Training for Technique as a Route to Success
Training, Kettle Bells and Personal Records
TWO WORDS… TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING
This morning at 7am, I showed up to Fluid Strength for the general Tuesday Kettle Bell workout.
Under normal circumstances, this workout would last 45 minutes and run the gamut of intersting, quirky and absolutely useful body conditioning.
Today happened to be ‘not normal’.
By not normal, I mean it was the semi-annual evaluation workout, a workout where we push ourselves and find our upper boundary.
The only problem with today’s evaluation centered around the fact that I’ve barely touched a kettle bell since early August (time of writing is late September). My family and I had to leave Bend due to fire smoke, we’ve been mostly in California. While we were away I worked out with my 15 kg kettle bell a few times but nothing serious (15 kg == small weight).
Fortunatly, I felt both excited to push my limits and apparently I have learned quite a lot since I started with Fluid Strength.
The day’s exercise involved a smart muscular warm up and the a max attempt at the kettle bell press, double kettle bell squat and a max single arm swings in 5 min set.
As a fitness hobbyist, I’m currently focused on preparing for the Strong First Level I Coach’s certification. At my body weight this means I have to do the core 6 kettle bells exercises (clean, swing, snatch, press, squat, getup) at 24kg. I set my goal for the day to hit 24kg in the Swing, Press and Double KB squat.
First up after the warm up, the Press, 24kg went up pretty easily and then we decided to push it to 28kg, a huge personal record.
After the press, into the Double KB Squat, again the double 24kg went down smoothly and then another set with the double 28kg.
For reference, double 28kg is equivalent to 124lbs, the single 28kg is about 62 pounds (62 pints of beer, a queen sized box spring, a 9 year old child, a male bear cub)
Update After Day 2 of Testing
Second test day consisted of the getup, double kettle bell clean and then the snatch, again, output was in 24kg, then double 28kg and back to 24kg for the snatch, video below.
The Getup
Double KB Cleans
KB Snatch
Enough Self Congratulations, Make Your Point…
My point with this, actually, I want to highlight and honor the role of training, technique and the trainer.
The trainer is Tash Anderson, founder of Fluid Strength in Bend, Or. Tash is great and I found her because like many things, I began asking myself good questions, questions about improving my hip flexibility.
The technique and training are really an extension of Tash’s knowledge base. Some important aspects of the teaching and training with Tash have been;
- Great fine tuning feedback, small precise adjustments that can be easily understood, incorporated into behavior and then demonstrated for completeness.
- A willingness to break movement down to fundamentals, in my case, my kettle fundamentals needed some work, for the period 2017-2020, the 15kg kettle bell challenged me and I didn’t progress much. I’ve since come to understand that as much as I loved kettlebells, they weren’t loving me back, a few small adjustments and changes massively unblocked my progress.
- An insanely well programmed set of workouts every day of the week in an efficient time package, always respecing us as learners and always offering us space to improve.
- A well equipped, professional space, always ready to roll
Most importantly, I hit strong personal records today because of how well my body adapted to learning and internalize effective technique. I strongly attribute this growth to Tash’s teaching style. I also wish that professional development could be as simple as finding the right kettle bell coach (which actually took many years btw).
Life is short, an optimized human body makes thing fun,will probably be absolutely necessary in the computer dominated future and can really reduce the overwhelming nature of life.
With Iron,
John D.
