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Kettlebell How heavy before it is unhealthy ?

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Anders

Anders

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Provided that you train with good technique, how heavy can you go in typical kettlebell excersises before the wear and tear on your joints and ligaments get too high so that you risk getting cronic pain when you get older ?

I was first and foremost thinking about the Sinister goal here, and the 48 kilo pull-up, Military press and pistol. Have any of you experience with achieving this goal, and if it lead to pain later on ?

The reason I ask is that I have some weightlifting friends, they have competed at a high level and won european silver medal for their weight class in bench press and deadlifts, and they have hurt their hips permanently.

So I was just asking myself if the same would happen with really heavy kettlebell work ?

Any thoughts and experiences on this would be welcomed.
 
The weights used by your friends is massive compared to kettlebell training, although having said that yes you could get hurt if you don't warm up properly, try to do too much too soon, and don't have good technique or programming.
 
@Anders As Pavel states in ETK regarding getting injured, "As you know, it's your fault. Too much, too soon, or too sloppy." This may seem harsh, but it is often true when lifting heavy objects.

IMO, everyone is different and has varied backgrounds of experience. With my training, I am stronger and in better shape at 42 than I was at 25. I did not lift extremely heavy barbells in my 20's either, so there are no heavy wear and tear miles on my joints. Kettlebell training by design is much more "torque at the joint" friendly than barbell training as well.
 
I'd think that half one's bodyweight is not excessive to lift. Guys who train for it can deadlift and benchpress more than three times their own bodyweight. When I do single arm pushups I'm pressing 70% of my bodyweight. One of the things I like about kettelebells is that they are used more for strength-endurance than raw power-strength. So, they are more of a "sport" or an "athletic exercise" than about lifting as heavy as possible. S&S to me is as much a cardio adventure as a weight lifting one.
 
Hello,

Lifting barbells is as "dangerous" as doing kettlebells. I think that one of the most important thing is to own the bell / weight. This implies to start with relatively light. Nevermind if it seems light comparing to friends. It is your health, not them.

Then we move to a slightly heavier weight or bell and do it again. You know it is too heavy when you have pain (even a "little one") after training.

My 2 cents,

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
Bear in mind also that your friends have been competing at what sounds to be a fairly elite level. Regardless of our chosen athletic pursuit, this pretty much inevitably will take a toll on our health.

The Cost of Adaptation: What Do You Choose? (The Chief, as always, puts it much more succinctly than I ever could.)

Provided our goal is simply health in addition to physical strength, and we're neither moving into pain nor do we have any gold medal/elite ranking aspirations, we should be alright.
 
J Petersen said:
Provided our goal is simply health in addition to physical strength, and we're neither moving into pain nor do we have any gold medal/elite ranking aspirations, we should be alright.
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I totally agree. In addition there is always going to be a point of diminishing returns in any type of training.
 
Barbells and kettlebells don't hurt people. People hurt themselves. I competed in Olympic Weightlifting for over 10 years and I have no injuries or issues. I was a better training lifter than competition lifter, but I competed at a national level.

The difference between an athlete and an exerciser is, an athlete puts there health at risk, and an exerciser does not. Many exercisers injury themselves though, as you can tell by the many injuries reported around the forum, but you cannot blame the tool or the weight.
 
You can hurt yourself with lighter weights if you don't do the drills properly, and even if you do the drills properly if you push yourself to failure on a regular basis you can still hurt yourself. The body builder culture of pushing yourself to failure gets tons of people hurt, even if the weight they were using was not particularly great.

The Evil Russian Speaks - Part 2 | T Nation

In this 15 year old interview with Pavel he brings up Ed Coan doing a set of 3 squats with 875 even though he could do five and then calling it. In contrast to a different training philosophy where he would do 660 and 12 reps to failure. One method trains the best power lifter in the world and the other method would get him injured.

So how much weight is a valid question but is subjective, some people are stronger than others, are bigger than others and handle weight differently. A 115 pound woman vs a 230 pound man both have a different version of heavy but they can both be injured by pushing their body to failure. So instead of asking how much weight maybe the question should somehow be "how much failure?" . The predominant physical culture is heavily influenced by body building is this business of going to failure, of exhausting yourself with each set, and keeping reps and sets fairly high. This methodology is more likely to injure you than weight alone.
 
My suspicion is that it's the level of tension at the joint that makes the difference between whether a heavy weight or ballistic movement does any amount of damage.... and this can't be seen by an external observer. @Tarzan describes this well in a couple of posts to those with injuries (he has a few himself), such as in this post when he advised: "A heightened level of conscious control needs to exist at all times....If you ever get to the level of fatigue where you are going through the motions you can start hammering the joint and doing damage. For you this motion will require full tension..." and this post where he advised, "Respect the iron when picking it up and setting it back down. you can swing with perfect form safely and then relax at the end of set and tweak your back.... Treat it like a 500lb piece of metal any time you touch it." These really resonated with me and made me more aware of the muscular tension around the joints. I don't have the injuries, but my joints are almost 50 years old, so I think it's pretty important. Seems we only can hammer our joints so much in life, whether we do it early or later, sooner or later it will catch up to us. On the other hand, if proper muscular tension is used, the joints are not excessively loaded, and the weight is safe. So it's all relative.
 
Geoff Chafe said:
The difference between an athlete and an exerciser is, an athlete puts there health at risk, and an exerciser does not. Many exercisers injury themselves though, as you can tell by the many injuries reported around the forum, but you cannot blame the tool or the weight.
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I think this is an important point. To many people forget they are not full time athletes and therefor has small reward when managing the risk/reward thing and injure themselves for absolutely no reason
 
Hello,

Indeed, the long term perspective is too often forgotten. I prefer lift less but during a long time.

Lots of pro athlètes include in their supllements pills to fight against pain. So I believe most of them know they are pushing too far.

Kind regards,

Pet'
 
Well.

The first guy is 30. I do not know the specific details of his hip injury, just that he is no longer able to deadlift heavy due to chronic hip pain.

The woman is 40. She said she is no longer able to do any form of strength training before feeling aching pain in her body.

The two men are 50. They are also no longer able to do heavy squats or deadlifts, only bench press.


It must be added that for all of these people they competed with these strength training suits, which increased their ability to lift heavy, but which might have put even more strain on their bodies.
 
Anders said:
The first guy is 30. I do not know the specific details of his hip injury, just that he is no longer able to deadlift heavy due to chronic hip pain.

The woman is 40. She said she is no longer able to do any form of strength training before feeling aching pain in her body.

The two men are 50. They are also no longer able to do heavy squats or deadlifts, only bench press.
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It would be interesting to know more about their health history, injury history, etc. It is difficult to place the blame on the lifting when we know little about how exactly their injuries came about, their specific diagnoses, etc. Also, sometimes they may not be as permanently disabled as they believe themselves to be. They may not be able to lift at the elite level the rest of their lives, but how many of us can? Sometimes its a matter of finding the right clinician who can really get them what they need.

I for one, would love to see more data on quality of life in elderly individuals who have strength trained heavily throughout their life. I am not convinced they would necessarily have a worse quality of life than people who have been largely sedentary and unhealthy their whole life. I would bet their quality of life would be better than sedentary people. Everyone gets arthritis, whether they lift weights or not. Whether they hurt or not is a totally different story. After all, I see a lot of folks in my office who have been completely sedentary most of their lives and yet their MRI results and xrays are horrific, they hurt everywhere, etc. The couch is a dangerous thing for the musculoskeletal system. If you don't use it, it decays. It's all about finding eustress.
 
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Thanks for all the good replies.

Rickyw - yes. It would be interesting to see how weightlifters feel when they are in their sixties and seventies.

Another point, somewhat related: My father has a career as an amateur football player. He has also been running asphalt roads once or twice a week for his entire life. In addition he has been overweight, by around 20-40 pounds. He is now 63 and his one knee is hurting very much when he walks uphills and downhill. His cartilage in the hurting knee is greatly reduced. So I guess this just mean that football and running can be dangerous as well, especially for overweight people.
 
Pavel and Dan John touches this subject in the book Easy Strength explaining the quadrants, in this case quadrant 4. However it may not be relevant to injuries later in life, but an interesting observation.

...someone’s going to ask, you know, seeing an Olympic lifter, the best in the world, and go, ‘Isn’t that unhealthy?’ Shhh. Yes. But he is very fit for that task, you know? ...
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Source: The Quadrants
 
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