As we age, our bodies inevitably undergo several changes, including the loss of muscle mass and bone density. However, it doesn’t mean we must accept these changes without a fight. Kettlebell training is a highly effective and versatile form of exercise that can help maintain and even improve muscle and bone strength throughout our golden years. Let’s delve into the science behind kettlebell training and discover how incorporating this exercise into your routine can pave the way for a strong and resilient body as you age.

Sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass, and osteoporosis, the reduction in bone density, are two common health issues faced by aging individuals. These conditions not only diminish physical strength but also increase the risk of falls, fractures, and other injuries. Fortunately, research has shown that resistance training can counteract these effects and help preserve muscle and bone health.

1. Whole-body exercise

Kettlebell training is unique in that it combines both cardiovascular and strength training, offering a whole-body workout in a single session. The dynamic nature of kettlebell exercises like swings, snatches, and Turkish get-ups engages multiple muscle groups, effectively targeting and strengthening them. This full-body approach can help older adults maintain their functional fitness, improving their balance, mobility, and overall quality of life.

2. Impact on muscle mass

One of the main reasons kettlebell training is effective at preserving muscle mass is its focus on functional, compound movements. These movements engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously, leading to greater muscle activation and growth. Additionally, kettlebell workouts can be easily adapted to suit individual needs, allowing older adults to progressively increase the intensity and resistance as they gain strength.

3. Boosting bone density

Kettlebell training not only helps maintain muscle mass but also has a positive impact on bone density. The load-bearing nature of kettlebell exercises stimulates bone remodeling, a process where new bone tissue is formed, ultimately improving bone strength. This is particularly beneficial for older adults, as stronger bones can reduce the risk of fractures and osteoporosis-related injuries.

4. Improved balance and coordination

The functional and dynamic movements incorporated in kettlebell training challenge your balance and coordination, which are essential for maintaining independence as you age. Consistently practicing kettlebell exercises can enhance your body’s ability to react and adapt to different situations, reducing the risk of falls and improving overall stability.

Tips for Incorporating Kettlebell Training into Your Routine

1. Consult a professional: Before starting any new exercise routine, consult with a healthcare professional or a certified fitness trainer to ensure that kettlebell training is suitable for your individual needs and health status.

2. Start with the basics: Learn and master the fundamental kettlebell movements, such as swings, goblet squats, and presses, before attempting more advanced exercises. Proper form is crucial for avoiding injuries and reaping the full benefits of kettlebell training.

3. Choose the right weight: Start with a lighter kettlebell, and gradually increase the weight as you become more comfortable with the exercises. The appropriate weight will challenge you without compromising your form or causing undue strain.

4. Prioritize consistency: Aim for at least two kettlebell training sessions per week to see tangible improvements in muscle mass and bone density. Remember that consistency is key when it comes to achieving and maintaining long-term health benefits.

Conclusion

Kettlebell training is a powerful and versatile form of exercise that can help preserve muscle mass and bone density as we age. By incorporating kettlebell exercises into your fitness routine, you can effectively combat the effects of aging and enjoy a stronger, more resilient body

Kettlebells have become increasingly popular in recent years as a versatile and effective tool for improving strength, endurance, and overall fitness. However, one challenge that kettlebell enthusiasts often face is how to transport their kettlebells from one location to another, whether it be to the gym, a park, hotel, vacation, or a friend’s house.

This is where a kettlebell carrying backpack comes in. A kettlebell carrying backpack is a specially designed backpack that is equipped with straps and compartments for carrying a kettlebell, making it a convenient and efficient solution for transporting your kettlebell.

Here are some reasons why a kettlebell carrying backpack would be necessary for a kettlebell enthusiast:

Kettlebell training is a highly effective form of strength and cardiovascular training, and when combined with the great outdoors, it can provide a wealth of physical and mental benefits. Training with kettlebells in nature not only provides an intense workout but also offers an escape from the stresses of daily life and an opportunity to connect with nature.

One of the primary benefits of kettlebell training is its versatility. Kettlebells can be used for a variety of exercises that target multiple muscle groups and can be easily adjusted in weight to accommodate all levels of fitness. By incorporating kettlebells into outdoor workouts, you can take advantage of the natural surroundings and incorporate exercises that would be difficult to perform indoors.

Nature provides a unique environment that can be especially beneficial for kettlebell training. Exercising outside in the fresh air and natural light can help boost energy levels and improve mental clarity. In addition, the uneven terrain and obstacles found in nature provide an added challenge to kettlebell exercises and can help to improve balance and stability.

Another benefit of training with kettlebells in nature is that it provides a change of pace from traditional indoor gym workouts. Instead of the monotony of a routine gym workout, training in nature allows for a more dynamic and engaging workout that keeps the mind and body stimulated. This can help to prevent boredom and burnout, and keep you motivated to stick to your fitness goals.

Finally, training with kettlebells in nature can be a great way to connect with nature and escape from the stresses of daily life. Exercising in a peaceful, natural environment can help to reduce stress levels and improve overall mental well-being. This is particularly true for people who live in urban areas and are constantly exposed to the fast pace and noise of city life.

As a student of movement and also a student of human psychology, especially as it pertains to doing hard things, it’s no surprise to me that people “hate” turkish get-ups. Most people hate doing difficult things, and since TGUs would fall under that category, they default to hating TGUs.

What’s even more interesting is that the more people tend to hate a particular exercise, the more beneficial that exercise tends to be. This is not always the case, but more often times than not, it is. In fact I know this feeling all to well, but I’ve just disciplined that emotion and learned that I too typically dislike things I’m not particularly good at. What’s even more interesting is that once you get past sucking at something, you seem to hate it less. Then, once you get proficient, you start saying nice things about what you once hated. And alas, the time comes when you become good at it, and now everyone should do it!

There’s a little lesson in humans-not-liking-things-they-suck-at psychology 101. This should be a high school and college course by the way. Not joking.

Onto the Turkish Get-up………

Executing the turkish get-up without any weight presents challenges for most of the chair-bound, desk jockey society we’ve turned ourselves into. Don’t take offense, I’m sitting in a chair, staring at my computer, and only corrected my posture because I’m typing about it. Now, talking about adding weight to this movement really makes a person feel like they’ll never be able to get good at the movement. 

Turkish get-ups require good hip mobility, shoulder mobility, trunk strength, shoulder strength, and leg strength in order to perform them correctly. TGUs are a great assessment tool for what people lack. Lacking things isn’t generally what people want to hear, but it’s what they likely need to hear.

If I told you that I could help you increase your “core” strength, leg strength, shoulder strength, improve hip mobility, reduce back pain, and build muscle with one exercise, you’d probably spit your drink out in excitement and tell me, “heck yeah man, tell me what it is and I’ll do it!”

Well, the exercise is called……..drum roll…………..turkish get-ups! (cue the anti-climatic music)

If you want to learn how to do this magnificently beneficial exercise for your entire body. Spend the 5 minutes watching this tutorial below:

When learning this exercise, give yourself some grace and be ok sucking at it for awhile. Work on the areas where you feel limitation. If you can feel that your hips are too tight to perform this exercise well, then you probably need to do some mobility and flexibility work on your hip flexors and glutes. If you feel like your shoulder can’t get into position, it’s likely you need to work on your thoracic spine mobility and shoulder mobility, which may require some pec stretches and soft tissue work. If you can’t even get off your back, your trunk may be incredibly weak and you need to spend some time doing some basic “ab work.” If you feel like you possess the mobility to do the exercise, but can’t stand up because your legs are too weak, then you need to spend some time developing some very basic leg strength.

All in all, if you’re able to do this exercise with good technique and some weight over your head later into life, just imagine how much more vibrant your life will be than the rest of your peers with only a butt print on their couch to show for their efforts.

Get strong, and then stay strong.

Grip strength is a simple but powerful predictor of future disability, morbidity, and mortality. The relation between grip strength and future mortality has been shown, not only in older people, but also in middle-aged and young people. The evidence has been summarised in systematic reviews and in a meta-analysis (Lancet Article).

Let’s address this from a common sense perspective first. If you possess good grip strength, it’s quite apparent that the hands have held, twisted, gripped, climbed, carried, and handled life quite differently than the person who has a rather wimpy handshake. Interestingly, a handheld dynamometer (for assessing grip strength) test is usually part of the battery of tests for professional baseball players at the beginning of spring training every year. As a former pro-baseball strength coach, I can attest to this assessment being utilized as a baseline measure of strength in athletes. I know there’s a strong correlation with grip strength and success in throwing and hitting a baseball. This may sound like a pat on my own back, but the coaches also got to perform the assessment, and yours truly had the second best grip in the minor league spring training camp. I didn’t expect it to be, but after thinking about it some more, I wasn’t that surprised. I’d been a wrestler most of my life, amongst also playing baseball and football, and I had lifted weights in a functional manner most of my life as well. Training with kettlebells (we’ll break it down more later), performing heavy deadlifts, farmer’s carries, and doing lots of pullups over the years had built up a strong grip. This may be a testament to the sport of wrestling, but after talking with several opponents after I wrestled them, they had told me how I was one of the strongest wrestlers they had ever faced. This puzzled me a bit, because I didn’t have an intimidating frame or physique at this time of my life, nor do I today, but strength is very neuromuscular and doesn’t always present itself in muscle size.  

I guess the analogy could be made that if you want to be a successful navigator (athlete) of life, it would appear that possessing good forearm extensors and flexors would give you an advantage over the limp wristers in life.

Check out these interesting findings from another research article published in the Lancet in 2015:

Findings: Between January, 2003, and December, 2009, a total of 142,861 participants were enrolled in the PURE study, of whom 139,691 with known vital status were included in the analysis. During a median follow-up of 4.0 years (IQR 2.9-5.1), 3379 (2%) of 139,691 participants died. After adjustment, the association between grip strength and each outcome, with the exceptions of cancer and hospital admission due to respiratory illness, was similar across country-income strata. Grip strength was inversely associated with all-cause mortality (hazard ratio per 5 kg reduction in grip strength 1.16, 95% CI 1.13-1.20; p<0.0001), cardiovascular mortality (1.17, 1.11-1.24; p<0.0001), non-cardiovascular mortality (1.17, 1.12-1.21; p<0.0001), myocardial infarction (1.07, 1.02-1.11; p=0.002), and stroke (1.09, 1.05-1.15; p<0.0001). Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure. 

Numerous clinical and epidemiological studies have shown the predictive potential of hand grip strength regarding short and long-term mortality and morbidity. In patients, impaired grip strength is an indicator of increased postoperative complications, increased length of hospitalization, higher rehospitalisation rate and decreased physical status. In elderly in particular, loss of grip strength implies loss of independence. Epidemiological studies have moreover demonstrated that low grip strength in healthy adults predicts increased risk of functional limitations and disability in higher age as well as all-cause mortality. As muscle function reacts early to nutritional deprivation, hand grip strength has also become a popular marker of nutritional status and is increasingly being employed as outcome variable in nutritional intervention studies.

Link to Study

From a common sense perspective, it’s easy to draw some conclusions about why being strong and having a strong grip could save your life in simply some dangerous circumstances, you know, hanging from a cliff, in a fight-to-the-death match in a back alley, or probably a more common scenario would be possessing the muscle and bone density to absorb and withstand a blow or a fall. It’s easy to see why being strong is advantageous here, but few people understand the profound physiological benefits that exist with being strong, and more importantly, the process of becoming and staying strong. Strength and muscle mass reach their peak in the 2nd and 3rd decades of life, at which point in time they typically begin their war with attrition. Due to the fact that 80% of the population doesn’t adequately stimulate their body’s lean muscle tissue and bone tissue, people who are sedentary quickly become frail and less healthy than their 20% counterparts, who engage in proper vigorous activity to retain what was built in their 20s and 30s, or to gain what wasn’t built in those decades. The two destinations of the vigorously active and the sedentary couldn’t be more different and it’s why we all have that rare breed in the family tree who people just chalk up as an anomaly, but deep down we all know that person did the vigorous work and gets to experience the work’s fruits later in life, not to mention the fruit of it during all phases of life.

This is the part where I sell the snot out of the kettlebell for it being the best tool. Kettlebell training may be one of the most under-researched tools in the exercise science community. Despite all that, it is a tool that possesses a massive amount of variety in it’s usefulness, but of relevance, the ability to develop strength (more directly grip strength) may have it as one the very best fitness tools one could use. Every movement requires the handling of weight in the hands, sometimes in a static sense, like a farmer’s carry, and other times a dynamic sense, like snatching it overhead. It’s important to develop strength and it’s cousin power to best optimize the human body’s performance.  

If the gains can happen to the elderly, it’s safe to assume that the gains would happen in a younger human, and this 8 week study showed just that:

When it comes to training for maximal benefit per unit of time, you’ll always be hard pressed to find a better solution than utilizing kettlebells. Hopefully everyone knows by now that in order to transform your body composition, one must strength train. Additionally, the use of high intensity intervals while strength training (or call it resistance training if you prefer) creates a metabolic situation that is very favorable to stimulating change for your body. Of course, you still have to do the work in the kitchen and not eat like a cheeseball.

Speaking of cheeseballs, are the Packers going to be any good this year? 

Moving on……

Why do we love the Turkish Get-Up so much? Well, what’s not to love about them? They not only enhance total body mobility, but they strengthen ranges of motion that are oftentimes neglected in traditional strength training. When performing a Turkish Get-Up, think of it as doing an isometric press, glute bridge, reverse lunge, tricep extension, and diagonal sit-up. You could argue more movements that are blended into that, but I think you get my point. There isn’t much of the human body that the turkish get-up just doesn’t touch. 

Furthermore, the Turkish Get-Up gives you a strength goal to always pursue, and the workout provided will always give you a new challenge despite the format and exercises never changing. How does this happen? Because you’ll always be striving to be able to perform heavier Turkish Get-Ups within this workout, while also striving to perform the workout more efficiently. 

To see a Turkish Get-Up being performed, click HERE.

Kettlebell swings are the most common and popular kettlebell training exercise known to man. Just because this movement is common and usually the first exercise anyone learns when using kettlebells, doesn’t mean it’s just for beginners. There’s a reason you see some of the strongest people on the planet swinging kettlebells. They have a multitude of benefits ranging from glute, hamstring, low back, and trunk musculature development, and depending upon how you use them, can be incredible for developing total body power and high levels of conditioning. 

To see a kettlebell swing performed, click HERE.

The format of this workout is quite simple. In my kettlebell coaching group, famously known as The Kettlebell Collective, we do some fashion of this workout once per week. It’s a love-hate relationship, but every time someone is exposed to this workout they are challenged more than they thought they’d be, they aren’t very sore the next day, and they can’t help themselves but want to get really strong in these movements and the workout in general. So, without further ado here it is:

10 Rounds:

Turkish Get-Up x 1 each side

Kettlebell Swings x 10

*You have 90 seconds to complete a round, and you use the rest of the time left of the 90 seconds to rest when you’re finished. Then, you repeat. This workout only takes 15 minutes and goes by in the blink of an eye. 

Enjoy, and let’s hear how you did!