Digging this one back up because, well it's worth it.
I just passed my Level 1 Cert in Nashville this last weekend. For background, I started training with David Whitley in September of '11 and took my training "in house" in August of '13. I'm a few days shy of my 51st birthday, so the appropriate bell for the cert was the 20 kilo. A few thoughts:
1. In Aug-Sep, I did a squat-intensive 6-week double kettlebell complex program from Geoff Neupert's "More Kettlebell Muscle". There was nothing in the cert that was as hard as any given session from "The Wolf". Yes, I was just as surprised as you are. The cumulative daily fatigue was greater at the cert, but no individual session could touch The Wolf.
2. Everyone says to train for strength first in your SFG cert prep work. I don't know how many people actually do this because way too many people spend all their time freaking out about the snatch test. But I did it. After the muscle-building character of The Wolf, it was time to make my new muscles strong so I began the "Strong!" program from Neupert's "Ketttlebell Strong" book. No ballistics at all. Just heavy KBs (32s for me) moving through a building volume of a Big Bang exercise. I got strong. It was really nice to know I had so much "headroom" in my strength. When you've been training with double 32s, flinging your double 20s around at the cert is so far below your strain threshold that you can focus entirely on improving your technique which is what you should be doing with each rep anyway. Get strong. Strong fixes everything.
3. Another bit of StrongFirst wisdom is that at the level most of us are at, metabolic and aerobic conditioning will travel alongside pure strength improvement for a long time. I found this to be absolutely true. Despite training Strong! for over 2 months (almost 500 reps), I rarely broke a sweat in training. My kinda program. My conditioning from The Wolf never went away and an impromptu snatch test showed my "walkin' around" conditioning would easily pass it in 4:45.
4. Original Strength resets are invaluable. Buy the book, take the workshop, get somebody to teach you how to do this stuff. Whatever, but when you can breathe, rock, roll, nod, march, and crawl for 2 minutes and literally be ready for whatever challenges await you at a cert - you've found gold.
5. Speaking of breathing: learn how to breathe. There's a nice section on this in Pavel's "Simple & Sinister". There's good stuff on this in "Original Strength". If your response to the idea of "learning" to breathe causes you to scoff, you're probably doing it wrong. We did an exercise at the cert that involved holding a bell at lockout for - a while. This will separate those who can breathe from those who scoff.
Okay, that's it. That's how I trained. The Wolf; then Strong!, then Strong! combined with Ballistic Beatdown (only a couple weeks on this combo); then Simple & Sinister to work swing and Get Up technique (only about 2 weeks of this as well). I touched a kettlebell for the last time on the Sunday prior to the tune of 50 swings, then I rested and took care of my hands.
The long and short: get strong first. It's no joke. It's no marketing ploy. It's no clever jingle.