The Beginning (blah, blah)

My familiarity with kettlebells goes back to my youth when I was growing up in the former USSR. Giryas were everywhere. They were in every sports class at schools and almost very hous had one too, usually from the younger years of the owner. The most common way to demonstrate – or compare – strength with kettlebells was to press them. Friend ofmine had two of them, 24 and 32 kg, and when I was about seventeen I bought 16 kg one for myself. Immediately I was introduced to an exercise I never new before (and did not do for couple of decades after), farmer’s walk. It was unintentional: I just had to carry the bloody thing from the shop to the tram stop, then from another stop to my home. It eventualy followed the fate of its many relatives: collected dust most of the time and was only pressed during drunken parties in order to impress girlfriends.

At the peak of Perestroika at age of twenty seven I left then still Soviet Union and settled for the next thirteen years in South Africa. As many of my contemporaries, I was training with weights since youth, on on-and-off basis. I continued this pattern in Johannesburg, without any meaningless progress. Well, it brought some benefits, of course. While I was training I was fit and reasonably strong. However, I could not show any serious achievements for my training, such as heavy squat or big muscles.

In the early 2000s I was browsing the Amazon for books on stretching and came across the name Pavel Tsatsouline. I bought his Beyond Stretching and, by chance, just because the name of the book was intriguing, Power to the People. That book changed my views on training. There was a link to Dragondoor with its forum which I quickly joined. After I moved to Australia in 2004 I bought Pavel’s another book, Russian Kettlebell Challenge. Purchase of two kettlebells followed, 16 and 24 kg, and I started training the RKC way. Despite growing up with kettlebells around me, most exercises I discovered for the first time. I started doing snatches, swings, cleans and presses and turkish getups.

Couple of years ago I started getting interested in Girevoy Sport. No other sport has its primary goal as strength endurance to the degree GS has. And to my surprise, this aspect of training is mostly overlooked in books on training methodology. I have books by Tomas Kurz and Mel Siff, in both of them this topic occupies not more than couple of pages.

At some stage, about a year ago, my interest in kettlebells cooled down and I started training with the barbell, mostly in squat. The training was progressing well until I maxed out on one of the weekends and completely fucked up my lower back. I could not properly move for about a month. My back eventually recovered, but the incident made me realize that this activity is potentially dangerous. This was confirmed by the fact that most elite weightlifters and powerlifters regularly suffer from back pain, the impression I got from reading about this sport. My enthusiasm for heavy squats never returned to pre-injury level.

Few months ago my interest to GS was re-sparked by furious discussions on the Dragondoor and Irongarm forums. AKC was fighting with RKC over whose dick is longer, and some observations dropped by the AKC supporters sounded very interesting. I decided to give GS another go.

The problem was, I didn’t know where to start. I found a DVD devoted to GS by Dmitri Sataev from the http://www.usgsf.com/, with very good explanations on the technique. Sataev is former protegee of Valery Fedorenko, the head of the AKC and formed World Champion. However, there were no training programs on the DVD. As I speak Russian and GS is primarily a Russian sport, I went to verious GS forums based in Russia. The reply on “how to start” was unanimous: get your technique right with a qualified coach. But where do you get a GS coach in Australia? I contacted AKC, but they did not have GS coaches in this country. Mike Stefano’s site offered online training, but my email was unanswered. Eventually I contacted Sataev again and it turned out that he offers online training. I started training under his guidance at the beginning of May 2008.

So that’s it. I am just under two months of training and so far there has been some, though modest, progress. Though I am starting this blog a little late, I intend to post my progress here regularly, as well as other info that may be interesting to GS enthusiasts.