Back in September I managed to do something that I had been working toward for a while. I achieved my very first kettlebell sport rank. As these things go it’s a pretty modest achievement. I did it with 16kg bells and a five minute set of long cycle.
I want to talk about it. Organizing my thoughts might prove to be a useful blueprint for my future work and maybe some of this will be intriguing.
But first, a disclaimer. I will be talking about some lifting that I did. I absolutely do not want you to read this as fitness advice or even a set of particularly good ideas. Be skeptical! I’m not a coach and it is unlikely that I can give you useful advice for whatever your particular situation is. This is just a bunch of stuff I did and your mileage may vary.
Off Season Preparation
I treat late spring and much of the summer as my kettlebell sport off season. I don’t think about it much because this is usually prime cycling weather. Weather for doing stuff. I don’t want to be indoors grinding away under the bells.
So how did I prepare?
I didn’t! I honestly didn’t even have plans to compete in the usual Twin Cities Kettlebell Open. I wanted to scream around on bikes all year and return to racing. I was reasonably successful with this goal. It turned out that this was accidental preparation all the same.
When the middle of July rolled around, I once again got the desire to channel my inner forklift and I cast my attention back to the bells. It seems that the desire to lift these things always returns and I don’t stress about it. I figured I had roughly seven weeks to prepare which meant I had a week to screw around and get used to the bells again, followed by six weeks of dedicated effort to condition myself.
The Lead Up
I noticed that, thanks to copious cycling mileage, my cardio was in a way better state than usual. For the first time since I gave long cycle a try years and years ago, I was bound neither by strength nor cardio capacity. This meant that I was finally able to view kettlebell sport in a completely new and familiar light.
That warrants some background context. When I began screwing around with kettlebell sport, I was truly weak and considered the 16kg bells heavy. My ten minute sets weren’t anything to write home about. They were affairs that I survived and that was enough for me. It was important only to go the distance, my rep count did not matter to me. There was absolutely no hope of achieving a rank at all.
Dedicated effort and plenty of eating facilitated getting way stronger. I don’t consider the 16kg bells heavy anymore; I haven’t for some time. During this period of time I had been cycling regularly but I hadn’t been trying to race my bike. A desire to return to that provided enough motivation to try to get faster. It turns out that getting faster on a bike is directly related to developing cardiovascular capacity. Who knew?
During that first week of reacquainting myself with the kettlebells, it occurred to me just exactly how this was an endurance sport. Once you’re strong enough, and once your cardio capacity is high enough, it’s all about output. I was in the right headspace to understand that viscerally. I had probably been told that this was the nature of the sport for some time by practitioners much more advanced than I but this doesn’t matter: I am fundamentally a dumb guy who has to learn by experience. You can tell me that a stove is hot and I’m still going to at least hover my hand over it experimentally.
With that, I had constructed a useful internal simile. Kettlebell sport is like cycling. Volume is what matters. I reasoned that I could use this as a framework to experiment with what might work for me. I knew that I had to do a bunch of “chill” days where I got the reps in without dying on the platform. I also knew that, unfortunately, I’d have to do one or two intense days per week that made me wish I’d have chosen a different sport. I don’t do well with specific, detailed, prescriptive plans. This is a personal failing and I would rather that it was looked upon as a charming foible. It’s really just a lack of sufficient dedication.
Instead of being really dogmatic and having goals that I would shoot for, session over session, I decided to set up some guidelines that would let me construct (hopefully) useful training on the fly. They were as follows:
- Don’t stop cycling. I wouldn’t prohibit myself from lifting on days when I planned to ride and vice versa. On days when I did both, I’d usually lift over my lunch break so that the sessions were spaced out by hours.
- Spend at least ten total minutes under the bells during the course of a session.
- No individual set was allowed to be less than two minutes. Historically, I’ve had very little difficulty with sets that were under two minutes in length. One can tolerate a lot of pain and heavy breathing for about 90 seconds. Beyond that? It’s a trial.
- Three days per week I would honk it out with my targeted competition weight.
- Two or more days per week I would work with much lighter bells. I looked at these as additional volume sessions where I could push pace and still condition myself, but without incurring a serious recovery debt.
Additionally, to maximize discomfort and time spent outdoors in the summer, I reasoned I should lift on my patio in the backyard. It receives direct sunlight all summer long. Coupled with temperatures above 85 degrees and high humidity, I figured that lifting indoors with air conditioning and moving air would feel like a vacation.
Final Preparation
Unfortunately, I got in my own way toward the end of these six weeks. I had been preparing for a ten minute set, but I’d underperformed or failed to go the distance in a few previous ten minute attempts in the last year or two. These were demoralizing and I was afraid of stacking up yet another failure. I felt good about my preparation and felt pretty strong and yet my headspace was incorrect.
So I emailed the organizer and requested that I change my set time from ten minutes down to five. I’m not making a living at this (who is?) and five minutes would be enough time for me to demonstrate that I’m still capable of doing this to myself. I knew I could handle five minutes because I had been incorporating those throughout my preparation. I resolved to just treat this as a particularly relaxed training day since I wouldn’t be doing multiple sets. Competition? No. Vacation!
Results
In short: it worked. Everything worked. I strung together some of my best reps per minute in a competition. I was able to maintain a pace that you could, if pressed, call “comfortable.” I even left some reps on the proverbial table: I was recording a video submission rather than attending in person and my dog had the opportunity to get loose and scamper into the area where I was lifting. I had to pause in the rack while my wife coaxed the dog out of the danger zone. I missed a rep or two, but the upshot is that more people got to look at my dog and that’s great. She’s cute and should be shared with the world.
That canine intrusion aside, I just generally didn’t push the pace that hard. I reasoned that the only thing worse than failing a ten minute set was failing a considerably shorter five minute set. I played it a little too safe.
At the end of the five minutes, I set the bells down and felt fine. I wasn’t even breathing particularly heavily. This was information I filed away for future use. It’s a clear sign that I can push harder next time; that a future achievement will outshine this one.
Future Plans
I want to continue with this volume idea. I want to wring everything I can out of it. There has to be a point where it won’t get me results and, once I’m at that point, I want to use whatever information I’ve gathered to address whatever weakness might be stopping my progress.
Ideally, I do a few more competitions before the next Twin Cities Kettlebell Open and I bump up to using 20kg bells at some point in the next year. Hopefully I eat all my vegetables and get sufficiently strong and I find myself capable of using the 24kg bells instead! From where I am now, I can see that possibility on the horizon. I just don’t know how long it’ll take to get there.
