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For raw beginners, male or female, I recommend Pavel's From Russia With
Tough Love book. FRWTL features a highly detailed and fool proof 'start up'
program, which concentrates on box squats, power crunches, and swings the
first several weeks, alternating tough and easy days on the hard days you do
two sets of maximum repetitions, and the easy days you do half that. You
work almost every day to 'grease the groove' and keep the muscles in 'active
recovery' even when you are not pushing hard.
Even intermediate gireviks will find much of use in FRWTL. It should be
part of every Girevik’s training curriculum.
If you can't get hold of FRWTL, a good sample program for a month long
'break in' period, might be:
1) 510 sets of (5L+5R) 1 arm swings. Rest a full minute between each set.
Keep the form super tight; don't worry about swinging the bell above the
waist.
2) 23 sets of box squats hold the bell by the horns in front of you, same
feeling as 'reaching back with your butt to sit on a bench'. The bench should
be at a comfortable height, lower it over the weeks as you get more flexible
and balanced until you are practically sitting on the floor. At that point you
are ready for 'deck squats' or "Good Morning" stretches with kettlebells, 34
reps.
3) Overhead (Military) press 23 sets of 34 on each side.
4) Windmills 23 sets of 3 on each side.
5) Power crunches or 'rollback' situps to taste.
Start out learning the first 2 exercises and introduce a new exercise every
week or so (unless you are impatient to proceed). Alternate hard and easy
days, try to lift 46 times a week for 1030 minutes to keep your muscles and
nervous system in 'grease the groove' mode. But be conservative in your
starting numbers, pay attention to how your joints (especially elbows) feel
back off if they start to hurt (i.e., burn instead ache with DOMS).
All right, let’s assume that a month or so has gone by and you can
comfortably swing, snatch, press, and clean your kettlebells for several
repetitions. You want to move up to the next level. How should a budding
girevik proceed? My experiences with Kettlebells leads me to believe that the
advanced beginner (and trainees trying to rehabilitate) should concentrate on
workouts with high numbers of sets with low reps for the ballistic drills and a
'singles and doubles' approach to the grind drills. My thinking in this regard
has been heavily influenced by Coach Ethan Reeve’s 'Density Training'
protocol and Matthew Wiggins' 'Singles and Doubles' protocol. Several of the
forum’s senior members and RKC instructors have also gravitated toward this
approach, and will vouch for its
effectiveness.
There are compelling reasons for an advanced beginner or intermediate to
train this way:
1) Splitting training volumes into high sets of low reps helps the trainee stay
focused and pay proper attention to form. Bad form is one of the primary
causes of injury in resistance training.
2) It allows the trainee to feel almost as fresh at the end of the exercise as at
the beginning. This follows Party principles of training as often as possible
while staying as fresh as possible.
3) It has much the same cardiovascular benefits as HIIT or Tabata protocols if
the rest periods are kept short; in the later stages of a cycle, the trainee’s pulse
rate may immediately leap above to the 120’s or higher (even at the end of a
supposed rest period) and stay there for the entire set.
4) The demands on the body's energy systems mimics the demands of many
sports, including martial arts, football, and racket sports explode, work like
mad for several seconds, then rest for a short period. The body has to train to
become accustomed to this mode of effort – it requires different metabolic
pathways than straight long sets.
5) Setting the weight down every few repetitions helps the trainee avoid some
of the risks of joint strain and overuse syndromes that can be caused by
extended loading periods on unprepared joints.
6) It changes the mental experience of the advanced beginner as the training
volumes increase. Instead of a strained ‘death march’, the trainee looks
forward to a manageable series of discrete, short efforts. Thus it is much
easier to begin when your energy is low or you are having a bad day. Maybe
you can’t face the idea of 60 snatches in a row, but you CAN face the prospect
of performing 5 snatches, resting a bit, then doing 5 more, etc. This leads to
fewer missed workouts – and consistency is a key factor to success.
Here is one way to go about it:
Pick a ballistic drill you want to excel in and pick a number of total reps that
seems very challenging (if not unreachable) to you for instance, 100 reps of 1
arm swings with a kettlebell (100 left+100 right). Then break the goal
number up into a high number of low rep sets and start with half that number
total – i.e. start with 10 sets of (5L+5R) and build up 20 sets (5l+5r) of 1 arm
swings over several weeks.
Keep the rest periods very brief, under a minute if you can. As your wind and
stamina improve, you can start a new set each minute. If you are performing
onehanded drills, stand up, take a breath or two, and ‘reset’ your form while
switching from one hand to the other. As you get stronger and build up
endurance, you may add a few reps to each set, but I would place more
emphasis on shortening the rest periods and adding more sets.
To avoid burn out or systemic overtraining, only practice this way with one or
two exercises at a time in a 24 week cycle. As the number of sets climbs, you
may find you can only effectively train one exercise this way per session,
although I find I can normally do two if time permits. Also, don’t be afraid to
have days where you deliberately back off on the number of sets by 3050%;
you may find that inserting an easy day or two allows you to return refreshed
to a higher level than before.
Once you reach your goal of number of sets, you have two options:
1) Begin a ‘density training’ style protocol to increase your consecutive
number of reps per set until you can do 100 straight. However there is no real
need to for a beginner or intermediate to do this except as a test of mental
toughness.
2) Pick another ballistic exercise and put the original on the ‘back burner’ for
a while, just doing enough to keep the ‘feel’ of the exercise. This is the
approach I would recommend. For instance, the Kettlebell Clean and Press is
different enough from a Swing to challenge the girevik, keep his training
fresh and give the lower back less stress, but at the same time engages many
of the same motor patterns. The snatch requires more focus and effort than
either the swing or the C&P and might be done for lower totals such as 1520
x (5L+5R). Improving in any of these drills will improve performance in all
of them. At the same time 'overspecializing' for a time on an exercise will
drill it into your nervous system, permanently improving your performance in
it when you go back to it.
For grind drills, I like a similar method Matthew Wiggins describes in his
book Singles and Doubles. His training methods are centered around heavy
sandbags and awkward objects, but he uses an extraordinarily flexible
protocol that can be applied to other exercises such as Kettlebell grinds,
Clubbell casts and presses, Evil Wheel rollouts, high intensity bodyweight
exercises or even strenuous yoga asanas such as the Full Locust and Wheel
poses.
Again the idea is to perform multiple sets (1020) of very low repetitions (12
or maybe 3 depending on the exercise) with very brief rest periods. A typical
Kettlebell application would be to perform 12 repetitions of the Good
Morning stretch with a 1.5 or 2 pood kettlebell at the beginning of each
minute until you’ve completed a maximum number of 2040 reps over the
course of 20 minutes. Set the Kettlebell down between repetitions during the
rest periods. Depending on your energy levels, you could then perform
alternate Military Presses (1L+1R) with a kettlebell you normally could only
press for 23 reps at a time, executing 20 sets in 20 minutes and setting the
bell down in between sets.
Again, the trainer should strictly limit the number of exercises he performs
this way during a given 24 week cycle, rotating to new exercises each cycle
to keep things fresh.
This approach let me perform 30 Liberty Torch presses with 2 15 lb
Clubbells, when my previous comfortable limit was 3 sets of 6. It also
allowed me to reduce the ‘choke’ on the Clubbell handles by several inches
over a month of training, greatly increasing the leverage and grip
strengthdemands of this exercise and giving even more benefits. If you want
to learn more, check out Wiggy’s book at www.conditioningsecrets.com.
There may be a time, after a year or more of training with Kettlebells when
the trainee decides to go for the extended ‘Death March’ sets required of
girevoy competitors and wouldbe Masters of Sport. However, this approach,
with its emphasis on ‘greasing the groove’ and ‘staying fresh’ will serve
many trainees well for their entire career, or as a fall back when they want to
regroup and recharge.