4 Mighty Effective Tips to Rapidly Boost Your Kettlebell & Bodyweight Strength
Kettlebells have a long history among old school strongmen, weightlifters, circus performers, special operators, and countless other tough-as-nails men and women.
The reason why is simple:
The kettlebell is one of the most versatile tools around for building strength in every nook and cranny of your body. Combine them with bodyweight movements and you’ve got yourself a system that can forge bold new strength and crush endless amounts of weakness from here to eternity.
Now, I don’t have to tell you 1,001 reasons why kettlebells kick all the tush all the time, but I DO feel compelled to tell you that there are a few tips that I’ve found incredibly helpful over the years to help kick-start your strength once again and thrust you boldly forward toward new heights of strength, muscle, and balls-to-the-wall epicness.
Without further ado, here are…
4 tips to rapidly boost your kettlebell & bodyweight strength
#1: Shorten your workouts
Strange though this may seem, shortening your workouts can have a big boost on your strength. This is for a few reasons:
a. It forces you to focus on what’s important (namely, the moves that recruit the most muscle)
b. It encourages you to give it all you got in the short period of time you have, so you’re focusing more on exerting yourself rather than “sparing yourself”
c. Short workouts are easier to recover from.
This is no joke either, as 1 hour + marathon workouts are not only hard to keep up with over the long haul, but as anyone with a spouse, kiddos, a demanding career, and social responsibilities knows, they’re hard as hell to recover from. And that’s key, because it’s not how hard you can work out that determines your success, but how well you recover from it.
#2: Workout more frequently
Right along with #1, frequent workouts with a laser-like focus work wonders for smashing old plateaus and building wild new levels of strength by virtue of the fact that you can attack your strength work more often.
Not only that, but your body will learn to recover more quickly than if you always put, say, 1–2 days between your workouts. What’s more, it will increase the number of moderate and light workouts you are able to do, which not only painlessly increases your weekly training volume, but is also the bread and butter of successful long-term training (NOT the balls-to-the-wall pukers everyone loves so much)
#3: Build upon your foundation
This is a nice way of saying “stop doing Turkish get ups, swings, and goblet squats to the exclusion of everything else”.
Yes, these moves are critical to learn and yes, they are the undisputed foundation of all successful kettlebell training, but once your foundation is built, it’s time to put a house and a roof over it! My vote goes to some of the moves listed in the next section…
#4: Move in ‘odd angles’
Kettlebells’ and calisthenics’ versatility and ability to reach angles and positions that are awkward or nearly impossible with barbells and dumbbells are one of the more unsung benefits of these systems.
Some of my favorite moves include things like face pulls, incline presses, bottoms-up windmills, single-leg deadlifts, bent presses, Hindu pushups, Hindu squats, sumo bent over rows, and uneven kettlebell drills (i.e. one light and one heavy kettlebell).
#5: (BONUS!) Mix up set and rep ranges
5 sets of 5 reps is a great way to build real-world strength — for a while.
But eventually your body will stop just handing over new and exciting strength gains, and you’ll have to “take a short cut” by doing rep ranges that you’ve been told for too long are only good for hypertrophy (muscle-building) or endurance. Examples would be
— 3–4 sets of 8–12 reps
— 2–3 sets of 15–25 reps
This can potentially help you increase your connective tissue strength (tendons, ligaments, etc.) as well as increase your strength in your slow-twitch muscles. And the ability to better recruit more muscle will mean that once you go back to 3–5 rep sets, you’ll be able to lift heavier and harder.
Plus, that bit of extra muscle mass you put on will look pretty nice on ya.
On that note, if you like training that:
- Gives you more strength than it takes from you
- Improves your stamina and resilience simultaneously
- Powers-up every nook, cranny, crevice, and corner of your Soft Machine
Then you just might like my 9-Minute Kettlebell and Bodyweight Challenge.
As the name indicates, it’s just 9 minutes long, and it’s designed to be done WITH your current workouts — NOT instead of them.
Even cooler:
Many find that it actually amplifies their strength in their favorite kettlebell and bodyweight moves, like presses, squats, pullups, and more.
And best of all, it’s free.
How free?
I’m talkin’ freer than the 4th of July, my friend.
Get thee thine own copy here => http://www.9MinuteChallenge.com
Have fun and happy training!
Aleks Salkin
