Friday, May 23rd, 2008...10:23 am
Foundation vs. Athletic movements
Hip Party:
Max Front Squats: work up to a one rep max in front squats. This has been my weak point in my cleans. Getting under the bar fast feels pretty good, but I sometimes hesitate from fear that I’m not coming up. Sure, this is not uncommon, but for me the fear hits early, at weights I’m still comfortable power cleaning. If I’m going to get under a heavier bar, I have to get UNDER that heavier bar, and feel confident that I’m coming up. Currently my jerk press is stronger than my front squat!! That’s not right!
Power cleans from pins. 4 sets of 6 reps. Focusing on the last portion of the second pull, get those damn traps to fire!
The double/double combo: Grab a kettlebell that makes for a challenging Turkish Get Up. Then grab a KB that weighs twice as much. Then double that weight and put it on the sled or in a sandbag. 5 reps per side for the TGU/10 heavy swings with the heavier KB, then drag or pull 100 feet. Repeat as many times as you can for 10 minutes.
Let’s address some observations I’ve had recently:
The first one will take less words and time, so we’ll start there. Bodytribe was, for several years, the only gym in Sacramento using the classic Swing as a regular part of our lifting arsenal. We heart swings; KB, DB, sandbag, keg, cat… whatever we can get our hands on, we’ll get those hips thrusting almost obscenely to move that weight. Featured heavily in many of our videos and a good percentage of our combos and workouts, the swing is not only a great workout for the posterior chain and other postural muscles, it is also a good intro movement to comprehend the beauty of generating explosive speed through the hips, which can lead to further lessons in jumping or the Olympic lifts.
So let’s do our swings with full range of motion, folks! Granted, I don’t get out much, but I like me my online videos. And in them I’m seeing a trend of partial movement swings with weight that is just a bit too light. A swing demands the bend of the knees, the arch of the back, and a nice stretch in the hips and hamstrings. While keeping the chest high (don’t lose that arch!), let that weight swing so far back that you could smash the toes of someone trying to sneak up on you with a big knife.
If you’d like an added bonus to your swings, instead of just letting the weight swing down on it’s own, PULL it down, either through your own force, or by adding a band.
Here’s the quickest video clip i could get my hands on this morning of what a full range of motion swing looks like:swings.mov
Now they’re, conveniently, a part of today’s workout challenge above, so see if you can’t get some range of motion out of them.
Tomorrow: Foundation vs. Athletic Movements, part II
5 Comments
May 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Hey there! Love what you are all doing and after we get our KB’s from AKC, will be putting the double/double into our workout rotation.
Question: What do you think about the rounded back technique for competition KB lifting (swings, cleans, snatches, etc.)? I was at the cert and it was first time I tried it. It went against everything I knew up to that point about back position during lifting. But, I also saw the longevity and results of those KB lifters so I’m coming around and curious about it. Also, we recently got an Atlas stone in the gym to play around with and the technique to lift those babies puts your back into a rounded position.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
May 24th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Hi Xi Xia
Another friend of ours, Craig, was at that workshop and we had the same conversation. The AKC concept is to use as little effort as possible to make an extremely efficient lift and continue to do so for high reps. The reasoning behind the rack position being with the hips tucked under seems to serve the purpose of letting the body sustain the rack more than the arms, but letting the elbows almost ‘rack’ themselves into the pelvis.
This might be justified by the positioning of the weight, since the load isn’t:
a) directly over the spine (like a back squat)
b) isn’t being lifted with bent knees (like a squat or a deadlift)
So even in this ‘tucked under’ position, there is still plenty of activity from the glutes and hips, plus a solid center is still advocated (from what I’ve gathered). Hopefully these are still taking some of the force off the discs.
I’m still not a complete believer in this racked position. It may offer a more efficient route for KB movements, but I’m not yet convinced it will cross over to other lifting scenarios. A question to ask is: will it build a solid foundation for other sporting scenarios, or is it a bit of an exclusive idea that seems to work for Girevoy sport and not much more? I’ll be putting my discerning tools to this more in the future.
As for stone lifting, a ’rounder back hug’ as we call it, works quite well. Many odd lifts require this scenario, to wrap the body around the object as oppose to trying to rack it, simply because you can’t. The goal is to not let the posterior spinal muscles (the ‘local’ muscles) relax, which the often feel like doing in flexion. Therefore there needs to be a great focus on stabilization while letting the legs do as much as they can. Pivot will come more from moving the entire body as a unit than simply at the hips, when trying to extend the body (and the stone) up to the platforms.
We use the rounded back hug with sandbags to practice before moving on to weirder objects. Since the load is actually brought to a racked position on the legs first, there initially is no danger to the spine. Then the legs will do most of the moving while the body stays locked around the object. It seems contraindicative at first, but with practice, it does work well.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Hi Chip,
What a coincidence that we are all having the same conversation and questions. Scott and I were at the cert and we have been discussing the rounded back position as well - especially when the bells dive between the legs on a down swing. I recognize the mechanical advantage of the elbow on the hips for the rack position. It took a while for the body to recognize that as a “safe” position though! It took even longer to stop “arch bracing” the back in preparation for the downward swing.
It’s the downward swing that I’m really curious about. With the trajectory of the bells, I feel like I’m “rolling” with the momentum. I could just let go and it would take me into a forward shoulder roll. Right at the end of the down swing, my glutes/hams eccentrically bear the brunt of the load for a moment and then rebound plyometrically.
My posterior back extensors are not relaxed like in flexion stretching but they are also not in a shortened state from full contraction either. It is very dynamic, the length and tension is constantly fluctuating during the downswing. If my back was arched, like in a back squat, tension and length is fairly constant throughout the loading phases of the lift.
Besides being efficient for KB sport, I think being able to absorb and deliver forces in non-arched back positions is a beneficial skill to have. For instance, I can see how an athlete in contact sports could benefit from developing non-bracing force absorption and being able to generate hip forces without an arched back position.
Have a great weekend and I know Scott is going to jump in on this thread sometime soon. If I’m ever around, definitely going to stop on by to check you guys out!
May 25th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Watching Kettlebell Sport is, I have to admit, not exciting for me. High rep, redundant work just doesn’t float my boat, give me some combos, some range of motion and/or something heavy!!
The terms in KB sport are non-traditional, and in a way i’m not sure I’ll get used to. The ‘jerk’ is more of a strange rolling variation of a push press, and the snatch… well, if it ain’t from the floor, it ain’t a full snatch. In fact, what KS calls a snatch is actually a reduced range of motion version of an old competition swing (even used in the second modern olympic game just about 100 years ago), although with a KB instead of a dumbbell.
Maybe I’m a bit of a purist.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Xi Xia/Chip-
It’s a weird thing, that GS type KB work. What I find is that if I am doing high reps (or maybe multiple sets a la combo shite) as I tire I can and sort of NEED to adapt to that style.
Chip, I am with you- my crank ain’t turned by a hundred reps of anything not involving a woman. I tend to do combo out everything- yesterdays fun was swing-hi pull-snatch-drop to rack-press-snatch-hi pull- swing.
But, as an exercise in self abuse I did a workout on Monday that was the long cycle clean and jerk, l-r, for 20/19/18/17 etc down to five reps with a minutes rest between sets. By the time I got to about the 9 rep set I was definitely playing using all I learned from Valery.
Hey, Scott Sonnon says it’s the best way, so that works for me.
Best-
Craig
Leave a Reply