ever need to do. That’s hot. By the way they will strengthen the abdominal muscles as well, but if you want more abdominal strength, a good idea, get Pavel’s book: Bullet Proof Abs. (See below.)

• Use low reps (3-5). Choose a weight you can lift 3-5 times with one rep left over. This means you get to lift really heavy weights, which is the thing that creates strength. Never lifting to failure. Always be 100% sure you can do the rep. Low reps for two sets builds tremendous strength without bulk. Pavel does have routines for building some bulk if you want, while still using low reps and not going to failure. Get the book below.

• Choose something that is safe and sustainable for years. Ironically, lifting heavy weights is safer than any other way to lift; that is, done the way Pavel lays out in the book. I have found this to be true as I explore the system. If it’s not safe you’ll be injured, and then you won’t be sustaining, will you?

Sustainability

As to sustainability Pavel’s works. You get to rest between sets for 3-5 minutes. So you can lift weights and not be wiped out all day. And you can lift weights for years without burning out. His chapter: Cycling: the Russian Breakthrough to Continuous Improvement looks good. It works for people doing serious training year in and year out, and I feel that it will work for you and me, too. The idea is that you start with a weight that you can lift ten times easily, and then you lift it only five times. Each workout you increase the weight by five pounds. Eventually, you will be at the weight that used to be the maximum weight you could lift in good form five times. You will breeze through your old limit and move to a new one. When you can no longer lift the weight with good form five times, you take a break and go all the way back to light weight again, but a higher weight than before because of your improvement. There are wonderful variations on this theme. Read the book to really appreciate the sophistication of this process.

As you can see, you spend most of your time well below your maximums so your body doesn’t burn out or get injured. In my case it means also that I don’t dread the workout because they are so arduous. In fact I look forward to them – I feel accomplished when I complete them. All this and you are constantly increasing your strength. Is that cool or what?

As before with the Body for Life Challenge, I will let you know what I find as this plays out in the laboratory of my life.

Here are the books, did I mention, Pavel has a great sense of humor, well at any rate, I laugh out loud throughout his books:

Power to the People! : Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American I have found some of this material magical.

Bullet-Proof Abs : 2nd Edition of Beyond Crunches Again great stuff that works.

You may find these and more of Pavel’s books at -

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