I’ve read two of his books already and am starting to get a little disappointed at his mentality of putting his material only in books. The amount of information each book has can be EASILY put in an article or two yet he decides to sell them for around 25-30 bucks each.
EC, MR, CT, DJ, and a host of many other authors on this site have put butt loads of information in their articles sometimes well-exceeding the amount of information Pavel puts in his books. I also think it’s a bit weird how he comes up with phrases and then begins to use them 24/7 (Pink Panther, Bear Program, etc)
Here’s a quote from CT in his Thib Zone about Pavel:
Pavel is a great guy but it sounds like he’s too concerned with making money
‘Enter the Kettlebell’ is hugely amusing, but by the end, the evil Russian schtick gets a little old.
Even so, I just orered two more of Pavel’s books - one about stretching and one about joints - turns out that they are both pretty much the same book. Had about 2 chapters of worthwhile material between them…lot’s of big print and many repetitive pictures.
Had a big discount so they were nearly free, but if I had paid the $25/ea list price I would’ve been disappointed.
It’s not just Pavel. When I first started training, I read a couple of books that were published by Men’s Health. The only good thing in them were the pictures. The text was mostly fluff, telling you why you needed to exercise, a lot of weak attempts to be clever. All the useful information could have been summed up in a brochure.
To echo your praise of Dan John, his e-books and news letters are available for free on his website- danjohn.org. He accepts donations, speaking of which, I’m going to stop being a sponge and chip in.
The two books I ordered were The Naked Warrior and Super Joints. Super Joints really pissed me off. I was like, “Thats it?” Sure it was nice, but I’m actually thinking about returning it and just writing down everything the back has to offer, which really isn’t that much.
I made the mistake of purchasing Power to the People when it first came out. The information contained was decent but I felt I got more informative opinions at T-Nation, and as was said, he seemed to be very repetitive.
When his other books came out I decided to just go to the book store and read them there in an hour of my time. These books are so un-technical that the information contained in them can be easily retained.
If Pavel were smart he’d just write them as articles for free on this site and market his seminars and training videos. I did a search of kettlebell videos on Youtube and those seem to be pretty entertaining and informative – more so than his books.
For instance this is one of his RKC Seminars, despite having a cheesy finish, looked pretty intense:
(Check the dude doing one-legged depth jumps off a table with rebound at minute 4:00)
Pavel is a very good instructor in person, but his marketing is very cheesy. I will say that he did teach me a lot about using the kettlebells correctly. It’s not easy as it looks and instruction is a great idea.
