Kettlebells Training 101

If you’re interested, at all, in Kettlebells training — then you’re in the right place.

What Are Kettlebells?

Kettlebells are often described as “heavy cannon balls with a handle” and that’s pretty much an accurate description.

You basically have a heavy iron weight (or not so heavy if you buy the girlie kind from some corporate store and it comes covered in pink plastic and with a “sweating to the oldies” DVD workout or something like that) attached to a handle of some sort.

They’re a Russian implement so they’re usually measured in Kilograms and the “Standard” weights are something of an old Russian measurement called “poods” — starting with a 1 pood (16kg — 30 something pounds) and going up from there in half “pood” increments.

What Are They Good For?

Kettlebells are cool because you can use them for pretty much anything you use dumbbells for. You may wonder “why not just use dumbbells?” and there’s a couple reasons for this:

1. Lifting kettlebells looks cool …
2. It’s a change up of routine, so it kills boredom …
3. You feel more manly …
4. And the real reason is because there are some exercises which are much more easily done with a kettlebell …

These exercises that kettlebells really shine at are ballistic exercises, namely the swing, snatch and clean and jerk varieties

Why Ballistic Exercises?

Because you get a chance to build not just straight-up, steel bending strength but explosive, full-body strength with kettlebells!

See, most people are pretty overtrained on the front of their bodies (everythign they can see in the mirror — biceps, chest, abs) and hardly do any work on what’s called the “posterior” chain — which ironically — is the set of muscles that’s most responsible for increasing athletic ability.

The kettlebell exercises like the swing, clean, clean and jerk and snatch are all exercises that teach you how to use your hips, hamstrings, glutes, and lower back to get weights off the ground and up into the air in a fast, dynamic action.

Learning how to use your hips is an important part of becoming a better athlete, becoming more explosive, becoming a better lover, etc …

How To Get Started …

You could pick up a kettlebell and get started with them in pretty much the same way you would get started with any strength building program, using it to do the basic exercises: A leg squatting movement, a pushing/pressing movement and a pulling movement.

The Russian Kettlebell Challenge, program “minimum” consists of only two exercises: The swing and the turkish getup. I’ll save the explanations for how to do these two exercises for a future article, but suffice it to say these two hit pretty much every muscle in the body.

You basically train 3x per week and one day you do turkish getups for 5 minutes straight, switching hands every rep. Then the next day you train you do the swings for 5 minutes straight or for sets of ten or something like that (I forget exactly).

So yeah, there you go that’s a pretty good “primer” on Kettlebells training and I’ll talk more about this in the future.