Swings and Super Conditioning

Appeared August 10, 2006

God bless you all.

The kettlebell or dumbbell swing is one of the most incredibly powerful exercises in modern hardcore conditioning. It works the posterior chain like almost nothing else and you can get a tremendous amount of strength and endurance with little or no damage from heavy loading. You all know I believe in heavy loads, but I also believe in mixing light and heavy work to get the most well-rounded effect and the greatest strength with the least possibility of overwork. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

At the present time I do quite a bit of heavy squats, but not that many heavy deadlifts or goodmornings. I find that the overload of muscles and structure is very close from all three of those exercises and you have to be careful not to overload the low back and hip structures from too much heavy work. I’ve also done a large number of swings lately and even though I haven’t regularly practiced stiff leg deadlifts or goodmornings when I have done them lately I have been very close to my top level. That means I’m maintaining that strength with no training and have the ability to practice those exercises with no pain from over work. Plus I get the benefits of extreme endurance and body conditioning from the swings.

Here’s a quick conditioning routine that I did the other night:

Start off with 100 swings with a moderately heavy kettlebell. Then sets of 20, 15, 10 and 5 of bodyweight squats, jumping jacks, sit ups, and push ups. Between every set jog in place for 50 steps. Try not to stop moving. As soon as you finish your set start jogging in place, and as soon you finish jogging hit your next set. Finish with another 50 kettlebell swings. Try to beat 15 minutes for the whole workout. You should be breathing very hard and you will have worked every muscle in your body along the way.