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Kettlebell 400 calories in 20 minutes

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conor78

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Never seen this approach/article before, though it certainly falls into the glycolotic category. 400 calories in 20 minutes. That’s some going..
 
This looks pretty much exactly like Kenneth Jay's Viking Warrior Conditioning 15:15 protocol.

In VWC, the progression is to work up to as many as 80 sets (40 minutes) over time, rather than a standardized 20 minutes. The article describes the cadence test as "overly complicated," which could describe the cadence test in the book, which has you progressively increasing pace over 5 or 6 minutes and taking the result from the final minute. In practice, just using a bell you can sustainably snatch for 6-8 reps (9 i s possible, but very rushed) in 15 seconds on/15 seconds off works fine.

VWC may burn a lot of calories, but that was not really the intention of the program. It was targeted at improving V02max (although there is some question, including on the part of Kenneth Jay himself, about whether it is a particularly good way to do that).

We actually did a 20 minute VWC session as part of my RKC certification and around that time (2009), I spent a few months working this protocol up to 16kg x 80 sets x 9 reps and 24kg x 64 sets x 7 reps. In the years since, I have not had any desire to revisit it.
 
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That’s very interesting. I like how the article made it seem like whatever they thought was a snatch was good to go. Lol.
If the study referred to in the article is based on VWC, as I am sure it is, a snatch is most definitely a snatch. However, because the program demands that you push the cadence to the max, the lockout is going to be touch and go, with no real pause or fixation overhead.

A lot of people doing VWC fell into bad habits chasing a high cadence, such as cutting the lockout short, cutting the backswing short (which robs you of power and can actually slow down your cadence), and swinging the bell violently back into the lockout while thrusting the shoulder forward and using the stretch reflext to launch the bell forward into the drop.
 
Never seen this approach/article before, though it certainly falls into the glycolotic category. 400 calories in 20 minutes. That’s some going..
Yep, using the example in the article, that would be 240 snatches in 20 minutes with a 16 or a 20 kilo bell. Not an easy 20 minutes, I rather skip a doughnut!

@Steve W. I can't believe those VWC numbers every time I read them!
 
@Steve W. I can't believe those VWC numbers every time I read them!

Thanks @Oscar

I'm going to quote my response to you from a previous thread on the subject because I think it's relevant to a lot of feats that get posted here:

Well, thank you.

That was the result of a sustained and incremental training process, so it didn't feel that special at the time (this was during 2009-2010, spanning the period before and after my first RKC cert), although I did and do feel proud of it. It also didn't feel that special because around that same time, I failed several SSST attempts (200 snatches in 10 minutes), even though I could do that VWC workout (448 snatches/32 minutes) and I could do the 100 rep test in a little over 4 minutes and finish just when it started feeling hard (Damn you, SSST!).

There are a lot of people who post here who do things I find amazing and hard to imagine myself ever doing (@Harald Motz is just the first to come to mind).

I also often see people post something like, "I can do x, but I'm struggling with y," when I can do y easily, but can't come close to doing x (and sometimes I've never come close to doing either).
 
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