Formosa Fitness

If you've bought one or more kettlebells, you may wonder what to do next when it no longer feels heavy. Well, you've only scratched the surface of what's there.

Here's what I did today with the 12kg kettlebell:

swings 2x25L/25R

clean and press 2x25L/25R

snatches 2x25L/25R

squats 2x25L/25R

push press 2x25L/25R

lunges 2x25L/25R

600 reps total and rest only as needed to catch the breath

I don't usually work with the 12kg kettlebell any more except to teach but I wanted this type of low intensity/high density work out today.

This type of work out hits everything and shows that you can still get a good challenge out of a kettlebell that may feel a bit lighter to you. This extends the life of the kettlebell, meaning that you don't necessarily have to go out and buy a heavier one unless you just want to.

Enjoy your kettlebell work.

I got 200 swings with the 24kg kettlebell today and it wasn't easy but it was there. I did a 1-10-1 ladder and pooped out at 4 on the down side, if you can believe that. I stopped to breath for a few seconds before cranking it back up. My lower back was aching like crazy.

The results?

My snatch has gotten a whole lot stronger and the hardstyle idea of building the swing before the snatch obviously makes sense. You can't hope to snatch weight you aren't comfortable swinging.

Additionally I've found that swinging the 12kg bell for 80-100 reps makes a great warmup if I'm short of time. I never thought of using swings as a warmup before the challenge but I can say now that they work.

So what's up for December? Not sure yet, but kicking around the idea of a burpee challenge. I did 50 today so....

As I've said many times, I test things on myself in order to teach better classes. I'm the guinea pig and the scientist all in one. I tweak programs and throw out exercises based on my own experience in order to teach clients better and I hope it shows.

One thing that has bothered me over the past month is whether or not to include the kettlebell snatch in my program. It's a tough lift and possibly too much for some fitness clients. For one thing, it's tough on your hands. You run the possibility of tearing the skin on your palm if your technique is off and you do too many at the beginning -- two things that are very hard to avoid when practice is exactly what you need.

So how to solve the problem?

I've looked at most everything on the snatch available and most of it is waaaay too extreme. Doing 200 snatches with the 24kg etc. is great and all but beginners need a mile long on-ramp before they are ready for anything like that. But descriptions of that on-ramp are few and far between. So I've been looking at building my own. 

What I came up with was intervals -- specifically a :15 work, :15 rest interval and switching hands every :30. This means :15 of work and :45 of rest for each hand -- plenty of time to let the hand recover. Plenty of time to know whether or not the hand is getting over-stressed.

None of the typical stuff was working for me. Long sets, even with multiple hand switches, was ripping the crap out of my hands. That's just a no-go. It was really hard to teach with ripped up hands. Not gonna happen. Besides, the protocol itself was going to rule out beginners. One minute of snatching is too much.

I've been working with this protocol for a few weeks and I love it. It got me from the 16 to the 20 and now the 24kg in a much shorter order than anything else I was trying. Yesterday I did the 24kg for 5:00 and the 20kg for 5:00 back to back. That was 50 snatches with the 24kg and 50 with the 20kg in 10:00. No hands tears whatsoever and that's unheard of for me on this volume at this weight.

So try it out and see what you think.

Snatches with the 32kg kettlebell. Excellent. Shows what consistent training with good coaches can do.

LOL. This one really snuck up on me. So I was going to do my upper body emphasis today with the kettlebell but I wasn't sure what lifts to do today. I did snatches yesterday and the day before....yada, yada. You get the picture. So on a whim I went and picked up the 32kg kettlebell.

Last time I tried to press it was July and that was a no-go. Lifting it is on my agenda but haven't gotten around to it yet.

And LOL up it went. No problem. After I calmed down, I tried it again to see if I was seeing things but no, I pressed it again. So you know what I did then, right?

Had to see how many times I could press it. Answer: five. What about the left? Five. So want to guess what I did then?

Yep, got to see how many sets I could do. Answer: 3 sets of 5 left and 5 right. Well, almost. Set 3 stopped at 4 on the right and 3 on the left.

So I'm happy yet embarassed a little about this. For one, I should try this stuff out a little more often. I need to have more confidence in my training sometimes. This stuff really does work. Been too focused on trees instead of the forest lately.

Second, I'm not sure how I did this. I had hoped to train in a systematized fashion through sets and reps of the 20, 24, 28 and then the 32. I was going to have this great program that clients could follow, just like I did. Except now that's ruined because I didn't plan for this. Haha.

I've been reading a lot of stuff by Charles Staley and Dan John lately so that's likely the source of how I did this. The escalating density training (EDT) is no joke. You got to get some of that, if you haven't already. I did a cycle with the double 24kg of double presses and double rows for about a month. But the numbers were fairly stable the whole time. Then later I did another EDT cycle of pullups and dips that was really fun. Actually, I'm still doing that one. But it must be working in spades. I know my pullups are at an all-time high.

I'm also doing some other things that might be contributing too, but in any case, it's all working. Who can tell? I've added Optimum Nutrition 100% Whey over the last month and have been trying to follow Precision Nutrition lately. It's all good.

Anyway, I'm feeling really, really good today and hope to drag some of the things I'm learning along the way into classes. I love seeing clients get stronger while staying healthy and I always make myself the guinea pig.

So train hard and stay safe this weekend!

Because...well...why not? Love how he describes the advantages of the kettlebell curl.

http://strengthandphysique.blogspot.com/ This is his blog. I have one of his books and it's great. Check him out.

There's a swing challenge going on for November. The challenge is 200 swings of your choice a day for the entire month of November. I'm late to the party on this but I started yesterday. I did 8x25 with the 24kg and a ladder 1-10-1 today with the 12kg. You can do any combo of one hand or two hand and using any weight or workout method you want. Using a lite kettlebell to do 200 swings as a warmup is permitted. 

Granted it's a lot of hamstring and lower back work but with some deloading this could be quite a learning experience.

And if you don't know what the kettlebell swing is, come by my studio and I'll show you!

The new IKFF forum is up and running and that was perfect timing. I've been looking for a place to talk about kettlebell training for a long time. Let's hope there're some good mods in place so the info quality will be high. Sign up and join us for what will hopefully be some great discussion. And while you're there, check out the new website. Very nice.

These are two concepts that are important for beginning kettlebell students to understand. Increasing the size of the gas tank is pretty easy to grasp. Think of a Crossfit workout that leaves you lying on the floor. If you can recover from that (and that may be a big if), then your capacity to tolerate hard training will hopefully increase. Your gas tank will allow harder and harder training as you work with the raw muscle aspect of training. (However, leaving you lying on the floor isn't the best way to achieve this attribute. A gradual increase in volume and intensity is the way to go.)

But increasing your fuel efficiency is sometimes difficult to grasp at first. This isn't necessarily intuitive, especially to people that have external motivations for training. Increasing your fuel effieciency means improving technique, increasing joint mobility, etc. These things allow you to lift more weight, go for a longer time, etc. but they work on a more subtle level than just increasing the size of the gas tank.

It just makes sense, right? The better your technique, the more reps you can lift. And yet, the pathway is different than just muscling the kettlebell. Just trying to kill yourself with the kettlebell will work for a while, right up until you get injured or at least reach a plateau. Then the benefits of muscling it will decrease and you'll be forced to improve technique anyway. 

It's the delicate balance between quantity and quality -- without quality, the quantity doesn't matter.

This is where treating kettlebell training as a type of martial art comes into play. Think of improving your lifts the way you would improve your armbar or side kick and you'll see the benefits quicker. 

I mentioned this in my review of Scott Sonnon's Kettlebell Foundation DVD but didn't describe it much. Basically, when you use the kettlebell or most anything else for high volume work, you're packing stress into the body. You then MUST find a way to get that stress out. It's  like wringing a towel and then leaving it in that condition rather than letting it unwind. Or think of a rubber band that's wound up and then not released.

Kettlebell training isn't alone in this regard. I often got this feeling from training baguazhang simply because in that art, you're constantly coiled. You coil one way towards the center of the circle while walking one palm change and you want to wring the tissues in that direction -- maximum coiling. You then unwind with the next palm change but use the momentum to wind in the opposite direction. What's happens is that you're constantly wound up and the more you practice without a compensatory component, the worse you might possible feel -- especially in the back and knees. Those areas don't take winding too kindly.

Kettlebell training works in a similar fashion with it's high volume training. The forearms and back are in constant use while training the kettlebell. If you don't then release that underlying tension, you're asking for overuse injuries.

I've had similar results from over-training the tiger form in hung gar (hongquan). It used a type of constant tension that taichi didn't release. Only closed chain kinetic releases would have worked but I knew nothing of that then.

When I was doing the escalating density training hard and heavy in July, I was packing stress into my body and not really releasing it. Just the name "escalating density" hints at that. The result was that my elbows were feeling pulled apart. Tendonitis was starting to set in. But releasing that tension with compensatory motions as in Sonnon's DVD is getting it out.

These motions are the key to long term practice of these various arts IMO. They are the best antidote to overuse injuries that I know. And as a teacher, I now make at least a few of them a part of every class I teach.

Avoid them at your peril if you're working hard on this stuff.