all posts post new thread

Kettlebell Alactic + Aerobic

Status
Closed Thread. (Continue Discussion of This Topic by Starting a New Thread.)
Hello,

@Anna C
Thank you very much ! This is plenty of very useful information, as always ! :)

So if I understand well, in function of the W:R we choose, we can target either hypertrophy or "pure cardio" ?

As both a boxer and someone who walks and carry a lot of things on a daily basis, I guess the aerobic training version is what I am looking for. Indeed, for hypertrophy well...I am ugly and I know it ahah ;)

All jokes aside, when we go for 20-50s of effort (or 15-30 reps per set), do you know how many sets (more or less) have to be done ? What is supposed to be done during the 8 minutes: other kind of easy exercise such as walking, stretching ?

Thanks again !

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
So if I understand well, in function of the W:R we choose, we can target either hypertrophy or "pure cardio" ?

Hypertrophy or aerobic development, yes, but I wouldn't call it "pure cardio." It's strength/power work which targets an aerobic adaptation, or targets hypertrophy. "Pure cardio" would be light jogging, for instance... steady state.

All jokes aside, when we go for 20-50s of effort (or 15-30 reps per set), do you know how many sets (more or less) have to be done ? What is supposed to be done during the 8 minutes: other kind of easy exercise such as walking, stretching ?

Oops, I labelled aerobic and hypertrophy ones backwards! I edited the post. My apologies. On the total sets, I am not sure, as I'm not sure I understand the notation. But I'm pretty sure you would stop when you can no longer be explosive.

During the rest period, you rest, but "recovery is active." So yes, walking, stretching should be OK.
 
All jokes aside, when we go for 20-50s of effort (or 15-30 reps per set), do you know how many sets (more or less) have to be done ?
For track intervals, if your race distance is 1600m (~4min) for example, a good rule of thumb is doing one quarter of the race distance (400m or ~1min) for a total of 1-2x the race distance 1600-3200m) or 4-8 intervals.
  • Shorter intervals (30sec or 200m) would do on the upper end (6-8 intervals)
  • Longer intervals (60sec or 400m) would do the lower end (4-6 intervals).
 
Hello,

@Anna C
Thank you :)

Do you know what happen if rest between sets are reduced ? Does it simply become more challenging but with the same benefits ?

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
Hello,

For track intervals, if your race distance is 1600m (~4min) for example, a good rule of thumb is doing one quarter of the race distance (400m or ~1min) for a total of 1-2x the race distance 1600-3200m) or 4-8 intervals.
  • Shorter intervals (30sec or 200m) would do on the upper end (6-8 intervals)
  • Longer intervals (60sec or 400m) would do the lower end (4-6 intervals).
Thank you !

How many times per week would you do it ?

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
How many times per week would you do it?
2-4 days per week that depend on other work being done. I think the hard-easy alternating days works pretty well or hard-easy-easy if unable to recover from the former. I consider strength and interval training hard days and LED as easy days.
 
Do you know what happen if rest between sets are reduced ? Does it simply become more challenging but with the same benefits ?

With less rest, it would become more glycolytic, I imagine. So it would change the targeted energy system adaptations. But how that affects each individual would differ depending on their metabolic tendencies/strengths and other such factors. For example, some people buffer the byproducts of glycolysis faster and better than others because they have trained that adaptation or their body is just better at it.

As far as the muscle fiber gains or effects, probably "simply become more challenging but with the same benefits"... IF you could maintain form. That looks like a pretty tricky exercise, and one that might require "freshness" to do with good form. So, much like ugly burpees (so popular around here), you're sweating and burning calories, but you're not really improving anything like strength, power, movement quality, skill, agility, muscle size/strength, etc.... Better to do it fresh and do it well.
 
F35CDE07-AE94-4442-9A0E-AF66D3016DAB.jpeg

@pet' s Burpee video did start me thinking (usually dangerous). I integrated sets of pushups today. The first six spikes are getups, each side w/ 28, 32, and 36kg.

Following that are five 36kg snatches, 21 pushups, and two 16kg weighted pullups. This was done for five rounds.

The spike drops off rapidly after the pushups and pullups. Five 36kg snatches average 12 seconds and 21 pushups average 20 seconds but the snatch spikes higher and lasts MUCH longer, as one would expect.

Last is nine sets of five 36kg snatches. The session ends with two smaller spikes from pressing the 32kg and waiter walking to the rack, then doing the same with the 36kg.
 
Last edited:
Hello,

@WxHerk
This is very interesting.

I never really trained high volume of snatches, but as you suggest, the snatch spikes last longer because this is a very explosive full body move. How do you manage the rest during your circuit ?

For a while, I tested something as follows:
5 pull ups, 15 push ups, every minute, for as long as I can stand.

Quite rapidly, it becomes hard because the body does not have time to manage all the lactic acid. However, the fun thing is that I did not felt the HR really high. It would have been interesting to have an HR monitor I guess.

I still do not have any device to measure HR so I mostly go by feel. I tend to start another set when I am almost entirely rested.

This morning, I did one-armed swings with the 40kg bell. The frame was as follows:
20 seconds right side, 45 seconds rest, 20s left side, 45 second rest. This can be considered as a "serie".
I did 12 series in total (so it was 6 'sets' on the right and 6 'sets' on the left in total

In which category would it fall then ?

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
Since Harald's thread is so long, I guess I don't feel bad adding yet another tangent to it...

I'm currently doing another program that's 3-days a week, mostly strength-based. But on the other two days a week I get bored waiting for students to arrive to class, so I've just been playing with some more A+A work. Not enough repeats to undo what I'm trying to do the other three days a week - and I keep playing with different modalities to see what my personal response is. I found that this was really interesting and worth sharing:

Here are two days in the same week (Tuesday and Thursday) where I was doing 10 x 40kg 1A swings (I do so much snatching for other things, I wanted to save my hands and not add more snatching on my "off" days) and waiting until I felt recovered before the next repeat. I had the heart rate monitor on just to record but wasn't using it to tell me when to start next, I just waited until I felt right. Also - nose-breathing only during the recovery.

A snippet from Tuesday

IMG-1865.jpg

And one from Thursday

IMG-1866.jpg

I got 16 repeats in on Tuesday before folks showed up for class and I had to stop. I felt great the whole time and could have kept going.

For some reason, Wednesday night I had terrible sleep and Thursday was a stressful day. I only got 8 repeats in and I just quit because I was feeling bad. You can see that my recovery time is almost double, and my minimum heart rate at which I felt recovered was 10 beats lower than on Tuesday.

I have nothing else to offer other than some pretty graphs. I just thought it was interesting enough to share.
 
Here are two days in the same week (Tuesday and Thursday) where I was doing 10 x 40kg 1A swings

Yeah, those are cool and I can totally relate. That's one reason it's good to not get too tied to a number on the HR graph... it's only part of the story.

The HR reponse on a stressful day is a lot like your response to other stress, if you think about it. On a day when you're feeling great, energetic, rested, and in a good mood, something annoying or perterbing can happen to you and it just rolls right off quickly and you go about the next thing. On a day when you're stressed, not rested, in a bad mood, etc. and something like that happens, it's just harder to let it go and move on to the next thing. To me it's just like what that HR graph shows.

BTW, 10 swings is a bit long a set for A+A. 5-7 swings has seemed to be about right. But it's still the same basic idea.
 
D1E4C924-9A0D-46E8-BA44-2C62707EC726.jpeg

This morning I did thrusters (thrusted?), as I need to squat more.

Double 24’s with clean, squat, push press: four reps, 17 repeats. My heartrate hung out at the top end considerably longer, but 4 thrusters are 23 seconds vs. 12 seconds for 5 snatches.
 
Last edited:
I've just been playing with some more A+A work. Not enough repeats to undo what I'm trying to do the other three days a week
I don't think you'll find there's a conflict between the two so long as you keep the A+A volume on the low side, e.g., I've found that 10-15 minutes of heavy, explosive lifting in short sets with long rests works even before a regular strength training day, and sometimes it makes the strength training go better.

-S-
 
I don't think you'll find there's a conflict between the two so long as you keep the A+A volume on the low side, e.g., I've found that 10-15 minutes of heavy, explosive lifting in short sets with long rests works even before a regular strength training day, and sometimes it makes the strength training go better.

-S-

Exactly, I'm keeping it short to experiment with different protocols just to fill the time when I get bored. With fewer than 20 repeats I'm not interfering with anything else that I'm doing. I would love to add the A+A with the lifting on the same day (and I do that for my students), I just don't have that kind of time for myself available to put them all together in the same day. I usually only end up with about 30 minutes of contiguous time to myself to workout. So, I try to train every day for a short time and only do one or two things on any given day.
 
Since Harald's thread is so long, I guess I don't feel bad adding yet another tangent to it...

I'm currently doing another program that's 3-days a week, mostly strength-based. But on the other two days a week I get bored waiting for students to arrive to class, so I've just been playing with some more A+A work. Not enough repeats to undo what I'm trying to do the other three days a week - and I keep playing with different modalities to see what my personal response is. I found that this was really interesting and worth sharing:

Here are two days in the same week (Tuesday and Thursday) where I was doing 10 x 40kg 1A swings (I do so much snatching for other things, I wanted to save my hands and not add more snatching on my "off" days) and waiting until I felt recovered before the next repeat. I had the heart rate monitor on just to record but wasn't using it to tell me when to start next, I just waited until I felt right. Also - nose-breathing only during the recovery.

A snippet from Tuesday

View attachment 7758

And one from Thursday

View attachment 7759

I got 16 repeats in on Tuesday before folks showed up for class and I had to stop. I felt great the whole time and could have kept going.

For some reason, Wednesday night I had terrible sleep and Thursday was a stressful day. I only got 8 repeats in and I just quit because I was feeling bad. You can see that my recovery time is almost double, and my minimum heart rate at which I felt recovered was 10 beats lower than on Tuesday.

I have nothing else to offer other than some pretty graphs. I just thought it was interesting enough to share.
Even with 10x swings per set, are you focusing at all on improving your HR dynamics?
 
Even with 10x swings per set, are you focusing at all on improving your HR dynamics?

For the last few months, I've just been playing around with modalities (swings, snatches) and weight and reps with no focus on improvement yet. I'm just collecting some data about how my HR looks with different parameters. Basically I'm in exploration mode, not actually executing to a program to actually do anything yet.

I think though, that I do have enough data about my response and my constraints that I'm going to put together an actual Strength & A+A program and see how it works for real now.
 
For the last few months, I've just been playing around with modalities (swings, snatches) and weight and reps with no focus on improvement yet. I'm just collecting some data about how my HR looks with different parameters. Basically I'm in exploration mode, not actually executing to a program to actually do anything yet.

I think though, that I do have enough data about my response and my constraints that I'm going to put together an actual Strength & A+A program and see how it works for real now.
Be Well and Strong – A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body
 
Even with 10x swings per set, are you focusing at all on improving your HR dynamics?
Al, I am intrigued by how to improve HR dynamics with A + A. For the past 2 months I have been working on setting an aerobic base by walking/rucking 3-5 times a week at or within 10 beats below my MAF number of 104. I do 15 -20 sets of 5 rep KB swings 3 times a week while wearing a HR monitor. This has been enlighening as without the HR feedback I would have cranked them out in short order. Now I wait until my HR drops to 85 before starting a new set. I can see progress over time as the rest periods are shortening, and I understand not adding weight, reps, or sets until there is sufficient improvement.

However, the amplitude of the HR between sets is something that I am not sure of how to improve. Eventually, it may take care of itself in the long run. However, after seeing Harald's and other posters beautiful regular HR patterns, I am somewhat concerned as mine look like roller coaster rides with multiple ups and downs between sets. Also, I hit peaks 1-3 times a session every 3 or 4 practices that are between 148 to 153. Considering that my calculated max HR (220 - age 76) is 144, I am either in incredible shape and/or incredibly stupid.

Any thoughts on improving (reducing) the max spikes? BTW my dr. was not concerned. I do light OS resets and F + L between sets.
 
Status
Closed Thread. (Continue Discussion of This Topic by Starting a New Thread.)
Back
Top Bottom