The 4-Hour Body: Becoming an Effortless Superhuman

This chapter starts with a former Soviet Special Forces instructor punching Tim Ferriss in the butt. Not a metaphor. Pavel Tsatsouline was literally checking muscle tension at a kettlebell certification event. Welcome to chapter 32.

Strength Is a Skill

At that same event, Pavel took a volunteer who was stuck at a 53-pound one-arm overhead press and got him to 72 pounds in under five minutes. That is a 26% increase. No new muscle. No steroids. Just technique and neural tricks - constant tension, proper breathing, better muscle firing patterns.

The takeaway: strength is a skill. And like any skill, it can be learned fast.

Tim did not fully appreciate how fast until Pavel introduced him to a sprint coach named Barry Ross.

Barry Ross and Allyson Felix

In 2003, Allyson Felix was 17 years old. Within 12 months she broke all of Marion Jones’s high school records in the 200 meters, ran the fastest 200 meters in the world that year, and became the first high school athlete to go directly into professional track.

Her coach was Barry Ross. And his training method was weird.

Ross spent 20 years trying to answer one question: how do you make humans as fast as possible? His answer was not more sprints, more track time, or more conditioning. It was heavy deadlifts.

Here are some numbers from his athletes:

• His best female multi-event athlete deadlifted 405 pounds at a bodyweight of 132 pounds
• His best female distance runner deadlifted 380 pounds at 138 pounds bodyweight
• His youngest male lifter, 11 years old, lifted 225 pounds at 108 pounds bodyweight

Nearly all his athletes, including women, can lift more than twice their bodyweight. And almost none of them gained more than 10% additional bodyweight to get there.

The kicker: these results came from less than 15 minutes of actual lifting time per week.

Why Deadlifts Make You Faster

The science is straightforward. Research showed that faster top speeds come from greater ground force support - how hard you push into the ground when your foot lands. Not from faster leg turnover. Most coaches had it backwards.

An elite sprinter hits the ground with roughly two times their body mass on each step. The muscles need to generate up to five times the athlete’s bodyweight in force, delivered in about 0.05 seconds. On one leg.

If you need more force, you need more strength. And the deadlift builds exactly the kind of strength that transfers to sprinting - posterior chain, hips, lower back, grip on the ground.

The old theory was that runners slow down because muscles run out of fuel. The actual research says runners slow down because their muscle fibers cannot produce enough tension. Fuel is fine. Tension is the bottleneck.

So Barry makes his athletes absurdly strong relative to their weight. Then the sprinting takes care of itself.

Allyson Felix’s Actual Program

Three times per week:

1. Dynamic stretching - “over-unders” using hurdles or a power rack, 6-7 reps
2. Upper body - bench press (2-3 sets of 2-3 reps) or push-ups (10-12 reps)
3. Deadlift to the knees - 2-3 sets of 2-3 reps at 85-95% of one-rep max. Bar goes up to the knees and gets dropped. No lowering the bar back down. This is critical - skipping the lowering phase protects the hamstrings
4. Plyometrics - box jumps (4-6 reps) immediately after each deadlift set
5. Core exercise - isometric holds, 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps
6. Static stretching

Five minutes rest between sets. Time under tension per set must stay below 10 seconds. No sets to failure. Ever.

Total workout time including rest: under 60 minutes. Total time actually lifting: less than 5 minutes. And you should feel better at the end than when you started.

The Updated Protocol

By the time the book was written, Ross had refined things further. His sprint program now has three sequential goals:

1. Competition conditioning. Believe it or not - fast walking. Walk as fast as possible for 15 minutes, three times a week. Seven and a half minutes out, same time back. Each session, you must walk further out and still return in the same time. Do this for four weeks. That is your conditioning base.

2. Maximal strength. The deadlift protocol, now tightened to: 1 set of 2-3 reps at 95% of max, followed by 1 set of 5 at 85% of max. Same for bench press. Plus the Torture Twist for core - a rotational isometric hold that every single trainee apparently hates.

3. Maximal speed. Two time trials plugged into a mathematical formula (the ASR speed algorithm from Rice University) that spits out exact distances and times for training runs. For events of 400 meters or less, no training runs longer than 70 meters. The average training run distance for one of his high school girls was 33 meters. She cut two full seconds off her 400 meter and dropped her 100 meter from 13.35 to 12.75.

Her pre-season conditioning was just fast walking. Her training runs averaged 33 meters. She weighs 119 pounds and deadlifts 340.

It Works Outside Sprinting Too

Skyler McKnight needed to bench 225 pounds for 20 reps to start for the San Jose State football team. He could only do 3. He had three weeks. Barry put him on 5 sets of 2 reps, five days a week, with five minutes rest between sets. He increased the weight but never the reps.

On test day he completed 18 reps. From 3 to 18 in three weeks.

The Chinese women’s national speed skating team switched to a deadlift-based protocol. They won over 10 gold medals in sprint categories and broke a world record. Average deadlift increase across the team: 115 pounds in 3.5 months.

Pavel’s Rule of 10

Pavel Tsatsouline contributes a sidebar with his summary for athletes who want to apply this to any sport:

• Use 2-3 compound exercises (deadlift and bench press)
• Lift three times a week
• Do sets of 2-3 reps
• Total about 10 reps per exercise per workout
• Never train to failure. Always leave 1-2 reps in reserve
• Rest five minutes between sets
• Finish feeling stronger than when you started

He trained Maria Sharapova this way. Just pull-ups, pistol squats, hard push-ups, and Janda sit-ups. Nothing else. She got plenty of conditioning from tennis practice. The last thing she needed was fatigue from the weight room.

Steve Baccari, who trains UFC fighters, puts it well: “Strength training is like putting money in the bank to take it out on fight day.”

My Take

This chapter flips the script on how most people think about athletic training. The common belief is that you get better at your sport by practicing your sport as much as possible. Barry Ross says: get ridiculously strong first, keep your body light, and the sport performance follows.

The numbers are hard to argue with. A 132-pound high school girl deadlifting 405. A sprinter whose conditioning program is walking. Training runs that never exceed 70 meters for a 400-meter event.

The principle underneath all of it is simple. Do as little as needed, not as much as possible. Build strength without fatigue. Keep sets short, rest long, never go to failure. Your body adapts to the load without breaking down.

Whether you are a sprinter, a fighter, a speed skater, or just someone who wants to be stronger without spending hours in the gym - the formula is the same. Heavy weight, low reps, long rest, go home feeling good. Come back and do it again.

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This is part of my 4-Hour Body retelling series. New posts every Saturday.