Formosa Fitness

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.