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Barbell Benefits of Barbells and Kettlebells Compared

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Kozushi

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As a tyro at barbell exercise, I'm nowhere near being ready to compare it with S&S (for instance). I know that there are a number of athletes on these forums who have spent significant time with both and I'm wondering what you have discovered vis a vis their relative merits.
 
Barbell: limit strength, maximum tension, the skill of bracing, that wierd CNS fatigue feeling after heavy lifting, a feeling of sturdiness, finding the body's angles of force production

Kettlebell: agility, movement, power, quickness, precision, flow, conditioning, endless variety
 
I’m curious about this right now too. Even though I didn’t want to, I’ve jumped from S&S over to StrongLifts for a while just to see if I like barbell work. Something I’m realizing is that for pure strength and muscle you really can’t beat the barbell. Mainly if you want an extremely strong lower body.

A big plus for kettlebells I’ve found though is you can throw together a 20 minute tough complex to cover strength, cardio, and mobility. Trying to cover that with barbells + external cardio and there’s no way you’d keep it under that 20 minute mark. The kettlebell is a very, very efficient and convenient tool. Do you have a little free time, a kettlebell, and a 6x6 area? There’s your gym.
 
Barbells are really cool to move huge weights with and skyrocket absolute strength and build muscle. My all time favorite lift is the deadlift, and I often wonder if it would be worth it to find me a gym to get back at deadlifting heavy again. But most strength gained with barbells is 'gym' strength, it didn't make much of a difference outside the gym, for me at least. When my goals changed so did my training and I traded in barbells for calisthenics. Lots of fun with calisthenics and pull ups really made my life easier and back bridges fixed my backpain. But I guess Im just build to lift objects instead of swinging my body, so I went to swinging kettlebells for S&S. Hadn't considered kettlebells a strength tool before.

Barbells pros: Absolute strength, muscle building, lifts are easy to learn, heavy weights are cool !
cons: Workouts are long and tend to get boring, requires alot of material, strength gained is very domain specific

Kettlebell pros: not so much material needed, efficient tool, ballistics are easier with bells, can be used as you would use a dumbell. WTH effects
cons: increasing weights is harder, muscle building cant beat barbells or calisthenics, i find working out with kettlebells harder than barbells, kettlebell instantly punishes mistakes ( could be pro ) but makes it require a teacher which isnt convenient

Overall when I compare Barbells, Kettlebells and Calisthenics the ones that align most with my primary goal is the kettlebell, to be specific Double Kettlebell work. I want superstrength outside the gym too and i feel programs like S&S just do better at that than lifting heavy barbells. The WTH effects are too precious !!! But on the side I also like some muscle, in all honesty, who doesn't want to look athletic ?

I would use variety days on ROP for instance to mix in calisthenics like pistol squats, one-arm push ups, back bridges, and not weight my pull ups but use a progression towards the one-arm pull up for example. Calisthenics also give super-strength and solid joints when used proper.
 
My all time favorite lift is the deadlift, and I often wonder if it would be worth it to find me a gym to get back at deadlifting heavy again. But most strength gained with barbells is 'gym' strength, it didn't make much of a difference outside the gym, for me at least.
Same experience for me.
DL is by far my favorite barbell lift although I think it doesn't really matter whether it's conventional or sumo, barbell or trap bar. The feeling of pulling a heavy weight from a dead start is very unique and special. I don't get a similar feeling of accomplishment through squats, bench pressing or whatever, no matter how heavy you load them up.
Getting stronger in the basic barbell lifts certainly increased my ability outside of the gym a lot, but I have at least to some degree have to say that I share Shawn's experience that a good amount of the strength you gain is "gym strength".
I already said this in the "barbell strength carryover"-thread, but working with KBs in some weird way unlocked my strength for the real world outside the gym and I experienced big time WTH effects.
They connected me in a way barbells never could.
There is still the obvious benefit for barbells that they are the best and most time efficient tool for absolut strength.

I could write a paper on the differences, benefits and my theories for barbells and KBs, but I won't comment further on the pros and cons for both implements, because it's all very specific from person to person.
For example I just talked about my personal experience that KBs had a better carryover to the real world than barbells, but I worked with barbells first and only after that concentrated on KBs. It may have gone completely different if I had started with KBs and worked with barbells afterwards or would have gone with calisthenics for 1 or 2 years.
Take a person who starts with KBs, goes on to achieve Sinister, complete the RoP, then RotK and then spends years training with calisthenics until he/she achieves very advanced bodyweight skills. After all that this person finally starts to use barbells.
This person will report about very different pros & cons for barbells and KBs then someone who's never trained before, used barbells as his/her first training tool and only tries out KBs after years of pure barbell training.
 
The kettlebell power movements are a bit easier to get a hang of compared to the barbell ones. The lack of a necessary dead stop in them is nice also.

Apart from that, I don't really know the difference. For example a get-up is a get-up, although the barbell one is trickier. The barbell can be a lot to balance at the start, in many exercises. Double kettlebell press vs barbell press? The kettlebell one needs a bit less mobility but I have found they're pretty much the same to me. And so on.

Of course, the incremental loading and absolute loading capacity make the barbell a different tool.
 
for me,

barbell = cycles of fatigue and recovery based on incremental load and relatively infrequent sessions

kettlbell = little fatigue, little recovery, fixed weight (then giant change in load), and relatively frequent sessions
 
Barbell: max strength development, possibility to be very precise in loading (more programming possibilities).
Unbeatable when it comes to full body strength. You cannot beat barbells for squats and deadlifts.
Should be paired with some mobility work to avoid the "gym strength syndrome".
Contrary to popular gym belief, it can be programmed in a way that do not beat you up! (easy strength, PlanStrong, etc).

Kettlebell: practical, versatile. Better tool for dynamic moves (swings, snatches). As good as a barbell for upper body strength for most people, as the point of diminishing return is low enough to be reached with kettlebells.
Good also for mobility work.

Bodyweight: practical as it is always available. Better to teach the skill of tension. Other than that, programming is more complicated. Intensity evaluation have to be by exercise difficulty (leverage, height, etc), while KB and BB simply have different weights.

Gym strength syndrome
I will repeat this: Transferability of Barbell Strength
When applying principles, the strength gained in all three modalities apply in real life.
Resistance is resistance, whatever the modality is. We should not neglect mobility.
 
Having started barbell work about a month ago, I am really starting to understand the importance of absolute weight in developing my body. Because I had started with the idea of virtual strength with kettlebells, it was actually a new idea for me to wrap my head around.

I like absolute weight. It's just dumb plain simple. And, it requires dumb plain simple movements with minimal thought involved, let alone minimal time and space. And, when I want to get stronger and I'm ready, I just load more weight on the bar!

Kettlebells are absolute weight instruments too when we use them for presses and similar. I can do two presses per arm with the 32kg bell these days.

Deadlifts are eminently practical for physical labour. I spent 4 hours yesterday doing laborious work around my yard - digging, carrying heavy things, etc, and I'm glad I'm deadlifting 280lbs these days!

For judo, kettlebells hit angles of strength that I'm not hitting with barbell deadlifts. Getups and swings get your body in all sorts of contortions and resistances against contortions. But the problem is that I'm getting contorted enough at judo practice to want to contort more at home. But when I don't keep my S&S going I pay for it on the mats!

Overall absolute weight moves are just simpler and easier. They lack cardio and mobility though, which need to be trained somehow, even if it's going on long walks or jogs or hikes.
 
i have good experiment with both. Barbell compound lifts help me a lot in the game. back squat makes me harder to push when i have to shield the ball, and bench press makes me comfortable using elbows to hit my opponents (aka dirty play). Deadlift and overhead press are harder to explain.

i only do swing, snatch, globet squat and get up with kettlebell. Mostly swing. i found out that i hate it because i'm not good at it. still wandering how can someone can progress fast at swing. my sns swing takes me nearly 20-30 minutes to complete. But it's very useful. my changing direction is improved and i recover faster between burst. swing+ long walk= perfect condition for my sport.
 
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