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Other/Mixed Thoughts on this Article? : Does the Kettlebell Swing Actually Improve Sports Performance?

Other strength modalities (e.g., Clubs), mixed strength modalities (e.g., combined kettlebell and barbell), other goals (flexibility)
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One of the studies done on recreational athletes was only 8 weeks long, the amount of time it takes to give up on a New Year’s Resolution when one realizes that one isn’t going to see dramatic results. I understand and respect that training for an elite athlete may focus on results that help them in their immediate season, since one bad season could end their career. But recreational athletes can get the most benefit when they focus on a longer time frame. Any jiu jitsu coach training recreational athletes knows that students need to think in terms of years, not weeks if they are to reap the benefits.
I acknowledge that it is very difficult to design perfect research studies in sports science. Each study is a trade-off in its own way and one tries to make the trade-offs in the best way that they can. I do hope that researchers continue to explore ways to develop the best research design possible.
 
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Like all strength and conditioning questions, the answer to the question posed in the title of the article is, “Maybe. It depends.”
There’s no such thing as sports specific weight training, so the premise of the article doesn’t make much sense to me.

The kettlebell swing can address the qualities strength coaches care about most: strength, speed, power and work capacity all in one relatively simple ground based movement. Yes, as the article points out the science on swings may be limited and the results spotty, but that isn’t the only metric for including or excluding exercises. The big questions are what do your athletes need and how are they doing?

Here is an older article from an Aussie coach who had success with KB swings improving his beach volleyball team’s performance. Includes some commentary on a few scientific papers and on hard style swings in particular. I particularly like what he had to say in the last paragraph. Swings and Vertical Jump

Edit: I am going to qualify my comment about the science of swings being limited: enter "Kettlebell Swings" in Google Scholar and you will get over 2000 hits. "Kettlebell Swings and Sports Performance" 1500 hits. I should have said perhaps, compared to "Squats and Sports Performance" with 37,900 hits, the number of swing studies is relatively limited.
 
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randyh said:
Like all strength and conditioning questions, the answer to the question posed in the title of the article is, “Maybe. It depends.”
There’s no such thing as sports specific weight training, so the premise of the article doesn’t make much sense to me.

The kettlebell swing can address the qualities strength coaches care about most: strength, speed, power and work capacity all in one relatively simple ground based movement. Yes, as the article points out the science on swings may be limited and the results spotty, but that isn’t the only metric for including or excluding exercises. The big questions are what do your athletes need and how are they doing?

Here is an older article from an Aussie coach who had success with KB swings improving his beach volleyball team’s performance. Includes some commentary on a few scientific papers and on hard style swings in particular. I particularly like what he had to say in the last paragraph. Swings and Vertical Jump
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Great post. Are you Randy Hauer by any chance?
 
Adam R Mundorf said:
Are you Randy Hauer by any chance?
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I believe he is. If so, I have to give @randyh props for the 70/50, 60/60, 80/40 snatch test prep program.

This is my absolute favorite snatch test program, and although I made a few tweaks to it, I never would have come up with the concept by myself.

I've posted about this program before, but I've never heard of anyone else actually trying it, except Ken Froese who wrote an article about it back in the day (which is where I leaned about it). Maybe it seems too different or too complicated, but it's actually pretty simple and very effective.
 
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Steve W. said:
I believe he is. If so, I have to give @randyh props for the 70/50, 60/60, 80/40 snatch test prep program.

This is my absolute favorite snatch test program, and although I made a few tweaks to it, I never would have come up with the concept by myself.

I've posted about this program before, but I've never heard of anyone else actually trying it, except Ken Froese who wrote an article about it back in the day (which is where I leaned about it). Maybe it seems too different or too complicated, but it's actually pretty simple and very effective.
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It's awesome seeing him here. He's a super high caliber coach.
 
Valle lost me at "due to the fact it’s hard to load in a way that is truly progressive." Come again? I was always under the impression that those KB things came in progressively heavier weights . . .
Understand that he works (and is very well regarded) in the niche of testing and developing national and world class athletes - all of whom are genetic freaks. The ball game is eking out seconds (or in sprinters, fractions of seconds) and centimeters in runners, jumpers and throwers - maybe over years. Research demonstrating the superiority of one exercise or training method in producing the very specific and measurable qualities those folks are interested in is a very, very big deal to them - they have precisely four years minus two weeks from one Olympiad to the next, or 51 weeks between one national track meet and the next, and every hour has to be invested not just wisely or productively, but optimally for the specific athlete. So his comparison of swings to snatches is driven by questions that most of us never need ask. It is his job to think about these things that way.
For the other 99.99% of us, the question "will it improve sports performance" is easily overthought.
It ain't that hard. If at Time Point 1 you can (for example) only swing a 16kg bell with power, deadlift only bodyweight, do only five strict pushups, and cannot do a strict pullup, and at Time Point 2, you can swing a heavy bell with power, pull 2.5xBW, and rep strict pullups and pushups with added load . . . you will be a better athlete at Time 2 than at Time 1 every single time. You can make that sports-performance-relevant progress by yourself, in your garage. If you could do those things and also run well, or get to a 3+ watt/kg FTP on your bike . . . the whole world of "age grouper" sub-Olympic/elite sport is open to you. Climb Aconcagua. Ride Dirty Kanza. Get to brown belt in BJJ. Easily transition to powerlifting. Race your SUP. Or whatever else you might practically be interested in doing, sports wise. Sounds pretty "sports performancy" to me, and maybe to you too. Hard to think of more productive tools to get from poorer to better sports performance than KBs, pullup bars, barbells, and trails to run or ride.
 
Something else that could contribute is that most athletes have become accomplished at things like power cleans on the way to becoming sufficiently accomplished at their sport to seek out an elite-level coach, as these have been the industry standards for quite a while. As SF influences become more pervasive, top-level coaches might see more athletes who are elite swingers and snatchers more and more frequently.
At that point, maybe it's more a matter of working with what the athlete knows already, as along as it is adequate to the task.
 
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