Training people that have experienced signs of aging is one of the most rewarding things for most fitness professionals.
Making your body become more youthful in your fifties and beyond when everyone around you is watching theirs deteriorate is empowering and motivating to everyone else. Your heath is extremely patient, and will respond and reward you for your efforts at any point in life.
It is possible to do in half an hour what some people do in an hour or more of exercise if you know how to prepare and maximize your time. I am not recommending that you make thirty minute workouts the norm, as it may take many people that long to warm up their bodies. If you try to move too quickly, you can injure yourself and that defeats the purpose of training altogether. Remember, always pay attention to what your body is telling you and take only what you know it has to give. With that in mind, if you are short on time, use these cues to help maximize your workout.
When it comes to achieving the results you want, you will need to use the right weight in your kettlebell training. For most people, the biggest limiting factor here is their nervous system getting accustomed to the weight and movement. It usually takes a few sets of a given move before your body is able to recruit all of the available muscle to do the job and relax the muscles that don’t need to be tense.
Many people think that blistered hands and bruised wrists are just a part of kettlebell training, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Developing proper technique with your hands and throughout the various movements can go a long way to minimizing or eliminating this problem, as well as balancing the exercises you are perfroming in your training.
Developing awesome power comes from teaching your mind and body how to perform using optimized technique and uninhibited muscle recruitment. These attributes are born out of consistency, and that is what we are going to develop today. Even if you are not using ideal motor patterns to maximize efficiency or if you are still using some of the less effective muscles for a given movement, you still need to develop consistency. Once we have consistency, we have a basis to coach from. It is impossible to fix an error in someone’s swing if every swing they do has something different wrong with it! Most people will have some muscle tightness, weakness or both that will impair a given movement.
High Intensity Interval training has been around for a very long time in one way or another and has been used by coaches to train many professional athletes.
However, in the past five years, high intensity interval training has become more of a mainstream way of training for people with the overall goal of health. Is this a good thing, or is it destined to go the way of so many other fitness fads from the past?
High intensity interval training started to become more and more popular in the wake of functional training. When people used to spend more time pumping up their muscles than building full body strength, cardio had to be done on a treadmill, stationary bike or stairclimber. This meant that many people would spend two hours in the gym or make two visits a day just to get the workout they should be getting in less than half the time. Cardio would usually be looked at as a chore, spending sixty minutes watching a digital readout tell you how hard you are working isn’t much fun.
Kettlebells provide you with options that no other single piece of equipment can give you in your training.
If you take all of the equipment in most gyms and add them up, they rarely combine to provide what a kettlebell can. With that said, I don’t know of any serious kettlebell practitioner that doesn’t use other pieces of equipment too. It is my aim to keep the authentic teaching of kettlebell training and strongman alive, and help it grow and evolve to help people see their goals in the modern day.
One of the most common objections I hear to kettlebells is people who think they are too old or injured to train with a kettlebell. There is an assumption that kettlebell training is only for athletes, possibly because many average people have been coaxed into using them that way inappropriately. Other people assume that as they age machine based training is the safer way to train for strength but nothing could be further from the truth.
The one arm heavy dead snatch is one of my favorite exercises. Power and fluidity in perfect harmony with one another, it’s a wonderful feeling.
Dumbbells, kettlebells and even barbells can be dead snatched with one arm, and each tool offers it’s own unique benefits. I learned the one arm dead snatch with a dumbbell before kettlebells were found in American gyms which allowed me to move up in five pound increments until I was dead snatching the heaviest dumbbell there, which was 130lbs.
