Kettlebell Simple & Sinister

by Pavel Tsatsouline

This is what gireviks call “the What the Hell Effect.” The kettlebell defies the laws of specificity.

In the XIV century, William of Occam, of Occam’s Razor fame, gave the best training advice: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” The Simple & Sinister program (S&S) has been ruthlessly pruned down to only two exercises, known to deliver the widest range of benefits while being simple to learn and safe when properly executed. The programming is foolproof.

“To build a superman, slow movements and quick lifts are required,” taught Bob Hoffman of York Barbell. The get-up is the ultimate slow lift; the swing is the ultimate quick lift.

Mark Reifkind, Master SFG[1] instructor, calls the swing the most beneficial exercise anyone can do. Among its many benefits are superior conditioning, rapid fat loss, explosive hip power, killer grip, various back health benefits, and it is easy on the knees. Rif adds that the swing is “scalable to a 70-year-old grandmother and to a 20-year-old super athlete.”

You will be training five or six times a week on a flexible schedule. Your workout is 100 swings and 10 get-ups, a very modest volume.

A quick observation: The smart and most badass tactical athletes I see on a daily basis work hard, but always leave some energy in the tank. They owe their lives and their brothers’ to the ability to go hard every day and not be too sore from a workout.” Occasionally, you will test your spirit and push the pedal to the metal in some manner.

Your goal, eventually, is to dominate 35-pound get-ups and 53-pound one-arm swings if you are a lady or a 70-pounder for both lifts if you are a gentleman.

Do not put your spine into flexion during or after training. Forward-bending stretches and slouching after training, harmless as these seem, could injure your back. Unless counter-indicated, back-bending stretches are recommended following training.

Walk around between your sets and shake off tension. Actively rest until your breathing is almost back down to normal.

Keeping your shoulders down as much as possible, slowly circle the bell or plate around your head progressively tighter and lower. Five circles in both directions are about right.

Perform the above three drills in the specified order for three circuits before your kettlebell training.

Right after the S&S sessions or later—preferably shortly before bedtime—do the following relaxed stretches for the hip area so heavily involved in both swings and get-ups. Do one to three sets of each in a circuit.

Nothing will happen in a single minute. The longer you stay in these two stretches and breathe through the tight spots, the better.

An asymmetrical load seriously challenges the stabilizers and increases the recruitment of many muscles.

the one-arm swing is an exceptional grip-builder.

The hard style one-arm swing is an anti-rotation exercise. In other words, the weight is trying to twist you, while you insist on staying on a straight and narrow. That said, it is impossible to avoid some rotation, especially with a heavy bell—which is why I wrote “more or less.”

The get-up is at least 200 years old, and modern specialists view it as an exceptionally functional exercise. Gray Cook, physical therapist to Navy SEALs and NFL teams, said: The Turkish get-up is the perfect example of training primitive movement patterns—from rolling over, to kneeling, to standing and reaching. If I were limited to choosing only one exercise, it would be the Turkish get-up.

Train almost daily, taking an occasional day off when your body or your schedule insists.

Daily Schedule Train at any time of the day. Start with three circuits of mobility exercises—prying goblet squats, hip bridges, haloes.

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.

Always do 100 swings: 10 sets of 10 reps. Every second or third training day, replace one-arm swings with two-arm swings using the same bell or bells. Think of the latter as active rest.

When we count swing reps, we add the number of times the kettlebell has gone up and pay no attention to what the arms do. So, on one-arm swing days, do 10L—rest—10R—rest x 5. On two-arm swing days, it is 10T x 10.

For your one-arm swings, select a weight you can powerfully and competently swing for 10x10, regardless of the time it takes. Let us call this weight “S.”

Do the next set when you have recovered enough to pass the so-called “talk test.” You must be able to speak in short sentences.

The only type of progression is in weight; the sets and the reps are constant. The power stays maximal. The rest periods vary organically, regulated by the talk test. Gradually replace the weight you “own” with a heavier one. “Owning a weight” means being able to do the given sets and reps with perfect technique, any day—without getting stressed out about it.

Replace “S” with “S+” 20 reps at a time—one set of 10 with the left and one with the right. On two-arm swing days also upgrade two sets of 10 to “S+.”

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.

A Jolt Once or twice a month, take on any physical challenge that will test your spirit without breaking your body.

Glycolysis is the sugar burning that supplies faddish “high intensity interval training” and “metcons.” This highly inefficient process pollutes your body with lactic acid, ammonia, and free radicals and messes with your hormones if you tap into it too much or too often. Anti-glycolytic training, in contrast, relies on the clean burning “rocket fuel” of creatine phosphate (CP) to power high intensity efforts and an equally clean aerobic system to replenish the CP. AGT is the latest frontier in training for performance and health.

Russian scientists concluded that the ability to sustain a given workload for an hour and more is an indicator that the training is truly anti-glycolytic).

Carl Jung observed, as did many before and after him, “Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.”

Since StrongFirst puts a premium on strength and power, limiting the swing volume to 100 reps is imperative. Within our bodies, there is a fierce competition for resources between strength and endurance adaptations. And, apart from the narrow specialists on both ends of the spectrum such as powerlifters and marathoners, most people’s lives demand both strength and endurance.

Experiments on weightlifters revealed that 100 reps per exercise class per training session was the maximal total before this bias toward endurance became severe.

In the swings, we could have gone even lower than 10—fives produce more power and less acid than 10s and are more in line with Verkhoshansky’s classic anti-glycolytic training model—but we would have missed out on some important adaptations, such as muscle hypertrophy.

Another vital reason to keep the rep count low, per set and per training session, is to leave enough energy for other things—practicing sport skills, being ready to fulfill your duty on the battlefield or just enjoying your day and not dragging your tail through it. Bulgarian elite gymnastics coach Ivan Ivanov believes that the purpose of a training session is to “store energy” in the body rather than exhaust it. That is a powerful mindset. In Ivanov’s experience, 100 repetitions per explosive movement hit the spot—and these must be done daily.

may seem strange to recommend training without days off when the goal is storing energy, but moderate daily training will keep the muscles’ fuel tanks topped off, while making tissues resistant to microtrauma and almost soreness-proof. It is the ticket to being always ready.

Time is a man’s best friend if he makes good use of it and a man’s worst enemy if he lets it run him. Most people who live by the clock are miserable sorts of critters. But living by the sun, that is something different. —Clifford Simak, Out of Their Minds

Oxford professor John Grayson taught mountaineers to “climb no faster than you can talk.” This rule of thumb would eventually come to be known as the talk test.

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.

The intermediate type IIA is where the money is when you have to produce high forces and maintain them for some time. It is the fighter’s fiber. The S&S swing protocol focuses on the fighter’s fiber.

Up to this point, my high-mileage body could not handle multiple ski days. After achieving Simple, I can do two or three days in a row without any pain. Once again, mountain ready! —Eric Frohardt, SFG, veteran US Navy SEAL