Day One was fun

I should not have doubted Agatsu. They know what they are doing. A little soreness is setting in but it’s not bad. There is a difference between practice and performance and today was about practice.

This morning was déjà vu: A review of the kettlebell swing and clean. Not that I am complaining; I learned more technical points, including the importance of the feet! Gripping the floor helps to stabilize the body. It makes sense: stability (and power) begins at the floor. Proper foot grip is the foundation for everything else because it forces you to engage the core. Kettlebells are all about generating power from the bottom up.

We also learned teaching cues for the swing. I can tell you teaching the swing has been one of the most challenging skills I’ve had to teach. The reason is that so many of us work the muscles in the front of the body, and neglect the posterior chain. The connection of the one part of the body to every other part of the body is the key to functional fitness and performance.

Another thing that many in the fitness world don’t do enough is locking the joints maybe because we have been taught it is bad to lock the joints. There is a place for bent joints and locked joints. It just depends what your goal is. But locking the joints is necessary for stabilization. If you are experienced in weight training this might seem counter-intuitive but the goal in kettlebells is different. Bodybuilders want time under tension but in kettlebells we want to stabilize the weight so that we can do more repetitions of the exercise; time under tension is counter-productive to that. We are not pumping a muscle in isolation but engaging the entire body.

In addition to these two basic exercises, we did the bottoms up clean and the snatch. These were a review of exercises introduced at the kettlebell certification also but the review was helpful.

Then we did single leg deadlifts for balance and some shoulder mobility exercises. Actually, we always warmed up with joint mobility. Then we did some fascial release work on each other which was really amazing. Very useful physical therapy you can do at home with a partner. It works to release adhesions that develop from overworked muscles.

We finished the day learning to do a stacked handstand. They timed us each doing a handstand with our feet touching the wall, facing the wall, straight up and down. Apparently no one was pulling in their ribs properly. Maybe we will learn to do a handstand in the air…  but it might take more than five days! And we'll have to get the rib thing first.

Looking forward to another great day. I will leave you with this thought: If you believe your less coordinated is side is as awesome as your more coordinated side, it will become so. Can you apply this to something in your life? You can take out the highlighted words and fill in your own.