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Any one read Pavel's seminal Power to the People?

In it, there's the Russian Bear "protocol" which talks about the approach to slapping on massive amounts of hard dense muscle by using the following principles:

1. Go as heavy as you can for 4-5 reps per set
2. Never go to failure.
3. Rest 30 - 90 seconds between sets.
4. Do as many sets of the 4-5 reps as possible.
5. Train as often as you can
6. Adjust your rest and nutrition to allow for sarcoplasmic hypertrophy
7. Use 80% of the weights from your work sets.

The as many sets as possible approach is in direct contradiction to the as many reps as possible approach 5/3/1. I'm aware that at the end of the day, it's just about getting as much volume in as you can by never letting one set go to failure, thus delaying technical and muscle failure, allowing you to rack up the rep numbers.

I'm aware that this is very similar to the Operator I/A v1 approach which allows for up to 10 sets if not more per exercise.

Has anyone tried something like this for a few blocks, and is it effective for slapping on a lot of mass? Any views or opinions?

Yup. The concept is sound but the way it was structured didn't work out for me. I'd recover and be ready to work again when it came to the press, but not recovered enough to deadlift, so maintaining any sort of consistency was difficult. Heavy high volume DLs are a tricky beast, especially if you're going to hit them 2-3 x week. It takes some serious self-knowledge and self-regulation skills which I didn't have back then.

Another negative was the lack of progression. In theory the underlying concept is to build volume as you get used to the weight to stimulate hypertrophy, but in practice it lead to a stall and diminished sets around week 3 for me. I had a hard time doing the same amount of sets as I had been doing in week 1. Having some sort of progression prevents this kind of stall-out I think. I had much better results with the old TB Gladiator routine, which is basically a structured Russian Bear with added progression.

When you're doing as many sets as possible but you're allowed and encouraged to rest as much as possible, it seems like this could easily eat up an entire day in the gym. I know time efficiency is an important factor for many people. Just my opinion, but if mass is the goal, a more traditional bodybuilding routine would probably give you more bang for the buck.

I did Pavel's Bear during the hypertrophy phase of a very long range prep for a powerlifting meet. I did BP twice/week and Dl once/week. Doing the DL Bear style was really grueling. I thought (and I could be wrong) that when doing Pavel's Bear you are actually supposed to shorten the rest periods. I think I did 60 breaks on the pressing and 90 breaks on the pulling. I got very big in a hurry doing this.

I think it was short rest periods too. I did a few weeks of it when I was overseas, but the DL really killed me and affected me outside the wire so I stopped and moved on to something else. Wish I had more input.

Oh that's right, just checked back to the book, and it is 30-90 seconds of rest between sets. Also; I forget that you had to drop the weights by 80% from your work set weights

So I'm seeing 2 problems:

1. The high number of sets ate into your ability to recover for later exercises.

2. It was hard to maintain the momentum.

#1 looks like it could be solved by moving your "Bear" sets till after all your other exercises were done. #2 seems to be something you could settle with auto-regulation, rest and recovery, but looks like it is not an easy topic to deal with.

Blackmetalbunny wrote: #1 looks like it could be solved by moving your "Bear" sets till after all your other exercises were done.

From what I understand Bear is intense enough that you shouldn't be doing any other training, except fork-to-mouth.

TangoZero wrote:

Blackmetalbunny wrote: #1 looks like it could be solved by moving your "Bear" sets till after all your other exercises were done.

From what I understand Bear is intense enough that you shouldn't be doing any other training, except fork-to-mouth.

O really? I gotta go back and re-read those few pages in detail then! Might have missed that part out.

The Bear is very grueling. No doubt. You might be able to get a more manageable approach (if you want to emphasize muscle gain) by doing something like OP I/A, but cutting way down the rest breaks.