The Benefits of Kettlebell Training for Athletes...

The Benefits of Kettlebell Training for Athletes: Biohack Your Fat Loss, Strength, Explosive Power, and Muscle Building

Ameer Rosic Wednesday May 7th 2014 Read Full Article

I’ve found great results with my kettlebell training. You can too!

Want to increase your vertical jump and Vo2 capacity?

Nothing compares to the impact that kettlebells have on the entire body.

Working the entire body at different angles, toughen-up your body, develop unbelievable conditioning and stamina, and acquire a chiseled physique by wielding the ball of iron known as the kettlebell.

In today’s Podcast, Chris Lopez and I discuss how you can benefit from kettlebell training as an athlete and how to biohack your fat loss, strength, explosive power, and muscle building

Transcript (Listen to the Full Podcast Here): Ameer: Hey Chris. Welcome to the Optimal Health Show. How are you doing, brother?

Chris: I’m good, man. Thanks for having me on.

Ameer: That’s my pleasure. It’s been a while since we spoke last time.

Chris: Yeah, we miss you out here on the East Coast, buddy. You have to get back here.

Ameer: Yeah, I will. I’m coming there for Mastermind Talks in June and probably another event in July.

So I’ll be there quite a bit. The reason I have you on the show today is because you’re so fascinated with kettlebells. You’re really immersed in the world of kettlebells. I’m curious why did you decide to focus your attention on kettlebells opposed to body weight training or conventional free weight training?

Chris: I guess the thing that attracted me the most about kettlebells, especially with hard style, it’s very athletic. There’s a certain athleticism and a certain skill when you’re playing with kettlebells whether you’re doing hard style or soft style. There’s a certain skill and athletic quality that you have to be able to master in order to really perform well with them and get what you want out of them.

Because I was always an athlete growing up, a lot of trainers or a lot of people who get into the fitness industry, nine times out of ten, we all played sports when we were young. I identified a lot of who I was with being relatively athletic. When the time came for me to pick and choose something that worked for me… I got into kettlebell training specifically out of necessity. Mainly because I knew they were portable. I wanted to do some type of resistance training.

I know you’re able to use body weight as well but way back when I didn’t really understand how to use leverages to be able to manipulate weight to use my body weight, I wanted to be able to hold some iron. I wanted to be able to lift some stuff up over my head and kettlebells were what they were. I started studying a little bit more into it.

Like I said, it was all about skill and being able to display some type of athleticism with it as opposed to the meathead approach like picking up a couple of heavy dumbbells and just push them.

Ameer: Where did you get most of your training for kettlebells? You said you were exposed to that at a young age. Who was the person who blew you away with what type of capabilities you can achieve with kettlebells?

Chris: For me, because I’m a hard style guy, it was always Pavel. I read an article from Pavel. Ironically enough, the first article that I read about Pavel was about body weight training. It was the grease and the groove of being able to set PRs with chin ups. I like a lot of what he said because there was some science and some story-telling involved in his article. Because of that, I started reading more into who Pavel was.

Pavel Tsatsouline, who is the godfather of the hard style kettlebell movement. The RKC, now StrongFirst and everything. He’s the guy who started it all and brought it to North America. I started reading a little bit more about him. As I was reading about him, kettlebells came about. That was just the natural progression.

You read about this Russian guy who knows a little bit about kettlebells or who knows a little bit about training in general. You find out that he’s “the kettlebell guy”. I was like, “Oh, kettlebells. That looks interesting. It looks like a cannon ball with a handle on it. What’s the big deal?”

With a lot of people, I approach it with the tool in the toolbox mentality where it’s a funny looking dumbbell and so whatever I can do with dumbbells, I can do with a kettlebell. But let me just see if I could do these exercises with the kettlebell instead of a dumbbell. I did stuff like bicep curls, shoulder presses, I’d hold up for squats and stuff like that.

Lo and behold, as I started getting deeper and deeper into the world of hard style training, I realized that there are kettlebell exercises and then there are exercises that you can do with a kettlebell. Bicep curls, that’s an exercise that you can do with a kettlebell. But a hard style clean, that’s a kettlebell exercise.

There’s a difference like the snatch. The snatch is a kettlebell exercise.

Ameer: What are the main benefits that you saw after you started implementing the hard style type of kettlebell training?

Chris: I had a lot of the what-the-hell effect basically on me. Before I started training clients with it, I started doing a bunch of stuff with me. The reason why I got into fitness, as I said, was because I was an athlete when I was growing up. I was obsessed with vertical jump. Obsessed.

I’m relatively vertically challenged, as you know. I’m about five eleven. I’m not very tall, especially when you play sports like volleyball or basketball. I had to reply a lot on my vertical jump. When I was in high school, I would do as much research as I could to make sure that I understood how to train for vertical jump.

When I started swinging a kettlebell, doing the hard style swing, I noticed the mechanics of the swing – being a big kinesiology nerd when I was in university –the mechanics of the swing were similar to that of a vertical jump. Kind of the same wave, hip hinge dominant and there was a lot of posterior chain work. I knew that that involved a lot of the kettlebell swing and the vertical jump shared a lot of the same qualities. So I started swinging kettlebells and I started swinging heavy kettlebells.

Lo and behold, after about a year of doing that, I was able to put two inches on my vertical jump.

Instead of standing underneath the basketball rim and being able to jump up and grab it, I was able to hold a volleyball in one hand, stand up and dunk it. That’s just one example of what-the-hell effect that I experienced. Because of that, because I was focusing on performance and really trying to achieve numbers and everything, I noticed that my body started to change, too. I started to get a little bit thicker in the upper back, my shoulders started to cap out a little bit, I had visible abs already but they were just a little bit more defined, I wasn’t really altering my diet, I wasn’t training for fat loss per se.

I was training for performance but I noticed all of these positive changes started to happen. That’s what sold me and really, really wanted to get deep into it and then look into taking more expensive courses and understanding the science behind it. Which leads me to where I am today, training clients with it.

Ameer: Let’s talk a little bit about the science. You mentioned earlier right now that the kettlebell swing, either if you’re doing soft style or hard style, can benefit, for example a basketball player or a volleyball player, to increase the jump, right?

Chris: Right.

Ameer: How does that work?

Chris: A lot of it has to do with the biomechanics of it, right? If you take a look at the vertical jump, whether you’re a volleyball player or a basketball player, that isn’t a squat movement. It’s actually a hip hinge movement. It’s very hip dominant as opposed to knee dominant where a lot of people think squatting is.

I’m not saying that squatting or heavy squatting won’t benefit your vertical jump. But what I found, especially with a lot of the athletes that I work with, because they don’t have a lot of time, because I can’t put them under incredible amounts of load – we’re able to use kettlebell swings to accentuate and help them with the whole skill of vertical jump just based on swinging the kettlebell. The reason why we’re able to do that is because, and this was a study done by this guy Brandon Hetzler who’s big in the hard style community and StrongFirst community. What he did was he took Pavel, the guy that I was talking about before, and he had him stand on a force plate. He had him hard style swing a twenty-four kilogram kettlebell and what he found was that, by accelerating the kettlebell on the way down, so when you swing a kettlebell, at the top of the swing, you forcefully throw it down initiating that with your lats and getting into an explosive hip hinge.

He found that Pavel was able to generate about four hundred pounds of force into the force plate by using what cold overspeed eccentric. If you think about that, four hundred pounds from a twenty-four kilogram kettlebell, that’s a lot of force you’re putting into your muscles and into that hinge pattern. It’s no wonder that, once you’re able to master that technique, master the hard style swing, and then understand the benefits of overspeed eccentric, it’s no wonder how you can almost parallel a heavy squatting of four hundred pounds within doing something a little more forgiving on your joints like a hard style swing. If that makes sense.

Ameer: Now, you said, you worked with athletes. Which athletes, in general, which sports, in general, do you think would benefit the most from hard style type of training?

Chris: I’ve noticed that power athletes, team sport athletes benefit the most from hard style training mainly because a lot of what’s involved is start and stop. I work with a group nationally identified volleyball athletes every eight months for their training year. Because of the amount of plyometrics that they do in practice already. These are high school age kids. A lot of them play club. They all play high school.

When you think about practicing five nights a week and they’re max jumping every single practice, that’s all the plyometrics that they need. They don’t need more plyometrics. What they need is some type of strength. Some type of way to support what it is that they’re doing to help improve their performance without being so strenuous on their joints. What we’re trying to do is, we’re trying to eliminate the amount of contact, we’re trying to eliminate the amount of impact they get. Every time you land on your feet after a vertical, after a max vertical jump, that’s about three to four times your body weight on your joints.

The answer to able to help these athletes jump higher isn’t more of the same. It isn’t more jumping but being able to get them to groove the mechanics of what it is. That triple extension of your hips, your knees and your ankles into their physiology or into their neural system so that they understand how to do that and do it with load. The kettlebell swing provides that perfect loading for it.

Ameer: Do you see a good combination between kettlebell lifting and more strength training, say, power lifting or olly lifting like a good marriage between the two?

Chris: Oh absolutely. There’s a myriad of power lifters that have worked with a bunch of hard style trainer or hard style trainer that have seen benefits of improving their lifts. Specifically, the deadlift.

Mainly because, again, that swing is so hip dominant. That swing is a bunch of high frequency deadlifts that you’re doing within a certain amount of time.

In fact, I’ve heard of some power lifters that have increased their deadlift by doing a couple of months just swinging. Just being able to groove that patter and become better at it. We like to say that strength is a skill. So the better you are at the skill, the better you are at improving that pattern – that hip hinge pattern – the better you’ll be when it comes time to perform.

It’s just like practice. Never train your fatigue. That’s big in the body building community but in the strength training community, we know that we need to train heavy. We need to train explosively. But we need to be able to manage fatigue and train as frequently as possible but as fresh as possible.

Those are the same principles that are espoused in the kettlebell community and the hard style community. It’s about practice. It’s not about working out and running yourself into a wall every single time you pick up a weight.

Ameer: I know Louie Simmons, from Westside Barbell, talks about that. He actually incorporates the B’s like forty-eight kilogram swings at least once or twice a week within his regimen.

Chris: Yeah, it was actually Louie Simmons who actually told Pavel that, within Pavel’s new organization, StrongFirst and the RKC before that, all the principles that we taught and that we learned through that, basically what we’re doing is reverse engineering what the strongest do naturally. That’s basically what we’re doing. We’re taking those strength principles and we’re applying it to the kettlebell.

That’s why they say that the principles that they say that you learn, when you learn hard style, are transcended. They’re internal principles. They teach the wedging of it. The internal focus. If you’re squatting, think about pushing the floor away as opposed to pushing the barbell up. When you’re pressing, think about pushing your body away and making sure that all your joints are in alignment while you push your body away from the kettlebell.

Those principles are transcended into barbell lifting. They’re transcended into body weight training as well. The principles are the same, just the modality is different. In our sense, we use the kettlebell but there’s no reason why you cannot apply those same principles to barbell training, body weight training or even to dumbbell training or Olympic lifting for that matter as well.

Ameer: Let’s talk about grip strength for a second. What’s your take on kettlebell grip strength in carrying over to other sports? Such as, for example, deadlifting. I know some people have great strength to lift the bar but, honest to God, their grip just sucks.

Chris: My cure for grip strength, for people who don’t have good grip or don’t have a good grip to begin with, is just heavy kettlebell swings. If you ask me, “Chris, how do you improve your vertical jump?” “I’ll give you heavy kettlebell swings, Ameer.” If you ask me, “How do I improve grip strength?” “I’ll say heavy kettlebell swings, Ameer.” “Chris, if you want to have a six-pack abs, what do you do?” “Heavy kettlebell swings.”

I find that they’re incredible for so many things. It’s just a matter of how you program it. You and I both know that when it comes to deadlifting, grip is one of the first things to go on anybody. It’s just a matter of being able to tolerate that for higher volume and really working your way towards it. If you have problems with grip, then you can still groove that hinge pattern for your deadlift by swinging heavy kettlebells just by doing it under time and making sure that you’re waving your loads appropriately so you get the right stimulus to be able to improve your grip.

In addition to that, I honestly I like to use chin ups for grip strength as well. I think really strong people can pull high chin up numbers and improve their grip strength at the same time just by using their body under load. For me, I think there’s a huge carry over using the swing but I like to use other modalities as well like using chin ups.

Ameer: What’s your take on those handheld devices for grip strength?

Chris: Like Fat Gripz and that kind of stuff?

Ameer: No, no. The ones that you squeeze back and forth.

Chris: I think they’re okay for specific work like if you have a specific weakness. I had a buddy who I was talking to a few weeks ago who had surgery on his pinky. That was always his limiting factor. There’s a nerve in your pinky that innervates your lad and we know how important your lads are when you’re deadlifting, right? He had to do some specific work on his pinky. I think if you’re looking at overall grip strength, I’m a simpleton. I like doing things simply.

Again, I think just carrying heavy stuff and farmer’s walks are good as well.

Ameer: Let’s talk about the Fat Gripz for a second. I used to play around, sometimes putting Fat Gripz on the kettlebell itself.

Chris: Oh yeah?

Ameer: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: I got a pair from a friend of mine. I’ll use them from deadlifts on a speed day when I don’t have to do a lot. Where my lists aren’t as heavy but I have to move the weight relatively fast. I don’t have big hands to begin with so my grip is always a limiting factor for me.

I like the Fat Gripz. I think they’re healthier for your elbows as well because of more of contact points that you get on your hand. The more contact points that you get, the more surface area that’s available, the more I think you’re able to channel or you’ll get more nerve juice out of the muscle. I like that to a sense but I still think that it’s a combination of practice. I think you still need to focus on specifically gripping and carrying heavy stuff with the grip that you’re intended to.

I think the Fat Gripz would help provide you with good assistance and doing fat bar deadlifts will provide you with good assistance. The thing that I’ve head though, the thing that I’ve read, it’s pretty neural intensive as well. So you can smoke your central nervous system pretty quickly if you’re constantly doing grip work.

Ameer: That happened to me a bunch of times like that.

Chris: Yeah.

Ameer: I’ve walked away from workout, shaking.

Chris: Really, ey?

Ameer: Yeah. I was just stupid though. I just push myself way too much and literally walk away from workouts like having this central nervous system, shake. My body would shut down ten days afterwards.

Chris: Yeah. I believe it. The amount of recovery that you’ll need after one of those workouts because grip training is so intensive. Especially if you’re doing heavy deadlifts with the Fat Gripz on them, can you even do another exercise after you’ve done that? That’s a full body workout right there.

Ameer: It’s a pretty intense workout. It’s interesting though. Let’s jump into this conversation. A lot of people do cardio separately for their workouts. The beautiful thing about kettlebells, it kind of merges them, too. You have the anaerobic condition and aerobic conditioning. Let’s explain the benefits that we can see when it comes to the cardiovascular system.

Chris: You mean the benefits of doing it? I’m of the sense – and you can tell I’m a hard style guy when I say this – that I think there’s a cardio spectrum. You’ve got your anaerobic, alactic on the far end. Then, you’ve got your very low intensity cardio on the other end of the spectrum. In between, you have spinning, jogging, heel sprints, all that stuff. I’m very much of the sense that you want to stay on one end of the spectrum or the other. If I’m prescribing cardio to clients – and when I read my programs, I do this exact same thing – I prescriber either very, very high intensive cardio or I prescribe walking. But I never go in between.

Ameer: Why isn’t there no in between?

Chris: Because I feel that a lot of the clients that I work with want a workout to be very muscle-sparing.

They have a lot of hard-earned muscle and we want to train specific to whatever their sport is or specific to whatever the fat loss goals are. In order for us to be able to do that, I just find that a lot of people are weak and I find that cardiovascularly doing anything like jogging, going to a spin class, or running a marathon, that saps you of a lot of strength. People lose a lot of strength because of that.

Nine times out of ten, if I have a client who wants to drop a ton of fat, I will get them to walk in the fastest state every morning. Then, if they want to do some cardio work, I’ll say clean a pair of double twenty-four kilogram kettlebells and do some double front squats. You’ll notice that their heart rate will go up no matter what. If they’re doing the double front squats for ten sets of five, they’ll get…

Ameer: What’s your take, then, on multiple swings like you mentioned earlier? Or doing maybe a fiveminute early snatch test?

Chris: The five-minute snatch tests, for StrongFirst America they use that as their standard, it’s all about power production and being able to maintain that. I like the snatch test in terms of challenging yourself.

But I don’t suggest people do a snatch test more than once every four to six weeks cycle. I don’t think a snatch test is something that you should be doing every single week. I think it’s something that you really have to work towards.

If I’m doing heavy swings, then I want to kill the set when the quality of my repetitions go down or the quality of my repetitions start to diminish. Within hard style, we want to lift things as explosively as we possibly can. We’d never want to turn any of our ballistic exercises, cleans, snatches or swings into a grind. So even though a piece of paper tells you should be doing twenty swings for this workout, if swings sixteen seventeen are laborious, and they don’t look like what hard style should be – if your rep speed is starting to slow down, if you’re not able to lift explosively, then there is no sense in completing that set. You have to make sure that the quality is there every single time.

So when I’m programming somebody for cardiovascular, or for strength or even for body composition, I start with five reps and I say be as explosive as you possibly can. Then, rest for the remainder of the minute and do it again at the top of every minute. Before you know it, they start accumulating their ability for strength endurance to be able to maintain strength.

So, it’s not metcon per se so that you’re chasing a bunch of reps. It’s staying within a low rep range, building your tolerance for that, starting slow, having a big picture outlook so that eventually, after a few weeks time, you’ll be at that rep range. But you’ll be doing it explosively and your last rep will look like your first rep. That’s where I am as far as cardiovascular is concerned.

Ameer: You mentioned doing every four to six weeks. So then, you really don’t do too much metcon week by week? It’s just more of a test every month or so?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. If you think about metcon, and this is what I find with the general population, metabolic condition is another word for strength endurance, right? Now, if you take a look at what strength endurance is, it is strength endurance. Strength being the key word. Most of the general population that does metcon, and I’m not talking about these CrossFit guys because a lot of them are strong, a lot of people who do metabolic conditioning in the general population are not strong.

You have to be strong first before you can do strength endurance. There is no strength there. We need to build up an appreciative amount of strength in order for us to be able to endure that strength.

Otherwise, our workouts just become endurance. If our workouts become endurance then they just become cardiovascular. We want to stay away from that midway spectrum of cardio and stay within a high intensity range or the very low intensity parasympathetic range, which will do far more for you being able to balance all the sympathetic work you’re doing with your strength training with the parasympathetic walking activity than stay in the middle where your nervous system could get taxed and you’re living in a sympathetic state the whole time around. That’s my opinion on the whole thing.

Ameer: So all the CrossFitters out there doing a couple of metcons each week, they’re burning themselves out.

Chris: Don’t you find that? I find that a lot of people get injured.

Ameer: Yeah.

Chris: I feel like that’s why a lot of people are walking around with bags under their eyes. They make you think they got hit by a truck. They’re adrenals are burnt out. They’re producing all this cortisol.

The thing with me, Ameer, is I’m of the mindset that a workout or a training session should give you more than it takes out of you. It should make you a better person. I don’t know about you. I’m thirtyseven years old now. I’m hitting that range where I have a different outlook on things these days. I don’t want to feel like I got hit by a truck and I have to recover from a workout five days afterwards.

Ameer: I agree. Plus, it’s the form, too. I train olly lifting here and there when I have the opportunity to.

Tell you what, man, I take my sweet as time doing lifts.

Chris: Exactly! It’s so neurologically taxing. Olympic lifers – guys who are competing in this stuff, whose livelihood is dependent on this stuff – they don’t do more than five reps of any type of lift or of any lift.

Ameer: Yeah. Then, in the CrossFit games or whatever, CrossFit box is you’re lifting that snatch, I don’t even know what their wads are today. Numerous times, twenty, forty, fifty reps and just the bar of your head non-stop.

Chris: It’s insane, right? I’m sure you read that study out of Ohio state that proved that CrossFit was the best way to build muscle and burn fat but it was some seen number. Twenty percent of the people that started the study couldn’t finish it because they got hurt.

Ameer: Fantastic.

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know about you but I don’t like those odds. If one out of every five people are dropping out because they’re getting hurt, that’s not the best way to train as far as I’m concerned. The risk far outweigh the rewards.

Ameer: Indeed. Let’s jump into the topic about breathing. What I like about the hard style, it really teaches you on how to really concentrate on your breath and how to master it to your benefit.

Chris: Right. The whole thing with hard style, you can see this on a macro scale, in terms of the programming and then on a micro scale as small as the breathing technique, is that it’s a matter of tension. It’s a balance of a wave of tension and relaxation. We want to tense our body as quickly as we possibly can.

The best analogy that I can use is if you think about a martial artist – I was reading in a book, one of Pavel’s very first books, Enter the Kettlebell! – he talked about how Bruce Lee showed somebody how to swing a kettlebell and how he would focus the top of the swing, so when you’re holding the bell out into the horizon, and how tense he would get at the top of the swing, to mimic the contact of a punch. At that point and time where your body is fully tense, you’re power breathing. You’re taking a lot of breath into your diaphragm and you’re creating almost an immovable cylinder. You’re creating one strict point of tension at the top of the swing. Maximum effort, high tension, every muscle possibly contracted at that point of contact.

As that kettlebell starts to descend, you nasally breathe, expel some of that breath and go back into your hip hinge. Then, come up and then extend. So if you take a look at the swing, as much as the back swing and the finish or the root of the swing, is a wave of tension-relaxation. Your breath matches that same tension and relaxation wave as you’re swinging back and finishing at the top.

In hard style, one of the very first things that we teach are our ability to be able to maintain tension and not blow our head off by creating so much pressure in our head when we’re swinging or when we’re performing high tension lifts like a press or even a getup or a squat. Like I was saying earlier in the call, those principles carry over into barbell training and into deadlifting even into body weight training.

It’s all about our ability to maintain that tension-relaxation relationship when we’re performing our ballistics and being able to maintain the high tension that we crate in our bodies to lift things over our head or to push things off our chest.

Ameer: I see a huge carry over and I used to work with a lot of – because I used to be in the MMA world – I used to work with a lot of fighters with kettlebells – I find it funny that a lot of them don’t really accept it as the modality of training. I’m like, “My God, there’s so much benefit here.” Think about it, from cleaning it to your chest – and that can be your guard like for a boxer or MMA fighter – to the whole aspect of muscular endurance if you want to do swings or snatches…

Chris: Yup. Ameer: … and to the whole aspect of grip strength. If I’m wrestling somebody and doing some jitz, well you better fucking watch out, man. When I grab you, it’s game over.

Chris: Yeah. You know what, this is what I’m talking about. This is where the double kettlebell cleans come in. It’s funny you mentioned that because I’m teaching a seminar to a bunch of muay thai fighters this Sunday and on kettlebell training and how it could improve their training… If you take a look at the double kettlebell clean, just that in of itself, you already talked about the guard being able to clean the kettlebell.

Let’s break the whole thing down. You forcefully extend your hips. That’s your striking. That’s your kicking. That’s your punching. There is an explosive hip extension when you punch somebody or when you kick somebody. That’s all triple extension. So you’re getting that in your double kettlebell clean.

Another big thing, form an MMA standpoint or a fighter standpoint, fighters have to learn how to tolerate force and absorb it and if needed, transfer that force into a counterattack. That’s exactly what cleaning is. When you clean a pair of heavy kettlebells, you have a double thirty-twos, or a pair of double twenty-fours for some people, and you’re cleaning those kettlebells and settling them into the rack.

That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re taking force. You’re absorbing force. You’re going to try to channel that force into, maybe, a press afterwards. So you’re trying to absorb that force and translate it into a counter move afterwards. I think MMA guys are really missing a lot if they discount the strength aspect and the explosivity aspect and the anaerobic aspect of using kettlebells.

Ameer: One hundred percent, man. I used to try to train some. A couple of my friends in the MMA world and I’m like, “Guys, you guys are training jujitsu over there, half of you guys doing muay thai, half may be doing Greco-Roman wrestling and I’m not telling you to adopt it as a hundred percent part of your training. But you at least incorporate five to ten percent. Do it. What is there to lose? Your grip strength’s going to improve. Your guard’s going to improve and everything’s going to improve.

One thing that, we touched base a little bit on it, is when you start playing around kettlebells and really doing training, you actually develop this neurological adaptation that I can’t really find anywhere else in any other type of training.

Chris: Yeah, no. Absolutely. It’s like what I mentioned before. It’s about what-the-hell effect. I think it’s about the athletic nature of kettlebell training and if you do it right. If you take the approach that it’s just more than a funny looking dumbbell and you would really apply the principles that you would teach or I would teach, it has so much carry over into other things.

It just makes you more athletic. It makes you leaner. It makes you stronger, for sure.

The other, and I wanted to touch on this, you were talking about jujitsu or BJJ or the guys that are on the ground, using the get up, being able to manage your body on the floor while you have something heavy on top of you, that’s key. So when I’m training BJJ guys, it’s all about being able to master the get up. It’s all about using heavy kettlebell swings to be able to master your grip because grip strength is so key.

That’s another point to be made.

People are missing a lot if you completely discount it as not training. I can get everything I need from body weight training and tossing a medicine ball around and everything.

Ameer: To them, I say, their loss.

Chris: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Ameer: Alright, Chris. If you had to summarize, what would be your number one Optimal Health tip you could give somebody?

Chris: Get strong first. Again, I’m a little biased. I come from a bias of strength. I really do believe – It was one of my coaches back in 2009 that said this to me – strength is your container. Strength is the container from which you can put all your physical qualities in. Strength makes everything better. You need to be able to have a baseline of strength before you can do other things.

We touched on this a little bit. As far as the whole strength endurance metcon thing, right? Metcon, which is strength endurance, only is strength endurance if you’re strong first. If you’re not strong then it just becomes endurance exercise. If you want to lose fat, get strong first. Be able to have that foundation of strength so that the kettlebells that you do use, or the dumbbells that you do use, the barbells that you do use, are heavier because that will elicit a higher metabolic response.

If you want to build muscle, same thing applies. The heavier weights that you use and the more volume that you apply with the heavier weights, you’re going to get bigger if you’re strong. But you have to be strong first. Even from a cardiovascular standpoint. Endurance athletes, as much as you guys shun weights or don’t see the benefits of weight training, if you are strong, the more force you are able to apply into the ground, the faster you’ll go. The faster you’ll go, the better your times will be. The better times you’ll be, the more you’ll win your endurance events. Strength fixes almost everything. Do yourself a favor and really focus on strength at least once or twice a week and understand that strength is a skill. It’s about practice, it’s about using high tension techniques. It’s about never fatiguing yourself or taking you to the point where you feel like you’re going to throw up after a workout. That’s not strength.

Strength is a skill. It’s skill work. It takes patience. It takes practice.

Ameer: Mastery, baby. Mastery.

Chris: That’s what it’s about. It’s about mastery. It’s about mastering the skills.

Ameer: Chris, where can people find more information about you?

Chris: There’s a couple of places. You can hit me up at kettlebellsworkout.com. That’s where you’ll find everything about kettlebell training, hard style training, physical culture, body weight training, all the stuff that I love to talk about. Some nutrition and lifestyle tips as well. Or you can find me at my personal blog over at fitandbusydad.com.

Ameer: Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris, for coming on the Optimal Health Show and have a great day, brother.

Chris: Thanks, Ameer. Thanks for having me, man.

Optimal Resources Mentioned: -

Enter The Kettlebell! Strength Secret of The Soviet Supermen

Ameer Rosic

Ameer Rosic is obsessed with health. A Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Functional Diagnostic Practitioner and Functional Medicine Practitioner, Ameer has spent years empowering himself with knowledge about optimal health, and now his passion is to share that with you! From interviews with top health experts to fitness and nutritional advice and more, Ameer Rosic can help you live a life of optimal health!

Discover more at www.ameerrosic.com.

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