Hello Strongfirst Community!
Today I achieved the simple goal of 100 1H swings in 5 mins, 1 min rest, 5 TGUs each side in 10 mins, with the 32kg bell. This is my first post but I’ve been stalking these forums a while now. Now I’ve reached this goal I’d like to share my experience, so that it might motivate others, just as these forums and Strongfirst Articles have helped guide and motivate me. I’ll try to keep it relevant.
I’m 31 year old male, currently weighing around. 85kgs, 181cm tall (5ft 11.5 inches). Having no prior strength training experience I bought my first 16kg KB 4 years ago, as I was looking for a way to get stronger for swimming. I had become quite obsessed with swimming, after reading Total Immersion by Terry Laughlin. This book introduced me to treating a session as a practice, the advantages of easy/efficient training, and how your hips generate the power expressed through the rest of the body and extremities (“
hands are just the tips of the propeller” - TI). I also learned how visualisation cues could have an immediate impact on technique.
Soon after reaching my goal of swimming the Dart 10K in 2015, I found myself without a goal, and I was no longer seeing progress other than accumulated volume in the pool. I realised in order to get better I needed to get stronger. Somehow I stumbled on kettlebells as the means to do so, enticed by the promise of whole-body strength in one simple implement – (also happy to find an alternative to dumbells or barbells which had never interested me/intimidated me). Swimming (the Total Immersion way!) had prepared me with good mobility in the shoulders and fair aerobic conditioning.
With no coach, my first go at 16kg swings went badly, ending with a sore lower back (nothing serious). That was instant feedback on technique! I took a few months before I came across Pavel’s Kettlebell Simple & Sinister, which took some time to digest. I learned the hardstyle swing and TGU, using visualisation cues and tips, the same way I had when practising front crawl from TI. Focusing on technique, drawing my attention to different parts of the body, reviewing each rep as a chance to improve the next.
A year on from my first 16kg, I bought a 24kg. The shock was unbelievable! It was murder on my grip, and glutes. I became more adept at TGUs. I could feel the benefits of KB training, however was not training regularly so therefore progress was slow, however every time I did it was with the same deliberate practice mindset.
Another year and I bought a 32kg, not to swing as I did not yet ‘own’ the 24kg, but to get accompanied with the bell I affectionately termed ‘the bas***d’.
At the end of 2017, I did my first 32kg TGU. It took a few sessions just lying in the floor-to-press position for holds of 30 secs to get my wrist ready. Once I was comfortable with that time, I knew I could complete the rest of the movement, and did so with success first time. Think about the technique, not the weight! – as has been said here.
2018 I was still unstructured in practice. However I’d come to practice a lot more presses, windmills, bent presses and BU presses.
At the beginning of 2019 I set some goals, Simple, and a 32kg press, following ETK. I finally started a training diary (Finally!). I’d lost 1H swing grip strength on 24kgs, and had to start over. It took about 10 sessions to get all 1H with 24kg. TGUs progressed faster than swings. By April, I was doing 24kg 1H swings in 5 mins and hitting the Simple standard for TGUs (32kg). I also pressed the 32 for the first time after several months working up to 5 x 1,2,3,4,5 ladders with the 24kg.
It’s the last day of July, and today I hit Simple. It was pretty tough, so yet to really ‘own’ the bell, but I did it. Just 8 sessions ago I was at 10m-2m-10m for Swings-Rest-TGU. This is where things got tricky. Trying to condense the swing time was just gassing me, and requiring longer to rest and do the TGUs. Then I stumbled across this article
A Solid Game Plan for Acing the Snatch Test | StrongFirst which I adopted for swings, jumping in at Phase 3 (80 reps in 5 mins, 5x16). This worked really nicely! I would advise anyone struggling to get their swing time down to Simple, to have a look at this article.
That’s it! I appreciate this is a long post, so thanks for reading. Also thank you to Pavel and all the Strongfirst community for creating and sharing such excellent work! I’ve learned so much and am much stronger than I was. I’m truly grateful.