Pavel Tsatsouline, ‘Vodka, Pickle Juice, Kettlebell Lifting and Other Russian Pastimes,’ Milo, Vol 6, no. 3 (1996).

I love origin stories. And fitness is full of them. Eugen Sandow and the first major bodybuilding show of 1901. When women first competed in weightlifting at the Olympics. The first man or woman to lift/press/pull insert world record number here etc. etc. We also have those critical originators and thinkers who helped to popularise training methods and paradigms. Think Mark Berry and 20 rep squats, Arthur Jones with High Intensity Training or Joe Weider helping to popularise body-part splits in bodybuilding. This is to say nothing of names like Louie Simmons in powerlifting or the Bulgarian method in weightlifting.

This incredibly short article below is an origin story in its own right. More specifically it can be taken as a starting point for kettlebell training in the United States, and some would argue, the West. Written by Pavel Tsatsouline in 1998 for Randall Strossen’s Milo magazine, this wonderfully named article is credited by many as kickstarting the kettlebell craze. As my friend Victoria Felkar noted some time ago, kettlebells had been used in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before they fell, almost entirely, out of favour. Heck check out our article on Swingbells, which Bob Hoffman marketed in the mid-twentieth century. They were effectively kettlebells!

Anyway. Pavel published this article in 1998 in Milo and there was a quick flurry among its readership to learn more about them. Reflecting on the seismic change in the kettlebell’s popularity, Pavel later noted that

It all started in 1998 when MILO: Journal for Serious Strength Athletes published my article entitled Vodka, Pickle Juice, Kettlebell Lifting, and Other Russian Pastimes. Up until that point, it had been easier to find honest arm measurements than a kettlebell, as Dr. Randall Strossen [the editor of Milo] put it. Fast-forward fifteen years. Today you would be hard pressed to find a gym in the United States that does not have kettlebells.

Off the back of this article, Pavel published several more articles in Milo (which you can buy in a ‘Pavel Pack‘ – not an endorsement but just making it easy for folks). He subsequently wrote Power to the People!: Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American in 2000, which remains a fantastic book. He has published several more since and, alongside Dan John, has probably influenced my own training more than anyone outside of Marty Gallagher, Jim Schmitz, John McCallum and Mark Berry – an electic mix but one’s I love. I’ll stop rambling. This is a wonderful piece and one everyone should read. Enjoy.

Vodka at night. Pickle juice in the morning (the best thing for a hangover).
Throwing some kettlebells around between this hangover and the next one. A
Russian’s day well spent.

The ‘kettlebell’ or girya is a cast iron weight which looks like a basketball with a
suitcase handle. It is an old Russian toy. As the 1986 Soviet Weightlifting
Yearbook put it, “It is hard to find a sport that has deeper roots in the history of
our people than the girevoy sport.”

My ancestors played with kettlebells—when they weren’t skirmishing with the
Germans, Turks, and many other neighbors who wanted a piece of Mother
Russia. Later, it was the key to forging the mighty power of dinosaurs like Ivan
‘the Champion of Champions’ Poddubny.

Poddubny, one of the strongest men of his time, trained with kettlebells in
preparation for his undefeated wrestling career and six world champion belts.
Thanks to K-bells, Poddubny would toy with much larger opponents, lift them
over his head, and slam them into the ground! On one amusing occasion, in
1907, at London’s Pavilion Theater, Poddubny destroyed the referees’ table when
he tossed another famous wrestler on top of it. Always the joker, Poddubny
made himself a16kg cane—so he could amuse himself watching pencilnecks at
coat checks drop it on their toes.

Pyotr Kryloff, another top gun during the early days of the iron game, was
nicknamed ‘the King of Kettlebells’, in honor of his favorite strengthening tool.
He was known for his stunt of jerking two beefy soldiers over his head, while
they sat inside two hollow spheres on the ends of a specially made barbell.

Russian professional strongman, Moor Znamensky, would do a handstand on
two 32kg kettlebells, after which he would jump back on his feet, lifting the
bells over his head at the same time. Then he would drop back in a handstand,
and repeat the drill ten times! So popular were kettlebells in Tsarist Russia that
any strong man or weightlifter was referred to as a girevik, or ‘a kettlebell man’.

A century ago, European and American iron legends like Arthur Saxon favored
kettlebells as much as their Russian colleagues. Then the West got prosperous
and soft and the hardcore kettlebell faded into history—along with many other of
our grandfathers’ manly pursuits. That is, everywhere but in Russia, a rugged
land that never knew easy living.