A Simple Strength & Muscle-Building “Hack” with Kettlebells
In today’s post I’m gonna show you how to deploy a simple strength & muscle-building hack you can add to your practice right now to improve our kettlebell technique.
It’s not something I see many people talk about and has been my sole focus lately — *being INTENTIONAL* in my strength training.
Are you being intentional?
Probably not.
Know why?
Because you’re busy and likely follow more of a “punch the clock” style workout and that’s totally cool, nothing wrong with it.
Punch the clock workouts are essential when you’re in a time crunch.
But, by adding this...
Simple Strength & Muscle-Building “Hack” with Your Kettlebells
... you can open the strength and muscle-building flood gates.
Elevation of your technical awareness
You consciously become self-aware of your technique. What's happening in the moment and where you can make adjustments each set.
You even enter a borderline meditative state where you become one with the movements and not worrying about sucking wind and dreading your next set.
Why should any of this be important to you?
Simply put -- the better your technical skill is — the more efficient you’ll be — which means you can lift more weight while staying fresh, become unbreakable, and reach your goals, FASTER.
Your strength accelerates
Each press you'll pause, assess the situation and focus on one aspect of the set to improve. Because of the paused dead starts (I like to think of this as an overhead deadlift) -- you accelerate your "starting strength".
Why is this important?
Aside from it jacking your press strength to the next level -- it could possible save your life one day. Especially if you're training Jiu-Jitsu.
There are countless situations where dead start strength is essential.
Plus, this hack works exceptionally well, when applied to lighter weights if you’re limited on bell selection and want to increase strength and size.
Dopamine Boost
The pure RAW enjoyment of your training will be at a never before, ALL time high. The more you enjoy what you're doing, the more consistent you’ll be — which means massive progress is soon to follow.
In my 19+ years experience in martial arts and strength training -- your exercise regiment won't always (and shouldn’t) be enjoyable but you SHOULD enjoy what you’re doing.
I know, sounds confusing.
What I mean is, sometimes your training will flat out SUCK -- depending on where you're at in a particular cycle -- BUT...
... you should always enjoy what it is you're doing.
For me, sometimes I hate knowing what I'm about to go through in certain cycles (like the beta test I just finished) for example, the long cycle clean and jerk.
I don't enjoy the tough training which comes with it, because it's a suck fest. But I DO LOVE the process of training and learning the nuances of the jerk.
All the details, the drills, etc...
See what I mean?
I recommend when you come off a tough training cycle, to transition for 4-8 weeks on a less intense program -- to work on your mechanics and address asymmetries but most importantly...
... to refocus your attention on being intentional.
You'll be amazed at how much enjoyment you'll get from this approach.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Enjoy!
Hec G.
P.S. -----> In case you want to give the workout a try which I did in today's post, here it is:
Grab a pair of bells you can strict press 10 times -- with relative ease.
This's a ladder protocol: (1, 3) x 7
Example ladder:
Set #1: 1 clean 1 press, rest.
Set #2: 1 clean 1 press x 3, rest.
This completes 1 ladder.
Go on to complete 7 total ladders.
(14 total sets)
Rest as needed between sets.
The rest periods should be intuitive.
If you like this program, I recommend checking out the entire system, here.