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Do not overgrip the bell in swings. Hook the handle with your fingers and try not to pinch the calluses at the bases of the fingers. As you get more skilled, you will find ways to rest the grip in certain phases of the swing and regrip on the fly.
pumice stone.
“sock sleeves,”
Of course, all of the above will heavily load the left arm. If it is paid no attention, its shoulder will painfully shrug as the rib cage collapses. Thus, you must drive your left elbow and forearm down hard into the deck as they are being loaded. Push your chest out and your shoulders down away from the ears.
Reload the palm while straightening the elbow, pushing your chest out and anti-shrugging the shoulder down. Turn your elbow pit forward as much as possible, without turning the palm.
Start with three circuits of mobility exercises—prying goblet squats, hip bridges, haloes.
As an option, you may follow these with a couple of sets of get-ups with exaggerated slowness and precision with a shoe or a light kettlebell. Groove the movement. Instead of doing full get-ups, you may select a particular phase, say supine to elbow, and polish it. Take the movement apart and put it back together. This is not a warm-up, but a practice. Do all your prescribed daily swings and then your get-ups. Wrap up your training session with the stretches, the 90/90, and the QL straddle. Hang on a pullup bar if you have one.
Even if you are full of energy every day, do two-arm swings at least once out of every three sessions.
Give yourself even more rest than dictated by the talk test after the first couple of sets—the circuitry that tells your body it needs more oxygen is slow to react at first.
“Owning a weight” means being able to do the given sets and reps with perfect technique, any day—without getting stressed out about it.
Get-Up Training An S&S training session is not a circuit; do all sets of swings before moving on to get-ups. Always do five get-up sets per arm, alternating sides every set. As with swings, walk around between sets breathing deeply and slowly until you can pass the talk test. Do not lie around like a beached whale.
Once you have become strong enough to one-arm swing the Simple kettlebell for 10x10 with the talk test, the five-minute swing test, and practicing for it, will provide difficulties in spades. Meanwhile, challenge yourself once or twice a month in a variety of ways. Help a friend move. Shovel snow for the entire block. Take out your dusty boxing gloves and call up your old sparring partners. Run up a mountain with a backpack. Enter a 10K race. Farmer-carry your kettlebells for distance. Take on any physical challenge that will test your spirit without breaking your body.
Michael Castrogiovanni,
The get-up, due to its semi-static nature and long time under tension, demands much lower sets and reps.
Bulgarian elite gymnastics coach Ivan Ivanov believes that the purpose of a training session is to “store energy” in the body rather than exhaust
You can stick to S&S and keep making gains for a long, long time. The bottleneck is not the program, but the practitioner’s ability to stay on task and not get distracted by the pop fitness noise.
I come from a gymnastics and powerlifting background, and I like my rest. I prefer to start my next set when my heart rate has come down a bit and I can put my all into the next set…I don’t want to rob the next set of intensity by starting out of breath. The talk test is solid.
What would happen if you rested more or less than allowed by the talk test? If you rest more, you will slightly gain on the power side and lose some endurance benefits, not to mention time. If you rest less—sucking wind and letting your muscles burn—you will give your conditioning and body composition a short-term boost because your system perceives intense glycolysis as an emergency. But it must be done very sparingly—and only after building an aerobic base with talk-test restrained training. Overdo glycolytic work and there will be hell to pay.
It is not unusual for a very powerful athlete to take half an hour to complete 10x10 max power swings guided by the talk test.
To sum up, there is no rest period to qualify you as a stud or studette. Do not look at the clock at all. Doing so could only provoke wrong decisions. Listen to your body and your breath—not your watch or phone.
