2009/08/21 - Interesting

Today I finished my second week of consistent training with the bells after a few months of relative inactivity. My approach to GS is quite different from my previous outing. I have been lucky enough to get exposure to some of the methods used in Russia and Eastern Europe via people like Paul Tucker and Eugene (from GS over 40) as well as some updates from the IKFF. At the moment I'm not training mainly long sets 5 days a week as I did a while ago. I am focusing instead on areas I feel are a bit weak in order to prepare for the rigors of GS. At the moment for me the biggest issue is strength. For the past two weeks I've mainly been doing short sets of one arm jerks and snatches with the 24 kg bell. Today I chose to put in a slightly longer set with a lighter bell. Here's the result:

Warm up: Swings (24kg) / body weight squats

OAJ (16kg): 6 min / 8rpm

Snatch (16kg): 4 min / 12rpm

Swings and stretching to cool down

It was quite an interesting experience. The 16kg bell felt very light and flew up easily in both the jerk and snatch sets. I could have easily gone 8 minutes in the jerks and probably 6 in the snatch set but I chose to take it easy (I might finally have realized that impatience is never a good idea). So what do I take away from this session? Clearly shorter sets have a carry over effect if you use a lighter weight for the longer sets. For me this means that some form of strength work is pretty relevant in GS. There is still a lot of experimentation ahead of me but for now I'm glad to have found training templates other than those offered by the AKC or RKC crowd. I guess the real learning here is that there is no one true way; we have to adjust kettlebell (and other training) to ourselves rather than only adjusting ourselves to a particular regime. BTW. thanks to Ken Blackburn of the IKFF for stating this point so saliently in his recent email to me.