Massive Kettlebell PR

Lately I’ve been working on a new kettlebell book and within that I expand on the cycling style of kettlebell training that I like to use as well as its application to multiple exercises. The first and foremost of which is the swing, but for me the second of which right now is the one arm push press. By the way, the book also deals with training kettlebells with other tools, as well as total programming and tons of cool stuff. For right now one of the major exercises I’m working on is the one arm push press.

Now why the push-press instead of the jerk? First of all I like the idea of being muscular with the kettlebell and not just being efficient. What does that mean? I want the bell to be used for explosive, powerful movements that creates fatigue not just escapes fatigue by efficiency. There’s nothing wrong with using the best technique and most efficient technique for what you’re doing especially if you’re in the sport idea of kettlebell lifting, but I’m lifting for pure maximum physical benefit. That means the most power I can get from my arms and shoulders as well as unification of my body to my lats, hips, thighs and abs and everything involved as well as the massive cardio components in an explosive drill. That’s the reason I use the push press.

It is an explosive drill, but at the same time a muscular drill not a drill that depends on small explosion and lots of relaxation. Now in the style that I use is there some relaxation? There’s some relaxation in absolutely everything you do, but especially from an endurance standpoint, though at the same time there’s a great deal of tension, extreme power repeated over and over again for a very fast pace. I also use multiple hand switches generally after 10 rep sets, but it could be any formation that strikes my mind especially after the first round of this particular type of training.

So what did I actually do? I took the 24kg bell and I one arm push pressed it for 300 reps in 10 minutes. Now this was a drop-the-hammer so to speak sprint to get that many done and I actually do believe you could do a little higher pace than that and in the future may attempt to get more repetitions in 10 minutes, but this was a goal of mine for a few workouts in this cycle now and I hit it. Within that, because of the sprint pace I then took a couple of minutes to rest and then continued pushing the bell for the rest of the hour. Actually 61 minutes and in 61 minutes I got 1,100 repetitions.

While I could get a higher total number of repetitions for the one hour workout if I used a better pacing method, this method gave me still a lot of stuff. I achieved long term explosive power, long term endurance, long term muscular strength, an incredible cardio session and a very, very hard workout all around. This is really what I’m looking for not just a paced workout that I can keep up, but something where I really have to cut it out multiple times throughout the hour hence the slower pace in the rest of the workout after the first 10 minute hard sprint.

Either way it’s incredible physical training both from a physical ability standpoint and from a cardiovascular standpoint as well as a mental strength standpoint. It’s another in the experiments in kettlebell cycling that you’ll be hearing about in the upcoming kettlebell book.

Now go out and hang your own PR because you know you can do it.