Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings: Just 12 Minutes a Day to Lose Weight, Prevent Sitting Disease, Hone Your Body and Tone Your Booty!

by Don Fitch

The two handed kettlebell swing is the foundation of all kettlebell exercises. It is very dynamic, involving swinging a heavy weight in a five foot arc, quickly repeated. The quick and continuous movement is very different in look and feel than most strength training. It offers an extremely quick way to be gaining, in just a few seconds, heart healthy cardiovascular exercise along with a body shaping muscular workout.

The exercise is also ballistic, which comes from the Greek, to throw. In the kettlebell swing you do indeed then throw the weight upward, (while holding on to and guiding it), meaning you have to generate force quickly, challenging your rapid-growing fast twitch muscles.

The kettlebell swing involves holding the kettlebell overhand with both hands, swinging it behind and back through the legs in a hiking football motion, and then swinging up and out in front, powered by a snap of the hips. The swing momentum slows and stops with the kettlebell up at shoulder l...

This single exercise, when repeated enough, provides huge benefits in fat loss, muscle gain and cardiovascular conditioning. Perhaps more than any other exercise, the kettlebell swing helps you slim down, pack on muscle and give your heart a healthy workout. This is why an entire book is devoted to it and to helping you do the swings that will revolutionize your fitness, strength and endurance.

Swinging the kettlebell tones the core and the muscles of the posterior chain, such as hamstrings and glutes. The swing replicates natural work movements of which we used to do a lot more, such as shoveling. The basic lifting motion is part of everyday need, such as lifting a child or hefting a bag of groceries.

Although the kettlebell swing is great for firming and shaping the arms, they don’t do the main work of lifting the kettlebell. The arms are relaxed, straight or slightly bent during the swings. Lift the kettlebell with a pop through your hips, not your arms. Your arms, forearms and hands will get plenty of exercise just guiding the weight, especially as it drops. ...

As with all weight training, breathing is very important in kettlebell swings. This is covered more later, but basically the rule is to exhale on the lift phase, that is, as the weight being boosted an...

The entire swing takes less than two seconds; my natural rhythm is 36 swings per minute, about 1.6 seconds per swing. This pace delivers 72 swings in two minutes. 54 swings in ...

The great news is that this perfect exercise is open to nearly everyone, of all ages and physical conditions. The motion is natural and replicates (and assists in) many daily activities. The intensity of the exercise is directly controllable by how heavy a weight is swung, and for how many swings.

For the young and healthy, kettlebell swings offer a quick and easy way to gain peak physical form and conditioning. Perhaps more than any other single exercise, kettlebell swings build both endurance and strength. For people at mid-life kettlebells swings help keep off fat, build functional muscle and prevent sitting disease. Seniors have in the kettlebell swing the means to maintain vitality, prevent loss of mobility and fight wasting away from loss of muscle and bone by building new muscle and bone. Don’t act your age; keep yourself young and strong with kettlebell swings. People carrying too much fat often have too little muscle. The kettlebell swings help with both aspects, quickly dropping fat while rapidly building calorie burning muscle tissue.

Some people beginning kettlebell swings may start with no weight. Just doing the swings with your hands holding an imaginary weight is a great way to start and develop good form. The box squat where you squat back and down over a 20 inch box is another zero-weight exercise that helps strengthen muscles and prepare you for kettlebell swings. Swinging no weight or very light weight offers virtually everyone the opportunity to gain the benefits of kettlebell swings. Overweight individuals or those who have not exercised for a period are wise to get a feel for the swings with no weight. Alternatively, a kettlebell of five pounds (2.3 kg) offers new users the feel and form of the weight and handles to grip.

Although training intensity can be reduced with lighter weights, especially at first, for full strength and endurance benefits you should eventually be swinging a fairly heavy weight for your minute and a half mini-workouts.

This book asks quite a lot of you in your quest to be fit and fierce. Twelve minutes of exercise, though astoundingly short in terms of the benefits they provide, is still not trivial. You are swinging a heavy weight for dozens, even hundreds of times a day. There had better be a pretty good reason why. There is! The kettlebell swing, with its mix of cardiovascular effort and fat-burning, muscle-building, strength-training may well be the best single exercise! Your kettlebell swings reward you, per swing, and per minute: • You look better! Fat loss, muscle tuning, body shaping, booty toning and posture improvement benefit your appearance, just as they improve your endurance, strength and health. • Your body is reshaped rapidly and muscles strengthened by your swings. Flab on your arms is replaced by functional muscle. Flabby thighs become sleek. • Your training makes you smarter. Well, at least helps you think better. Your swings flood your brain with fresh, oxygenated blood and top it off with a dose of testosterone. • Your general physical abilities improve markedly. You are better able to move, to carry things, to pick up kids, to play sports, to make love, to respond to emergencies with strength and endurance. • Your swings help your posture, allowing you to stand tall. The posterior chain, so well worked with kettlebell swings, includes the key posture muscles. • Your training makes your butt look smaller! Actually your butt becomes shapelier, as the gluteal muscles i...

Your kettlebell exercises strengthen your bones and fight osteoporosis. • Kettlebell swings are great for the back and can help overcome back pain and immobility. • Kettlebell swings are the fastest exercise. You can go from sitting to full exertion in seconds and be all done in little over a minute. • With your daily workouts, you will be fierce. And why not? You are slimmer, harder, taller, smarter, fitter, and your booty be bad! The twelve minutes are not done at once. As a matter of fact, eight sessions, each 90 seconds long may be optimal for exertion and spacing for maximizing metabolic risk protection. Eight sessions has you exercising frequently throughout the day, in quick, easy sessions. Well, quick at least. Your twelve minutes is roughly the cardiovascular equivalent of running an eight minute mile pace for a mile and a half in 12 minutes. A moderate daily aerobic workout is a key component of nearly any health regimen. It is very good for your heart health to raise your heart rate and respiration with cardiovascular exercise on a daily basis. In many ways, the first minute and a half of running a long distance is the most difficult part of a run, as the body shifts from rest to intense exercise. In this same way, the 90 second kettlebell swings are quite intense, as your body adjusts from no-load to heavy exertion immediately. Kettlebell swings represent a type of interval training, a short burst of intense exercise. Twelve minutes a day of kettlebell swings...

Kettlebell swing sessions, spaced throughout the day provide a nearly perfect “antidote” to the sitting diseases. Think about it, performing kettlebell swings is nearly the opposite activity as sitting! You can switch from sitting to swinging the kettlebell in five seconds.

Healthy exercise effects take place as you swing the kettlebell: • Your heart rate suddenly jumps up into training range. • Your blood flows quickly and completely, flushing and feeding cells in the farthest parts of your body. • Your lymph system, now powered by the huge pumping motions of the weighted swings, leaps in to action, optimizing lymph transport in your body. • The amount of calories you are burning suddenly jumps ten-fold. • Disease risky genes are turned off; health promoting genes are turned on. • Your muscles are used strenuously and build quickly. These new muscles respond to insulin, intake and use glucose, as well as strengthening you and just plain looking good. • Your bones, skeleton, cartilage and connective tissue immediately benefit from the precision workloads your swings impose. • Your posterior chain is strengthened (and well formed) by this most perfect exercise for toning your backside. This provides protection against lower back pain. • Your ability to think clearly is boosted by the flush of oxygenated blood to your brain and to every cell of your body.

Getting up out of our work chair, say once an hour, to do 90 seconds of kettlebell swings may well serve as the perfect preventive behavior to the onslaught of metabolic sitting disorders. Don’t let your chair and car seat disable you; fight back with kettlebell swings!

One of the scarier sitting diseases is osteoporosis, thinning of the bones. Our bones are ceaselessly breaking down and rebuilding. But they need some challenge to rebuild. If all one’s time is spent with skeleton and body supported by a chair, our bones don’t get the activity and load they need to become strong. Like anything else, the rule with our skeleton is “use it or lose it.”

Kettlebell swings are a nearly perfect way to use your skeleton; it is totally involved in your task of swinging the weight up out in front of you. Not just bones, but tendons, other connective tissue, and of course, muscles, are challenged and strengthened.

Kettlebell swings attack metabolic syndrome head on. First, they build muscle and reduce fat, both keys to the disorder. Fat build up, especially in the abdominal area, can be halted and reversed with kettlebell swings (and the other recommendations in this book). The muscles the swings produce hel...

Alzheimer’s disease and other memory and depressive disorders may well have sitting components. Certainly depression is associated with lack of physical exercise. Aerobic and muscular exercise, such as provided by kettlebell training, has been shown effective in treating depression, and to some extent, Alzheimer ’s d...

One of the maladies of excess sitting is poor posture. Another is back pain. Especially while working at a computer, sitting tends to drag one down into bad posture, slumped, with rounded shoulders and head forward with a vulture neck. Such posture is not pretty and it causes back pain. To best accommodate gravity, the spine should be pretty much vertical with the head over the shoulders, not way out front. When you are slumped with forward head parts of the back are weakened, others are overstrained. Pressures on nerves and connective tissues are uneven and exaggerated. Back pain results.

In addition to getting up out of your chair each hour to do kettlebell swings, you may want to incorporate a couple of other stretches for your posture. One common posture goal is to raise the chest, which directly counteracts rounded shoulders and forward head. Commonly, excess sitting shortens and tightens muscles and connective tissue in the chest. These areas need stretching to allow the chest to rise and shoulder to un-round.

Except in some specific training you might wish to do, your twelve minutes of daily kettlebell swings are not done at once. As a matter of fact, eight hourly sessions, each just 90 seconds long, are your best pattern for preventing metabolic diseases. Two other excellent patterns are one-minute of kettlebell swings each hour, 12 times a day or two-minutes of swings 6 times a day.

The important thing is to get up out of the chair frequently and engage in the vigorous activity nearly exactly opposite of sitting. That would be the kettlebell swing. Chapter 6 will help schedule and complete your kettlebell swing sessions to best fit your schedule and provide maximum protection from sitting diseases.

In some ways, kettlebells are astounding. Because of their utter simplicity, they become the most convenient form of exercise equipment possible, amazingly quick and useful. I can be sitting in my desk chair one moment, then on my feet picking up my 40 pound kettlebell the next. In another two seconds I am swinging the kettlebell and just 90 seconds (and 54 swings) later I am finished. I sit back down, huffing and puffing, energized and refreshed.

You should acquire and own at least two kettlebells. They are not cheap, but they still may be the very cheapest and fastest exercise equipment. In terms of a lifelong strength and endurance aid, your kettlebell purchase may be among the best values in your life. Several forms of kettlebells are now available. Probably the best remain the black cast iron bells resembling a cannon ball. Other forms now include various colors, put on with a plastic coating. This coating may degrade with age. Not much degrades a black cast iron bell except rust. Make certain the kettlebell handle is well designed. For a two arm swing, both your hands grip the kettlebell. The handle should be sufficiently long that your hands are comfortable. I hook three fingers of each hand through the handle, with my little finger to the outside. You may try out a number of different weights in kettlebells and graduate to higher weights as your strength builds. They may be purchased in sets with various weights, such as 20, 25 and 30 pounds (9, 11.3, 13.6 kg).

For your 12 minute daily swings, you might well end up with one weight, but you may likely want to own a variety of kettlebells for various exercises. A kettlebell’s weight becomes easier to handle and less challenging as you swing it more and you commonly want to move up weights, so determining a favorite weight is an adjustment process. Still, it is possible to have a favorite weight for your daily 12 minutes recommended in this book.

As you begin swinging kettlebells and work your way up in weights, your first goal is to avoid injury. You may start out with negligible weight, even no weight, especially if you suffer a back or other condition that hinders the swing motion. If you have access to multiple weights, the first weight you might want to pick up may be 10 pounds. This is light enough to prevent any injuries that might result from swinging heavier weights right away. Using the guidelines from the next chapter, undertake some swings 12 for your first set. If the 12 repetitions seemed fine, do another set, this time for 24 swings. These swings will seem more difficult than later when you are accustomed to the exertion.