Whether you have used a kettlebell have not used a kettlebell don't even know what a kettlebell is your this episode of the movement movement the podcast for people Who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy healthy strong body usually starting feet first those things to the end of your legs So they're responsible for stuff like balance agility mobility stuff like that on the podcast We also break down the propaganda the mythology and off in the outright lies You've been told about what it takes to run or walk or jump or play or to yoga or cross better dance Whatever it is you'd like to do and to do those things enjoy it and effectively and efficiently wait I say enjoy it. I'm getting a little old knife forget. That's a lie. Don't forget it was a trick question Of course I said enjoy believe if you're not having fun You're not gonna keep doing whatever it is so find something you enjoy doing I am Stephen Sash and co-founder co CEO of zero shoes calm and we call this the movement movement podcast because we that includes you more about that In a second are creating a movement about natural movement letting your body do what it's made to do and the part where you get involved It's really easy to spread the word give us a great review give us a thumbs up share hit the bell icon on YouTube to find out about New episodes in fact you can go to www.join the movement movement calm.
There's nothing you need to do to join There's no secret handshake. There's no dance. We do every morning Please not want to tell people about it Just that's where you can find all the previous episodes all the ways you can find us on social media and all the places you can spread the word So in short if you want to be part of the tribe just subscribe. All right Let's get started have some fun Brett tell people who the hell you want what you're doing here Awesome Steve Steve first off just fantastic happy opportunity on the podcast and to speak to you in your audience and looking forward to today's conversation The long story made short of how I got here is a certified athletic trainer I've been involved in the fitness industry for over 25 years So certified athletic trainer CSCS to the end made the decision in February of 02 to go get certified in kettlebell training with Paul and started teaching with him a year later in April of 03 and Then got hooked back up with great cook who I had worked with in my training room in his clinics from 95 to 97 and Started teaching working with FMS and functional movement systems in 2006 and so over 22 years now of being in kettlebell certified and 21 years of teaching it all across the globe Let's back up cuz 20 or 2 that was really did I say really enough times early in the wonderful world of kettlebells So how did you even hear about this and then how did you get connected with paddle sets?
I mean who's the guy who everyone basically associates with bringing kettlebells from Russia to America like back up to do the way back Machine and talk about that awesome I was running a hospital fitness center at the time so we were doing post rehab or post rehab was a thing and We were transitioning a bunch of people from physical therapy to our wellness program and doing training with them I am an air quotes guy you'll be seeing that pretty frequently I'm I tend to err in that direction as well I love it Nobody puts baby in a corner because if I air quoted it you can't hold me to it One of my former employees somebody that I've worked with me for a while comes back and says hey You should really check out this Pavel guy and I said okay So I got his power to the people book and power the people was revolutionary in its time because it was the anti bodybuilding message It was you only need two lifts you need to prioritize strength and not muscle size Minimalist routine you know things that have been at the heart of Paul's teachings for from his inception from his beginning as a teacher And so at that point the kind of marketing machine kicks in and I start getting the newsletters And this is the days of mailed getting actual mail and printed materials and so started hearing about a bow bought the book Russian kettlebell challenge Reddit said I can do all that with a dumbbell and threw it in a drawer and Ignored it for a while and then in the back of my brain is just picking at the back of my brain So I get it back out and I go okay So I hook up a 50 pound dumbbell and I'm gonna try one of the snatch workouts That's in the back of the book and I like to joke that when EMS revived me and that's a joke There was there were no emergency services activated But by the time I was done with the workout I said you know I should go get trained in this and I missed the opportunity to be a part of the first ever certification in October of 1 but I did go to the second certification of February of 02 and we were throwing water balloons at each other in freezing Sub-freezing temperatures at nine o'clock at night and there's a really different experience than what we've cultivated to this point But yeah, that was the that's the way back machine story for how I got to exposed First of all water balloons in suffrage temperatures is the kind of thing that you expect with Russians my my gymnastic coach When he was at the world so saying that was traveling with a bunch of Russian gymnasts And he said to say they have a different sense of humor as an understatement here is their favorite joke two bricks are sitting on the top of a roof One brick falls off and the other brick yells I hope you land on someone's head and it's a person in hysterics And it's a plastic Russian joke from that era at least so just for the fun of it If you had to give yourself a number for what number are you for people who were certified back then if you were in the second round Where would you put yourself? In the first 30 so I think there were seven or eight people at the first certain in October of 01 and I think there were 22 people at my Certification in February of 02 now so many of those people were still there swinging bells I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that's right so let's back up a giant step for people who are completely oblivious to what a kettlebell is And why in fact it is different than a dumbbell jump into that if you would hundred percent It's an interesting it's a can of all the handling right You've got this massive weight and then you've got this handle on top and so it looks very brutish and simplistic But what you get in that thick handle and offset center of mass is a weight that becomes very alive in your hands as you're swinging it There is this displaced center of mass that you need to deal with which increases and gives us the ability to swing it between our legs Creating a very unique over speed eccentric position. You can only swing a barbell between your legs once and then you'll decide Are we not gonna do that again? I'm not sure you can even do it once I think halfway and then you're in the hospital Yeah, you'll stop it's self-correcting So the the candle offsets and her mass the loaded eccentric position the way that when you rack it in the clean or get up Or for the press that offset center of mass literally up to a certain point guides your shoulder into better positions Then once you reach a certain point in the displacement is great enough It's a challenge to be overcome that actually provides a lot of additional strengthening for the sake of doing this for normal human beings Let's let's define two things.
Let's define what the overloaded eccentric is and let's also talk about what the rack position is Which is for people who have used kettlebells We're gonna then jump into why many people stop using kettlebells is because they don't understand how the rack position works And they have smashing the crap out of their forearm until and they think that the solution is to just build up forearm Calices or something so let's do the eccentric the overload of eccentric and then let's talk about positioning and how people may have that outside In the brains absolutely so the eccentric position of a deadlift or the athletic hinge that we use in the swing is That position where you can have sat back into the hips and you're absorbing the load of the kettlebell So we're gonna do this a little differently just to paint a picture So imagine for the fun of it that the motion that we're talking about is and I'm this is not quite accurate for a number of reasons But let's refer to it as low actually it's not too bad I was gonna say getting up off a chair getting back into a chair But it's actually better to say toilet because when we're gonna go sit on a toilet We really stick our butt back further than we do if we're sitting on a chair and when we get up We're like a better term thrusting our hips forward to get up off the toilet So the eccentric is the sitting back part and when we have the kettlebell the kettlebell when we're standing upright and kettlebell swing the kettlebell Your arms are extended basic for lack of better. There's variations but basically straight out in front of you So perpendicular to your body parallel to the ground and so what's happening is as you're sitting back with your arms straight You're the bell the kettlebell is gonna be swinging between your legs So you'd be crushing your toilet and then having to go to home to you about a new toilet because yeah, all right So that's the motion that we're talking about yeah, and we could picture a broad jump or vertical leap You know when you sit back and hinge into that to load the hips that's that's that that picture But that picture doesn't involve a toilet So it's not it lacks a certain degree of clarity that it out when you sit into that eccentric position and what's happening with the swing in particular is On the way up we've produced this force. We've created this great hip extension We've created a ballistic action with the kettlebell So we bring it from this eccentric position into that constant position It's gonna swing up in front of us all the energy the kettlebell's ever gonna get is gonna come from our hips coming up into that extended position Then we got to let gravity do its thing or assist gravity slightly by reconnecting the arms to the body and then sitting back into that hinge position the Amount of load we're able to achieve in bringing that bell into that eccentric position and then quickly turning it around into another Swinging is really unique and I've been on force plate I know that I produce between three to three and a half times bodyweight eccentric load doing a two-handed swing with a 24 kilo bell So I can produce a lot of force I can absorb and redirect a lot of force within that kettlebell swing And so that over speedy centric and if you think about it force absorption and redirection of what sport do we not just talk about? Right.
It is everything that we do whether it's walking running jumping plane There's another interesting thing about that. I've been thinking about quite a bit lately Which is how people misunderstand even basic weightlifting or basic strength programming with one one essential idea and it has to do with the force curve It's like where you should be applying force and where things should be any easier and for the sake of using an example of the bicep curl Or let's use a little use the bicep curl many things have been done because we know that last little bit of doing the bicep curl can get hard And people think oh what we need to do is something where we're accentuating the hardness at the end But the right force curve is that it's actually hard at the beginning and gets easier at the end because that's the way your muscle works So ironically There's this whole thing about using bands and bands get harder and harder as you stretch them and people go that feels really good But it's the exact opposite of what you typically need and with kettlebells you're getting that correct force curve So when you've sat back in that in the swing the kettlebell is between your legs a little behind you and you're about to start pushing your hips forward To send the kettlebell flying that's where it's the hardest and then it gets easier and gets a little weightless at the very end That's the right force curve for building that kind of strength that just as you said is appropriate for pretty much everything We would ever do on our feet. Yeah, no, I 100% and I think Be sure to tip your server I think that it really is the secret sauce of kettlebell training in general because when we take it into the swing to clean the snatch We get into slightly different force vectors everywhere with the clean and the snatch were a little bit more vertical More like a vertical leap versus the kind of broad jump force of maybe the swing to put it into general categories and that we use to call it What the heck effect and so people would start swinging a kettlebell and PR their pull ups People would start swinging a kettlebell and PR something that they hadn't been training Whatever that that may be but I really I really think it comes into that that loaded eccentric and over-speed eccentric and just how much Force we can start absorbing and redirecting and how that transfers into so many other things that we want to be doing Yeah, it's not an uncommon thing to think about that sprinters are known for having butts and it's all from that hip extension Which is and just to clarify that hip extension if you're managing standing up and you lift your right foot off the ground half an inch And then you just pull it behind drag kick your heel behind you That's hip extension But when you think about that from a seated position if you think about getting up from a seated position or that bottom of the deadlift And thrusting your hips forward more than the idea of standing up and like a squat That's the way that that's up up there. So let's then go to the whole thing of this whole Problem that people run into when they're starting to get into things like clean or the snatch and they smash the crap out of their elbows Or sorry their forearms and think oh, this is not for me Absolutely, so when we and if we take it down into something like the get up You're gonna roll on your side.
You're gonna stab your grip on the handle You're gonna bring it over you got to back out one up for people who've never seen a turn to get up And I don't know why it's a very close get up probably didn't come from Turkey. It's probably yeah, who knows it's like Bulgarian split squad didn't come from Bulgaria And it's just a thing walk through what that would look like if somebody didn't know what it was because they were from another planet And they're watching a video if I was laying on the ground and I had a weight shoe shoe Bounced on my fist. So let's say that I was holding on to a dumbbell or I had a kettlebell in the rack position Or I had a yoga block balanced on my fist and I was going to get up from the ground to standing and back down without dropping the yoga block So that's a get up so you visualize coming through the different positions that you would come through getting to the elbow getting to the hand Sweeping the leg getting straight and then progressing into the standing position and reversing that great cook called it alignment with integrity under load So it's like a moving yoga a loaded yoga Ish sort of thing where we move through these positions to get the standing and then we come back down and we're really concerned with maintaining our alignment Because regardless of what load you're holding what's holding the load is the ground you are aligning your structure So the weight centers through you most efficiently to be held by the ground So actually a lot of benefit of get ups one of my favorite exercises I do them every time I train to some degree some days it's one or two some days it's five I'm just very first things first. I think we need to make more try to get references during this conversation No one got it rewind secondly what you said I never thought of that get up that way and I want to add a little tweak to that image imagine you're lying on the ground in your back Your arm is pointing up towards the ceiling and you're holding a glass of water that's full and you want to get up to standing without dropping a drop Which by the way reminds me of a thing from our link letter And this is showing how old I am kid say the darnest things he had it was a collection of kids saying funny things and one of them Is my favorite kid was asked to describe what how it rains and he said water forms around a piece of dust until it forms a drop And then it does which I love so you're holding a glass of water point it was a ceiling You want to stand up in a way that keeps the that's most efficient It keeps the glass from the water from spilling and then getting back down as well So once you can imagine that now just imagine having a anywhere from I know let's make it 10 to 40 pound weight that not only Are you holding your hand was a little offset?
So it's not just holding in your hand. It's a little out of whack So it's trying to force you to not have that perfect alignment But it's showing you what that alignment is because the better you do the more weight you can handle because it's not about strength as much as it is About alignment. Yes. Yeah, I love it I love the description and I think that as we move through something like that I'm gonna take a little bit of a left turn potentially and because you may have had people want to talk about foot structure and How we're loading the foot and how there's some uniqueness in there?
Why would you think that I've ever talked to anybody about that? That is it's a guess It's just it's just a guess. Yeah, try again, but okay keep going But when we come up into the hands what we see are some unique hand and risk structures that influence how we hold the bell And the reason I'm getting into this is because to your point of people not being comfortable with the bell in that rack position A the back of our forms in some ways we did we don't bear load So having any weight sitting there initially is like dude, that's weird like it I feel pressure there and I've never potentially never felt that before it you'll adjust But when we look at hand and wrist architecture and I sit here and I snap my hands up It looks like I'm waving right. I'm I have a very owner deviated hand and wrist position and I have a thumb that is very high in my Poem so the reason so for people who aren't watching so imagine just putting your hand up at face level with your palm facing Faces and if you do that kind of naturally yeah, your pinky is not pointing straight up It's pointing but like I'm using my right hand It's point at two o'clock and that creates an interesting bit of alignment from the base of my thumb to the base of my pinky That is pretty much horizontal parallel to ground that most people never thought of and so now there's two other risk archetypes so you and I you're not as honored you It is I am but you appear to be a bit honored deviated my friend Fabio zone in who is our one of our Italian instructors And he has a product with strong first called victorious Which is all about the kind of a military press so I started using his grip for the military press because I saw in the video And I'm like ooh that sounds cool.
I'm gonna start doing it well I irritated both my shoulders and I started I was blaming everything else I'm like I changed my grip on my pull-ups or maybe I did this or maybe and then I'm like me dummy The only thing he changed was your grip on the kettlebell and so in looking at my hands very honored deviated thumb very high in the Palm Fabio is very radial deviated with a thumb that's very low in his palm interesting He goes pinky side of the bell with the bell very deep in his palm I go thumb side with the bell angled at the direction of my wrist and and and Calice so to speak I go deep as I can without putting pressure on my thumb because again my thumb is very high in my palm And then there are people who are neutral they're neither honored or radial and the thumb position is varied in there in establishing this We really started taking a look at how people were gripping because okay if we're doing a static move like the get up Maybe we can get away with just going neutral for everybody But once you're pressing and you're actually moving load through this mid-range of the shoulder How you align that load and how you're moving that force through your structure really matters and so for me Thumbs side angled grip. I get a really strong push shoulders are healthy. Everybody's happy for Fabio It's pinky side deep neutral grip and people are neutral middle of the bell parallel to Calice's It is a very general recommendation as I'm getting in position for something like the get up or I'm thinking about where I want that Bell to end up in my clean We can increase our comfort by understanding our hand wrist architecture and then appropriately gripping pardon me gripping the bell either towards Thumb middle or pinky depending on hand wrist Interesting so what often happens for people if they are doing the clean Which is basically you're bringing the bell from the ground or from swing to essentially your shoulder for that And also for the snatch where you're bringing it again from you to the ground or part of the swing all the way overhead what people will Sometimes experience often sometimes or sometimes often is that the kettlebell will smash into the back of their forearm And so part of what we're talking about with the grip is one piece of trying to eliminate that What if anything or other things that people need to pay attention to whether they're doing a clean or snatch or anything else So they're not getting that mess of farm smashy font Absolutely easiest easiest way to think about let's talk about the clean specifically for just a moment You want that to roll up into the rack position You do not want to flip the kettlebell up into the rack position So just that visual of very smoothly rolling that kettlebell up into position So there is no impact and we want the kettlebell to come into the rack position like a butterfly with sore feet It should be very gentle and land arrive and the right on the right in the rack position at the same time your arm ends up in the Rack position if your arm ends up in the rack position first and then the kettlebell shows up bad news because that's gonna be a knock and Potential bruise so we want to think of rolling up and one of the quickest ways we can learn that is two things cheeky So if I go neutral grip with the handle on the ground and I want my right hand to end up with the bell and my left hand Comes over and covers my right and I kick it back and pick it up I'm gonna automatically tame the arc and not what that bell get way away from me I'm just gonna it's gonna actually guide me into that roll it up to the rack position And another thing that we could throw in there is don't clean it to your shoulder clean it to your hip Because the biggest problem people have with the cleanest they just do too much with it We're actually not moving the bell that far. We don't have to if we swing at a seven out of ten effort We're cleaning at a two.
It's a massive difference Yeah And then the other thing is if you picture me in that hinge position but rowing a kettlebell So I point my thumb back and then as I row it I point my thumb forward so a little twisting row there We're back and forward. I'm trying to explain back and forward so some points behind you some points to your shoulder Okay, basically here. Yeah, you're doing a Brutus ascending christians of alliance thumb down when you're having In the come on I can do it when you're in the hip hinge and then as you're coming it's coming towards your shoulder You're basically hitchhiking so thumbs one of your shoulder Yeah, so in that rack position I can actually touch my collarbone with my thumb So that's the kind of position we end up in but if I'm performing that row down at the hinge position and then during the row I stand up You'll bring the bell right into the rack position and probably not over clean it Yeah, that's a brilliant cue. It says if you've been doing this for a while that's cool It's up one or two things all the way did we get you said there was two things about this Do we cover both of those or we did the cheek clean and the row row to clean will really help clean up the clean And yeah, it's all we've got yeah, yeah Professional stand-up comic I know you're gonna work in room.
He's really got a number your audiences and look even in a kettlebell conference if that gets a laugh That's a real problem. I mean, yeah, but I do it anyway because it's not for them. It's for me That's a very normal mcdonald approach to comedy It's if he likes the joke and the audience doesn't laugh they're wrong and he'll just wait He did before he died now. He's waiting for a very long time Okay, so that him that kind of gets us through the clean Let's try chat about the snatch version of that and the snatch again is taking the kettlebell from basically the ground or swing to all the way overhead Yes, and so what happens there is and we went on a 20-plus year journey with this where in the original RKC book Popble describes the snatch as a clean that ends up overhead, okay?
Somewhere along the way people started talking about the snatch being a swing that ends up overhead, okay? When you do that you arc the bell in much wider arc away from yourself and now it has to Come over at the top Whereas if I'm treating this as a clean that ends up overhead I'm turning that bell over much differently and arriving at top at the same time And so when you tweet treat the the swing as a the snatch as a swing ends up overhead You have the potential for getting hit at the top of the snatch is much much greater That's interesting because I imagine people's natural inclination if you're gonna say hey go from that swing to getting overhead Would just be the swing harder to get your hand up there and you're setting yourself up for that bell coming around your hand and just smashing Your forearm. There's nothing else that could do practically paint the fence So another Cobra Kai or karate kid reference If we think of the snatch being this paint the fence sort of motion Then you can see how the bells going to just float and very gently turn over at the top and then on the way down I'm just I'm painting the fence on the way down and that's really tight arc where I'm working in this motion Really helps with how we're performing the snatch That's really cool. Okay, so we talked about the four things that most people think about when it comes to kettlebell training So we got the get up.
We've got a swing. We've got a clean. We've got a snatch What is there beyond that most people are not aware of that has real value? Oh boy, the military press right away I think in the pre bench press days how much you can military press was the judge of overall strength And so I think performing the kettlebell military presses a really tremendous move Something that people should be doing the godless squat and the kettlebell front squat whether you're doing it with one bell or two bells Really nice vertical and when we contrast this with a barbell front squat where you really have to create either the olympic rack position Which I am not physically capable of doing because if I actually put my hand in the rack position the barbell is halfway through my face Or I've tweaked my wrist to the point where it actually damages my wrist to a certain extent and inhibits my grip strength Which I would never want to do so wait so you're saying after all this kettlebell training this was to make you rock hard You just can't tolerate throwing a barbell to your face Correct.
Okay, just checking especially through my face. I could probably hit it once but not through my face You remember and then it wouldn't matter The traditional barbell front squat where we're either in the kind of bodybuilder rack the zombie rack or the traditional olympic rack position There's how you have to handle that load is changed by the implement the barbell Whereas with the kettlebell that kettlebell is gonna sit over on my forearm in this little triangle in between the bicep and the in the Form and it centers with my body And the rack position compresses my rib cage so that I'm actually strengthening my breathing muscle Which are in my diaphragm in a very different way than I would if I was using a barbell And so I think the kettlebell front squat is one that we can definitely move towards and then peek behind the curtain of some moves They're still possible the push press the jerk the bent press the windmill There are some other exercises in the lexicon that really have some tremendous benefit to them and again Yep, speaking as someone who understands weightless terminology. I got all those with a windmill So the push press here just again if we put it on push press like a military press what you're doing is getting your legs involved So you've got to whether it's a kettlebell or anything So you've got that at your shoulder you take a very shallow squat and as you're pushing up from that's when you're also getting your hand over head The which have after that a dress which I'm sure oh jerk similar idea Except that you're really accentuating the leg part and rather than just worrying about getting the whatever the weight is over your head You're dropping further you're squatting more so it's like a it's as much as the weight is going up You were going down to catch both at the same time what we have after that one the bent press bent press what I mean Bim press is an old school lift where we open up into this back rack position and then it's actually not a press It is me pushing myself underneath the weight And so there there was an old continuum Especially and we'll focus more towards the barbell for just a second where if we were talking about the barbell military press And you progress to a point in load where you could no longer press it You would almost naturally begin to dip and drive and use some leg assistance to get that overhead and the push press is born You continue to push press until the weight's so heavy that the momentum from the first push Requires you to then drop underneath of it to fully walk out the arms and stand up And so there's this continuum from the military press to the jerk that kind of happens very naturally as we go up in load No, you know what this really is. This is guys who aren't willing to these are this is bro gym stuff from 100 years ago Where guys aren't willing to admit that they can't really lift that weight so they find ways of faking it So they can go see look what I did and say you just fake that you didn't move that weight at all You basically just dropped faster than the weight could drop until your arm was straight up and then you stood up That's not the same as lifting something and then arguments flare I 100% and the difference between something that is more of a grind pure strength lift versus that ballistic lift where you're using momentum and Actually trying to take advantage of your speed.
It's nice continuum there and with the dumbbell or the kettlebell We talk about the single kettlebell military press and once it's heavy enough We're going to open up a little bit and push it away where the body and the bell are moving at the same time side press Then the bell gets so heavy that I have to create this support position and drive myself underneath the weight Pardon me once I establish the rack position my job is to Statically drive myself away from that weight So I end up underneath it in the bent press position. You can look up arthro sax on Eugene sandow earlier in Yeah, it's like the classic one of the classic bodybuilding pictures from the early in the 200s The Olympia trophy with the that's Eugene sandow performing side press Clever. Okay, and windmill So the windmill is back to one of our loaded yoga moves where I've got my feet underneath my hips I turn my feet 45 degrees away from my working side So if I'm gonna have my right arm overhead, I'm gonna have my feet angled to the left 45 degrees Then I'm going to push back into at a 45 degree angle that right hip Because once you shift the feet and get into this position The hip is going to be slightly offset So then my job is to push it back at a 45 degree angle to get it vertical And then I continue to hinge into that position performing windmill Interesting weird So we get a good piriformis and hip stretch too many people get into the window and shoot for a hamstring stretch And that's really not what we're shooting for when we do the window We're trying to get into that into into those ropes hip rotators and piriformis and one of the things that I'm a little bit passionate about as far as For things like swings and deadlifts and squats is using the amount of foot out term that you need In those symmetrical stance positions single leg stance goes by the tendrils in those symmetrical stance positions And I'll use myself as an example because it's all I've got I have a 62 degree alpha angle cam style FAI and anterior labor room is completely torn anterior superior labor Let me say for people who don't know what that is you will continue to not know what that is Because we're not going to dive into that diagnostics I have square pegs and round holes. It's the easiest way to think about it If I do not go with a hip out term I cheat myself of a lot of hip range of motion and if your hip stops your back starts Yeah, that's a bad trade-off And so creating the foot position that you need to move effectively means I do my swings my matches Everything squats with my feet turned out Well, the hip rotator is going to get a little tight or short in that position But when those how I stretch those and maintain some balance in my hip and keep things opened up And to think about how some kettlebell biomechanics apply to other things What you just said for anyone who goes to a gym and uses any sort of leg press machine Whether it's a hack squat or a leg press or any of those similar idea If you don't turn your feet out a little bit You're going to be limiting the range of motion you have Not getting the full impact on your legs and your hips And it's all going to either not be effective enough because you're not getting up a stretch Or it's going to then start going to your back and ways that are not Let's say non-ideal at the very least But you mentioned something a moment ago in passing and it was not a grody kid reference that got But it was single leg And what got me to getting my first kettlebell was as a sprinter I was doing a bunch of stuff and I got really into doing single leg Not stiff leg, it's a misnomer stiff leg deadlifts It's basically slightly knee bent but doing single leg deadlifts And I spit and paste and swizzle sticks made a approximation of the kettlebell with a bunch of weights and a bunch of electrical piping And then a friend of mine who was actually at the time selling kettlebells Was so offended by my little contraption that he gave me an 88 pound kettlebell And so that was that's something that again most people hadn't even thought of as being a kind of kettlebell exercise So there's these other exercises that are non-ballistic that are other things that are kind of round out The pantheon of kettlebell exercises, so single leg deadlift being one What else we have in that domain?
It's almost anything you can do with a dumbbell you can do with a kettlebell But if you want to do some one on rows you want to use it for deadlift, single leg deadlift, suitcase deadlift Use it for a goblet squat, all of those things So basically think a bridge floor press or a floor press sort of situation So working on the pecs and the chest if you're into that sort of thing I don't know why anybody wanted to do that That's a picture of pretty much anything you could use a dumbbell for You can use a kettlebell for But the kettlebell is easily passed from hand to hand And that offsets and or mask continues to have a lot of benefits where a single leg deadlift with a dumbbell May take you beyond the range that you can control And really you shouldn't be going that deep The kettlebell becomes it sits off the ground, especially if you're using an appreciable Weight say 24 kilo and above You're going to be far enough off the ground where your range of ocean is almost naturally limited to a more ideal range One of the things about both kettlebells and dumbbells that becomes an obstacle for some people Is getting a range of weights Now sorry I'm having a flashback Some super skinny to the point of anorexic distance runners that I used to be on the track with at the same time Their coach had them doing some kettlebell work after they were done running And these are guys who you know These are world champion distance runners Who couldn't do a push up and they were using a two pound kettlebell for doing swings It was just humiliating to watch which makes no sense because I'm not humiliated I was just watching just to shake him ahead But nonetheless getting a range of bells or a range of dumbbells can be off putting for some people Have you played with any of the adjustable weight kettlebells? I haven't and I'm gonna make a pitch right now for if we go back to the traditional set of kettlebells Would have been a 16, 24 and 32 kilo And in Russian measurements, it was poots So you had one poot, one and a half poot, two poot So 16, 24, 32 kilo And an eight kilo of a shot Wait for the final let's do the math on that for people who don't think in kilos Because we're holdouts for not using kilos So 16 is roughly 35 pounds ish 24 so we're talking about 50 pounds plus money And what do you say the other one is? 32 kilo, so 70 and a half pounds There we go, okay Yep, so the jumps there the 16 plus pound jumps that you have between those loads There's actually a benefit to that And so when we tend to think nowadays in incremental loading fashion, right? We're going to go up a pound to two and a half pounds five pounds whatever it is We're going to do these nice little small incremental jumps And over time if I just add a pound to my bench press a day I'll be bench pressing 360 whatever pounds more because it's a leap year so I can't really have any days So we'll end up benching 300 pounds more and of course this is fiction The benefit of having step loading forced upon you Let's say you get this 16 24 32 kilo bell and you can press the 24 kilo right now But you can't press the 32 So instead of going out and buying all the microwaves You're forced to stay with the 24 kilo bell build skill build tissue build the neurology and patterning and volume That leads to being able to press the 32 kilo bell And that's progression where you're forced to stay at own build volume at and adapt to that load Before you take on the heavier load has tremendous benefit And when you look at periodization in general and you look at a six week meso cycle why is it six week long We know that within two weeks you get a tremendous bump in strength and and progression because of the neurological adaptations It takes another four weeks for your tissues to catch up So stabilizing the results quickly lost or sorry quickly gained quickly lost So if you want to maintain a progression You need to stay there for a while and own it and build that volume and skill and progression And so step loading and the kind of what appears to be this brutish forced march towards owning one way before you take on another Actually has a lot of benefit.
That's very interesting. What was I gonna say that knows not about that? Oh, so you were shaking eight pound kettlebells these tiny little baby bells that are just silly Please say more for those people who have those are now feeling embarrassed Or justified either one works for me I think that from a general fashion people are stronger than they think they are Now obviously that goes wrong and people end up in situations where they're not as strong as they thought they were and they run into problems But a lot of people will sell themselves short And so early in the kettlebell days when they only came in kilos and nobody understood kilos because we think like that I would say to somebody hey go grab that eight and go ahead and do this movement and it could have been A deadlift a single idea of the road whatever it was and at the end of the set. I'd be like how that feel Eight pounds that felt fine.
I'm like no that was almost 17 pounds. They're like what? Yeah, you just moved 17 pounds really easily. Oh, I might be a little stronger than I think Yeah, you're a lot stronger than you think so now let's grab that 12 26 pounds and let's do something with that And so and you can only get away with it for so many times before they started doing the math You're wrong because I had a when I was doing heavy lifting which I'm not doing now because I've got spine issues I like to lift and kilos because even though I knew I could do the translation into pounds I didn't and there's something different about lifting 200 kilos versus 440 pounds and which I never did 200 150 But nonetheless, it's a very different thing in your brain because I remember the first time when I was lifting pounds and I deadlifted 400 First of all, it was just a psychological barrier so to get psyched up for doing I was totally able to do it But I was just so terrified about the number four at the beginning of what I was lifting that it took a little while to get you know Ready to do that then it got worse because as soon as I deadlifted 400 I had two thoughts immediately thereafter The first was oh crap now I gotta go for 500 and luckily the second one was hey, you're a moron So I never did that so let's say so my god So we talked about the list independently.
Let's talk about just workout structure if you will and how doing using a kettlebell for that Is a different game than what many people are thinking about or used to think about getting a shake getting strong etc etc We'll create two different categories We'll talk about grinds which would match up more with traditional strength training Progressions and training plans and we'll talk about ballistics which really start to play by their own rules If I'm structuring something like a military press program with the kettlebell You'll see some fairly traditional programming to show up in there Maybe I'm working on a five by five approach Maybe or maybe I'm working on ladders and performing one two three four reps So we have rungs one one rep to rep for with rest in between it's not a continuous thing And then I'm progressing to the point where I can do five ladders to five Which is actually about 150 presses if you're doing both arms And so it's a lot of work to build up towards five set five ladders to five within squats presses Bridge for press things that we talked about you'll see some more traditional programming kick in there Although we might take a bit of a higher volume approach with ballistics Which we would consider swings cleans snatches and jerks things of that nature The loading is so quick and so brief because we are really doing I think very kashansky would call it a power metric move Not a iometric move, but we're pretty far on the power side of things when we're doing swings clean snatches jerks So now the volume that I can accrue because the amount of time I've loaded is so short I can really start to pump the volume a little bit and if you look at something like pothole simple and sinister He recommends basically a daily training volume about 100 swings Well, most people never think in terms of doing 100 bicep curls and nor should they but with swings I can I grew up in runna, Virginia And there is a classic restaurant there I run up called the texas tatter Which is this old steel counter thing that at two in the morning is the place to be downtown And there's ten little stools and you have the every walk of life represented and there's a line out the door There's a sign behind the counter that says we can serve a thousand people 10 at a time So I didn't get 100 reps out of you five at a time And so we break it down into these high power high quality chunks, but the total volume that we can achieve is pretty significant That's interesting. I like the idea I'm a big fan of doing little things often just because I'm fundamentally lazy So like to do The other people who like to go to the gym for two hours i'm not that guy It's just not my thing But like the other day happily my home gym is right next to where we have our television So I did a little something before tv watching did a little something after tv watching now granted things i'm doing are not Easy so i'll do norocamstering curls until I fall over or which is now is getting to be more and more because I can go all the way down All the way back so it takes a while till I fall over but i'll just do that and then go watch tv And then when i'm done i'll because i'm vain back to your point about working chest I will actually know what it is just for the fun of saying it and being a little transparent what or the hell that means I've been doing more things to build more muscle because i'm 61 and having more is better And so i'm working on all of those body parts that i don't really care about other than it would be nice to take off my shirt and have my wife go Or even better to have other women who are 30 years younger do the same thing i have to confess that would be fun But i'll do some significant chest related something lately my favorite exercise is the reverse grip dumbbell bench press So it works really well in a whole lot of ways they're entertaining i can do with bells too actually i know i think that but anyway So yeah, i'm a big fan of those little things more often and it's one of those things that's interesting Many people just don't think about breaking it up They don't think they have to go to the gym for this amount of time You have to do the workout for this amount of time rather than just making it such a In a real part of your day where the problem is it just doesn't feel like you're doing as much And so you so there's a weird psychological component to if you don't walk out of there Just sweaty and pumped and tired and exhausted and thinking people were staring at you and they're not so Like with that back to the my single leg stiff leg at deadlift I gotta bring that bell we moved offices so i don't have it here But i used to have it right next to my desk and just four or five times a day i do a set of ten And it was yeah i'm gonna bring nothing in here and then of course then if i do that i won't have it at home i gotta buy no one Okay, there we go. So there you go. All right, my bells have Expanded a number over the years.
Yes, there's several of them upstairs Oh, if someone's looking to just get started with kettlebell things and obviously this leads to talking about you and what you're doing What can but before we get to how they can connect to you if somebody's looking to get started whether they're looking to just integrate this into what they're currently doing That's something that can be helpful for whatever sport they're participating in or if they want to think of it as just a workout thing The same way you would go to the gym and do whatever else. How would you recommend people think about that little and do that? So there's a couple different things pommel simple and sinister program is a great starting point for pretty much anybody The get-ups involved the swing deadlift the swing you're gonna go through the gobble squat the hip bridge and halo And there's a lot of benefit to just getting started there now I'm always a fan of getting an individualized approach If I can learn something well in the immediate term I can do better with that thing over the long term So rather than suffer all my own for six months or a year trying to figure something out Why not just get a coaching session and even if you just want to get coached on the get the swing the get-up One or two sessions there can save you months of frustration trying to figure it out on your own So that those would be my two biggest recommendations We have workshops that we do that are four and a half hour kind of bite-sized things that take you through different aspects of the Of kind of about training but somewhere in that mix of symbol and sinister book or online course An individualized session and a workshop where you still get some individual some individual tips great ways for folks to get started Awesome And so if they're going to do this week, this is a perfect segue for if people want to get in touch with what you're doing Describe what you've been doing since you've been doing this now for over 21 years on the crown of the mccr Talk about how they can get in touch with you and how they can learn things within from you Absolutely. So I do articles and things through strong first dot com I have my instagram feed at Brett Jones sotg that where I post videos and do things my website is applied strength dot com I have now three different products on strong and fit dot com where I have the iron cardio video iron cardio book And my new program that just came out is mind the gap Which is all about filling in those mobility stability and strength gaps when you follow a minimalist routine and you don't Be in the gym for hours at a time.
You have to accept the fact that there's that minimalist routine will leave potentially some gaps So how do you fill those gaps in a timely efficient fashion and how do you do your training so that you feel good? I think people's unspoken desire and fitness is to feel good. Yeah, they very rarely come in and say that typically it's I want to lose Wait, I want to do this and do that but in the background is I just want to feel good Yeah, and so that's a direction there beautiful. I should have asked this before I said how can everyone get in touch with you Is there anything we left out?
On forever probably but anything oh my gosh. Yeah, we can have a bunch of different conversations But I think that the overall thing is I'm 21 plus years into using this thing called a kettlebell And I learned something every time I pick it up. I think you've been running for how many years One two three actually a couple of five years. Yeah, I've been doing it for a little while and you know what is a good point I literally I was at an event Oh, when was this and let's call it November and I bumped into a guy who gave me a cue that after all the years that I've been sprinting Change my sprinting form in a positive way It was like oh that is something that I've been trying to do that I couldn't figure out of my own it's brilliant Yeah, and so approaching this as not something that you're gonna master in six weeks But knowing that I'm 21 plus years into swinging a bell and I learned something every time I pick up a bell Every time I clean it every time I press it is an opportunity to learn Boy, wouldn't we approach our fitness in a different way rather than the just workout?
And that's why I was strong first when we very strongly in the direction of we don't refer to our training sessions as workouts their practices We are practicing the skill now dr. ed Thomas who was a mentor of mine and somebody that I learned a lot from always said I never went to the gym to work out. I went to the gym to learn Now in the process of learning did I get tired? Did I get sweaty?
Did I get quote fit? Yes, but that wasn't the goal the goal was to learn the next progression to do the previous progression better to enhance my skill to learn And you've been doing it for a lifetime of running and sprinting there are olympic lifters powerlifters There are musicians who have been practicing the same piece There's a famous cellist who in 92 was asked why he was still practicing and his response was because I think I'm starting to make some progress It's way Ruth Gordon had that line which he won an academy award. I wish anyway. Yeah, no, it's a really approach.
Sorry. Keep going No, I just I would love for everyone to approach their training as an opportunity to learn and to that would I think really change people's relationship with with fitness And I'm hoping one day to do a perfect swing, but we'll see if that ever happens Good luck on that one if this is I think about like Japanese art forms like calligraphy or T ceremony or any of these the ideas get it perfectly Right knowing that's impossible and that little paradoxical thing is what makes it interesting and there's always something there I'm Ruth Gordon's line. She was like, I know she was 80 years old when she won the academy award Her climate I can't tell you how encouraging this is I love it Good, Brett as always and I say as always because we've now had this conversation about this conversation We've had two big chats and absolutely pleasure. I'm really thrilled that we got to share this everyone I do hope for anyone listening slash watching that you take advantage of just exploring this and seeing if kettlebells or something you want to play with And integrating what you're doing.
I highly recommend it There are as we were alluding to lots of applications for these where you're just Replacing something you're already doing with something maybe a little more interesting for you physically let alone something that looks more interesting in your basement Where people are going to walk by and have some opinion they could be interested in conversation too. Anyway, thank you. Thank you Thank you for everyone else just a reminder check out everything Brett said and all the places he was pointing you to and on my end At over to www.join the movement movement.com for previous episodes Place to engage with us on social media places to find the podcast if you're not happy with where you already found it And if you want to drop me an email because you have a recommendation or a suggestion or a compliment or a complaint Or someone who you think should be on the podcast. I'm still trying to get someone who thinks I have a case of cranial reorientation syndrome Who's willing to spar with me about that?
That'd be fun. You can drop me an email It said you can email me at move move at join the movement movement.com and until then as always just go out Have fun and live life-y first