How to Sync Your Breathing for More Kettlebell Power

Kettlebell ballistics have very little to do with the kettlebell—and everything to do with how you move your body. When it comes to rhythmically repetitive power work like swings, snatches, and cleans, your best performance comes when you’ve synced your breath to the movement pattern. Better, more athletic swings mean you get more out of your […]

Troubleshooting the Squat: Half-Kneeling Pulses

Interesting thing about the word troubleshooting (I’ll get to the main point soon…promise) in the context of coaching: when you look for synonyms, you need to wade through synonyms for it in the context of damage control, “good offices,” and customer service before you get to “as in adjust.” And “as in adjust” troubleshooting is […]

Get StrongFirst Online: Essential Kettlebell Exercises

“Online education is like a rising tide, it’s going to lift all boats.” Anant Agarwal According to an article in US News and World Reports “a 2015 study showed that 6 million students – a large majority of whom were undergraduates – enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2015.” And if MIT, Harvard […]

Data for the Data-Averse

Your fitness is a result—not of the work you perform—but of the work you recover from. The research suggests shorter sets with limited drop-off of power and velocity, with sufficient rest—for a lower biological cost. And this is how to measure it.

Let’s Get Lateral

The kettlebell swing alone may cover a great percentage of a human's athletic needs, but those who participate in activities that require good lateral motion, strength and stability can benefit from sprinkling in some lateral variations—such as the side-stepping swing and goblet lunge.

Your Multipurpose Strength Tool (aka the Get-up)

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” —Marshall McLuhan Our “tools” could be looked at as our implement (a kettlebell, for example), the exercise we select, our program, or how we use the tool to mold us. Multipurpose tools have become a mainstay in our lives. We “shaped” the multipurpose tool to […]

It’s OK to Struggle

Professional “Learners” We were all professional “learners” at some point. Think about it. Your “job” for the first 18 years or so was to learn. First to learn how to move and walk, and then how to learn in school. This may have continued in sports (learning more movement) or onto advanced degrees (learning more […]

Cultivating Recovery

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” Jim Rohn Take a moment to do an internet search for me: Recovery strategies in fitness. I’ll wait… A search for “recovery strategies” likely sent your head spinning. In the last few years, recovery strategies have become another fad blazing through the […]

Quarterly Update: Back to the Barbell

Our Chief SFG Instructor and Director of Education is a great person to keep up on—particularly these moments of reflection on his own training and the lessons his insights impart to the rest of us.

Sinister, Occam’s Razor, and 2018

How does StrongFirst's Director of Education and Chief SFG Instructor plan out his training for the coming year? Here's a peek behind the curtain, of one of the smartest minds in strength.