Kettlebell Transferring tension techniques to strength moves

[lais817]

In an effort to boost my pressing ability, I have been practising bottoms up presses and I'm really happy with how tight and locked in I can get. The issue I have is when I move back to pressing with a heavier bell, I find I can't maintain that same level of tension.

Does anyone have any tips aside from, obviously, spend more time practising?

 

[HarryBergers]

I actively pull my arms(humerus), into my lats along my ribs before the first rep of the set to set my upper body tension. Singles or doubles, the free arm works too. This gets my lats and obliques tight. The rest of the core is activates against this tightness by "crunching" into a hollow-like position while inhaling against my diaphragm, while pulling my knee caps up and clenching the glutes locking the lower back. For my grip I focus on squeezing the handle with the muscles the handle touches in my palm more than death gripping the handles with a traditional finger grip like overhand deadlift. The bell sits diagonally in my lower palm with my hand vertical.

From rack position(or my cleaned-to rack) to this position my elbows move maybe 2-3 inches.

To start the press I'll squeeze both the triceps and lats to get the bell moving, almost feels like you push the weight away from you out and up.

This was my pttp technique and it worked great for progressing strict pressing for me

 

[Luis T. Gonzalez]

The 1st is to have a good clean. If you are wobbly of fidgety in the clean, then your press will not be good and you will not be able to press much. Try doing a hardstyle plank and tense your entire body before you press next time and work on turning on the tension from your toes, to your quads, glutes, core, lats, and fists. That same tension should exist in your clean and press. When you press you can hold a gripper in the opposite hand too to squeeze hard the muscles of the side you aren’t pressing on if pressing a kettlebell.

 

[marlowe]

In an effort to boost my pressing ability, I have been practising bottoms up presses and I'm really happy with how tight and locked in I can get. The issue I have is when I move back to pressing with a heavier bell, I find I can't maintain that same level of tension.

Does anyone have any tips aside from, obviously, spend more time practising?

This is interesting. Adding instability to a movement does not increase your force production - quite the contrary. You can never squat more on a bosu ball than on flat ground, always less. Also why you can leg press more than you can squat. The more stable the movement, the more force you can produce.

You, however, talked about  tension, and that can definitely go  up with increased instability - precisely because of your need to stabilize your body. It's why we produce more (full-body) tension when squatting then when leg-pressing, to keep using the same example.

So you see how, apparently, no, there's no way to reduce instability and maintain requirement of tension; you can keep practicing, as you said... but this all has given me an idea you might find useful.

In addition to pressing the heavier weight, do sessions of one-handed swings with it. If it's heavy enought to disrupt your posture and it forces you to really lock your abs, your shoulder and your a#@ in order to avoid rotation, it might help you work tension as a skill with that weight until you learn to press it bottoms-up.