My Philosophy

"Don't tell me the sky's the limit when we have footsteps on the moon!"

Tuesday 29 November 2011

Why Kettlebells Rock

Hello Readers!

This is an exciting exercise week for me (if such a thing is allowed!) because I have received my order for some new kettlebells. These are the exercise tool that, alongside ChiRunning, got me out of a major down point in my life. The situation was that I was quite overweight at around 16 stone (over 100Kg) and none of it was muscle.

My parents had membership to a posh gym, where they met Roger and Claire, who were personal trainers there. Due to a disagreement with the management there they left there and started their own studio gym, for just them to train (and punish!) willing candidates. I was one of these candidates.

Claire got straight to work on me, and discovered that the reason I got so many injuries while running was that my core stability muscles were very weak, and I was asking small muscle groups to do difficult tasks, which leads to injury. One example of this is shin splints; if you get shin splints then you are probably using the small muscle on the front of your shin to do part of the pushing forward when you run. This is an incredibly small muscle for that kind of task and so gets fatigued quickly and can no longer perform its primary function when you run, which is to aid in keeping your foot stable on the floor under the impact of your stride.

In order to fix this for me I was trained on how to use kettlebells, which helped me to become strong and flexible enough to be able to successfully change my running technique. Since then I actually have never actually had an injury from running, so it seems to have worked!

So how does it work?



This is the all important swing, if you play the video you can see how the swing uses all muscle groups in the legs. It increases strength, endurance and flexibility all in one. Also, you can see that the movement is aimed at driving your body forward, all important for running. I have already noticed an improvement in my power and speed, having just ran a new distance personal best of 15 miles, and managed to keep it under 10 minutes per mile. The training is really starting to pay off!

This is the website for their studio, located in Bracknell, England. Drop them a line if you're interested in learning the techniques.

Viel Spaß homies!

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