Category: Tips and Tricks

Why You Need To Practice Your Kettlebell Skills

On By adminIn General, Tips and Tricks2 Comments

Learning good kettlebell technique is like learning any other skill – it requires regular practice.  When I started practicing the basic movements on a daily basis is when I really started seeing measurable progress with my KB program.  If you’re serious about getting everything you can from your kettlebell training and realizing its true benefits, you have to focus on good technique. Let’s go over a short example and talk about a good way to structure your daily practice routine.

An example of an exercise that requires a lot of attention to proper form is the clean and press.  This is a highly technical exercise.  A lot of people – myself included – go out on day one and do a full fledged c + p workout – maybe 50 or so total reps of the movement.  The problem is that your form is crappy and you can’t lift as much weight as you could if your form was better and you just end up with a banged up and bruised forearm. So with this kettlebell exercise, just like all the others, the key is practicing and getting your form down before you include it in a full blown workout.

So what do I mean by practice?  Just start every workout by practicing the basic drills you’re working on.  For example, if you’re learning how to do the swing and the get up, pick a light weight and do a few get ups and a few dozen swings.  Practice the various positions of the get up.  Go back and forth through the parts of the movement you’re having trouble with.  For the swings, do 10 or 12 at a time, focusing on one point for each set – staying tight, keeping the lats engaged, proper breathing, etc.  Don’t come anywhere close to failure on either drill.

The key to making real progress with your kettlebell training is proper form. Practice your drills every day according to this basic schedule and you’ll be well on your way to more effective and efficient kettlebell training!

I’m Going To Purchase Some Kettlebells; What Size Do I Need?

On By adminIn Tips and Tricks2 Comments

So you’ve (hopefully) done a little research,  and you’re ready to purchase a kb or two and get started.  But what size to start with? Good question – I’ll try to help you out by telling a little about my own personal experience and that I’ve had with my clients.

The first thing to think about is what exercises you’ll be doing with the kbells. Seems obvious, but for some reason most people don’t seem to give this a lot of thought. Most people – men and women included – could probably handle the Beast (the 106 pounder) for deadlifts. On the other hand, if you’re doing turkish get ups, you’ll probably need a little lighter weight.  That being said, the first exercises I always teach my clients and force them to master before moving on to more advanced drills are the swing, the get-up, and the goblet squat.

For those exercises, an average woman would be well served with a 12k (26 pounds) for swings and squats and an 8k (18 pounds) for get ups.  Squats could be done with either weight.  Most women can progress fairly quickly to the 16k (35 pounds) for swings.

An average strength man will use a 16k for swings and a 12k for get ups to start, and either weight for squats.  Most men can progress quickly to the 20k or 24k for swings.

These numbers are guidelines, obviously: you could start higher if you’ve got a solid background in strength training and athletics, or lower if you’re new to working out or just getting back into it.

Like I’ve mentioned before, my personal favorite brand of kettlebells is Dragon Door; if you’d like to know the reasons why check out this post. Above all else, find a quality brand of kettlebells; you’ll be happy you made the little extra investment.

Another thing you might want to check out is the starter kits available from Dragon Door – they give you an instructional book, DVD, and a single kettlebell.  This is actually probably exactly what I would buy if I was starting all over again with kettlebell training – Pavel is the man when it comes to kb instruction.  And learning to do things right from the start is so important.  Click on the banner below to find out more about these packages:

DragonDoor Quick Start 468x60

So, use this info to figure out what size kettlebell would work best for you and your goals.  Most importantly, pick one up and get started!  And remember, if you’d like to receive free email updates from kettlebellbasics.net, be sure to subscribe by entering your email in the box in sidebar!

A Word Of Caution + Why The Basics Are So Important

On By adminIn General, Tips and Tricks7 Comments

I’d like to kick things off here by telling you a little bit about my own experiences with kettlebell training over the last couple of years – for a very specific reason.  I think it will be of a great benefit to you as you progress in your kettlebell training career.

I’ve been involved in various athletic endeavors for the last 20 years or so – baseball and basketball in grade school, football and track and field in high school and college, a ‘cup of coffee’ in the NFL, and more recently in triathlons believe it or not (I played offensive line if that gives you an indication of why I say that – I was at about 310 lbs at my biggest).

I still consider myself to still be in pretty good shape.  I work out five or six times a week, although admittingly I suffer from a little bit of ‘workout ADD’ (I have trouble sticking with a program for more than three weeks or so).  I’ve dabbled in literally almost every imaginable training style, from Olympic Lifting to German Volume Training to CrossFit to HIT – you name it, I’ve probably done it.

About two years ago, I heard a few of my trainer friends were getting into kettlebells, and it sounded interesting.  Honestly, my first thought was that there couldn’t be too much to it – nothing more than I could figure out on my own.

So I go buy a couple of kettlebells at the local used sporting goods store.  I do a search for ‘kettlebells’ on YouTube to give me an idea of some basic drills (bad idea, in retrospect).  There’s some good stuff on there, but there’s also a lot of crap – and I happened to stumble on the crap.

I think my first workout consisted of about 50 clean and presses and 50 snatches.  If I remember correctly, an ill locked-out snatch and an actual glancing blow to the head by a kettlebell finished my workout for the day.  Luckily, I didn’t do any serious damage, but my wrists were bruised and swollen, along with my ego, for about a week.  Not so good.

After a few months of playing around and not really knowing what I was doing (or really getting anything out of it, for that matter), I decided I wanted to do things right.  I bought Enter The Kettlebell by Pavel, which in retrospect was what really got the ball rolling and is probably why I’m so into kettlebells today.  I went through the book, made detailed notes on everything, and went through the Program Minimum first, followed by the ETK Rite of Passage.

I was shocked at how well the Program Minimum worked!  I got stronger, lost a little fat,  and actually improved my cardio conditioning with basically less than one hour a week of workouts!  I knew at that point I was hooked.

After a couple more months of training almost exclusively with kettlebells and making some great progress, I decided to sign up for the RKC certification because I knew I wanted to take my KB training to the next level.

In short, it was an incredible experience, was extremely physically demanding, and more than anything incredibly educational.  I couldn’t recommend the course more to anyone wanting to get serious about kettlebell training.

Another thing I learned from the RKC certification is that perfect execution of the basics is critical.  You can get an amazing amount of milage from a few basic kettlebell exericses – in fact, you could probably only do the core five or six drills forever and continue to make progress.

This blog is dedicated to helping you learn the basics really, really well.

Now I use kb’s at least 50% of the time with my one-on-one and group training classes and in my own training.  I’m hooked for life, and I hope you soon will be too.

So that’s a few words of warning and some basic advice on where to start.  I’ll be frequently updating this blog with basic exercise descriptions, new workouts that have worked well for me and my clients, reviews of books and DVD’s about kettlebell training, and much more.  Hope to see you around!

Forest Vance, RKC

P.S. If you’d like to shortcut your learning curve a bit, check out my manual and training course all about mastering the Kettlebell Swing by clicking the link below:

http://kettlebellswingsforfatloss.net/