"I dare you to find a single exercise, kettlebell or not, that delivers more benefits than the kettlebell swing!"
Pavel Tsatsouline
Author: Enter The Kettlebell! Strength Secret of The Soviet Strongmen
The guy in the following article was already as strong as hell, although also slightly overweight. In attempting to lose some of this weight he decided he would complete 10,000 kettlebell swings in 10 days. An ambitious and intimidating task which was met with such responses:
"You'll get compartment syndrome. Kiss your arms goodbye"
"You have deep-seated emotional problems"
Results: His gains were mostly made in increased performance as opposed to fat loss or lean muscle gain. However, what i found particularly useful and cool was his approach:
- He took advantage of how the human mind often works during a tough workout, to enable him to push beyond the point where most people (tough or not) would have already given up.
Check it out...
Excerpt from T-Nation:
"Trapped in Vegas"
On Day #7, James hit the wall. His wrists had exploded from using the 48-kilo bell the day before, and he had been up until 1 A.M. editing articles and was 800 reps behind schedule.
This gave him a severe case of "the fuckits" and he didn't want to move. So he tricked himself.
The workout he devised to get back on track wasn't a breathing ladder, took nearly two hours, and when it was over he'd done 1,860 swings. But he didn't know that until it was over and he counted them.
This protocol is based on three concepts:
Emotional perspective and pacing strategy: James had already done 975 reps in a breathing ladder, and that was a pretty big day. That makes 1800 reps a potentially miserable experience. Who wants to spend 1800 reps thinking about 1800 reps?
Open versus closed ended exercise: As James said, "Modern theories of exercise effort put your rate of perceived effort as actually causal, not just a consequence of the fact that you're getting tired. However, perceived effort is badly affected by knowing how much you've done so far. This protocol had to be open-ended, like a bushwalk which just has to go until it stops."
Endspurt: Endspurt is the German word for "finishing strong." Think of any time you've had to run a fixed distance or do a set of heavy breathing squats. As soon as you get close to the finish and the magic words "almost done" float through your mind, you're suddenly able to dig deep and finish with a strong burst of effort comparable to the output you had at the beginning.
Here's how the protocol works: Go find your jar of loose change. Almost everyone has one. Dump it out and grab a huge handful of the small coins. Don't look too closely or count them. To make it even harder to know how many you've got, split them between both front pockets of your track pants.
Each coin represents one set of twenty swings. Do one set, toss one coin from your collection into a container and do another. The sets will go by quickly enough that eventually you'll lose count of how many you've done, and despite furious speculation you'll never be sure how many you've got left. The answer is always, "Just one more."
Like being in a casino, you'll lose track of time and the amount of money in your pockets – Trapped in Vegas.
Once you get towards the end and you can feel only a few coins left, switch strategies to take advantage of the endspurt effect. Line the remaining coins up in rows of five (100 reps per row) and count them.
You now know exactly how many reps you've got left and the final burst is on. Compared to the first phase, this will fly by.
When you're done, count them all up. When James did this he ended up with 93 coins, for a total of 1860 reps. Would he do it again? "No. At least, not for a while."
Read the entire article here:
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