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Every New Years my wife feels like we should do something big! To be honest, I am not all that into going out when so many people are liquored up. I ask her, “why do you want to go out so badly?” She often replies, “cause I don’t want to miss out on anything great!”

The same fear that my wife has about missing something great during New Years is the very same emotion that I think many people in fitness experience. How so? People end up doing everything, every training method, they want to have ever training tool, they have to go to every program under the sun. Why? When I ask people why they do such things, it is often, “I don’t want to be left out”.

I find that staggering, but not shocking. I went through that process in my early career as well. Pretty much any new piece of fitness equipment I got it. Any new program, I had to try it! Then something happened. I changed.

I went from having a extremely packed facility full of equipment to rather bare bones. It wasn’t in an effort to be hip or cool, I just started to realize what I REALLY needed and what really helped the people that I trained. Pretty soon I wasn’t worried that I didn’t perform all the “cool” exercises, I had figured out what worked for what person. I learned the dirty little secret that no single exercise is vital, you have to find the right exercise. Since then, I can’t tell you how much better my own training and that of my clients has been.

That is why I find it interesting when people make strong statements like, “you can’t train only with kettlebells!” Hmmm, you don’t HAVE to train with just kettlebells, but can you?

I hear lots of reasons, “kettlebells don’t go heavy enough”, which leads to “you can’t get really strong”, and of course, “you can’t perform THIS so very important essential exercise.”

Instead of thinking of how training with kettlebells exclusively would make you feel limited. I actually believe it would make your training much smarter! Let me explain by dispelling some of these very common myths.

Kettlebells Don’t Go Heavy Enough

Years ago I heard a well respected strength coach make the argument that kettlebells aren’t that powerful because they only go up to 70 pounds (at the time they did) so they aren’t that great for strength. Ironically, a rather strong person is someone who can manhandle a pair of 70’s (32kgs). How do we have both?

The problem is that most people try to compare the weight of a kettlebell to that of a dumbbell or more problematically a barbell. Sorry, trying to compare the weight of a kettlebell to a barbell is almost apples to oranges. Whether is has to do with the independent movement of the kettlebells, to the different weight distribution, or the fact the holding position of the kettlebell is very different from a barbell. In the end we know one thing and that is weight is not all equal.

I might believe that kettlebells aren’t heavy enough if I routinely saw people throw around double 106 (48kg) bells with ease. However, I find that to be a very rare find.

You Can’t Get Really Strong

To be perfectly honest, this is the one that gets me more wound up. Unfortunately, most people totally screw up the governing principle of strength, the overload principle. The idea of the overload principle leads people to becoming consumed with the idea of load. However, that isn’t what the overload principle actually means. The concept is that we have to provide a stress to the body to cause changes greater than the body experienced before.

The reason that most programs fail is they fall into that trap of just load and forget about the many other variables that actually can play a very important role in improving strength. By not having the small jumps in weight available in kettlebells we can focus on these other concepts.

Other Overload Variables:

-Speed

-Load Position

-Body Position

-Range of Motion

-Volume (amount of work)

-Density (amount of work in a given amount of time)

-Direction of Force

-Type of Muscle Contraction

Each one of these concepts could be an article within themselves. My point though is to show how many other variables most programs fail to actually consider. If we look at each and think about how they play a vital role in strength training and program development, we can see that kettlebells can work incredibly well in all these variables and how the weights of kettlebells could be greatly altered in conjunction with manipulating these different ideas.

We often hear the legend of old time strongmen performing incredible feats of strength. Ironically, most didn’t sit there focusing on adding 2 1/2 pounds to a lift. They intuitively used these other methods to manipulate load. The deadlift didn’t really become a staple lift till 1910-1920 when South African Strongman, Hermann Goerner, made it a focused lift. Bob Hoffman of York Barbell Company really popularized the more familiar barbell that we know in the early 1930’s. My point is that these things we consider soooo important to get strong are really rather new ideas. We have seen people become incredibly strong without the luxury of small weight increases or a wide array of weights for centuries.

The Fitness Cynic

I don’t blame people for being more than a bit skeptical about the idea of getting stronger by JUST using kettlebells. However, since Dragon Door helped bring back kettlebells to the modern fitness world, there have been hundreds of real world stories of people getting darn strong!

Some may feel a bit cynical because there was marketing of kettlebells that helped the movement and therefore, their popularity. Few realize that the barbell become popular because Bob Hoffman and York Barbell were advertising and promoting the benefits of barbell training. Why? They wanted to sell barbells, but also because this is what they truly believed, the barbell was a great and powerful tool that could change people’s lives.

A third reason that I think many people have issues with the idea of kettlebell training only goes back to an interesting piece I saw on CNN about social media. The story told of how less and less young people are using Facebook as their primary social media outlet. Why? Much has to do with the fact it went mainstream. When the grandparents started becoming active on social media, it started to become deemed “less cool” by the younger generation.

Now that you can find infomercials on kettlebells, fitness ads using kettlebells, and just about any fitness media that wants to appear cool. I think some people have fallen victim to the idea that kettlebells aren’t cool because anyone can use them. Funny enough, I think that is what makes them a beautiful tool.

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About Josh: Josh Henkin, Senior RKC, CSCS has been a RKC instructor since 2003 and has implemented kettlebell programs for major Division I programs, SWAT teams, and many different general fitness programs. Josh is also the creator of the DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training system where he is a highly sought after presenter worldwide. He can be reached at info@ultimatesandbagtraining.com or http://DVRTFitness.com.

One is for serious strength.

The other is for firming and toning.

One is for packing on functional muscle.

The other is to sculpt.

One is for increased performance in just about everything.

The other goes well with spandex.

What are these two contrasting things? I am comparing how most people in fitness see squats and lunges. The squat has long been held up as “the king” of lower body exercises while the lunge has often been seen as the token exercise that you do because it is suppose to be good for you. However, you would never dream of emphasizing the lunge over the squat, or would you?

For quite some time I had the above belief, especially during my days competing in Strongman. Real strength was reserved for squats, deadlifts, cleans and such. Why waste precious energy on an exercise that many coaches think we can save for music pumping aerobic classes?

Something interesting began to happen though. As I kept going heavier in my training my body started feeling it. Stiffness, tightness, and little increase in my performance made me begin to wonder if there was a better way to really get strong and fit.

It wasn’t just casual aches and pains, I began to see my recovery take much longer, I saw my training being based around what didn’t hurt that day. How in the world could I go against the gospel of strength training though?

Really only one reason would be good enough to go against such established beliefs, I felt and performed better when I made lunges more of a core lift in my programs! Why? Why in the world would I have started seeing better results from implementing lunges not as an accessory exercise, but a focused lift?

I began to wonder why, after all I can theorize things such as better hip stability, building more mobility, fixing imbalances, hmmm, might be something here.

While I am from the first person to think lunges are worthwhile, is there anything more than my anecdotal evidence though? Is this just some silly controversy I am trying to begin?

A 1999 study by scientists at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, set out to find different levels of muscle activation by some common lower body exercises. In this study, both squats and lunges were included. The results?

The researchers studied glute max, glute medius, and hamstrings. All three are important in hip stability and power production. According to the EMG activity of 12 trained individuals there were three interesting findings;

“For the gluteus maximus, squats elicited significantly more muscle activation than both the horizontal and vertical leg presses, but showed no significant differences in EMG activity when compared to the other exercises.” (yes including lunges)

“Results for the gluteus medius showed that quadruped hip extensions, step- ups and lunges generated significantly more muscle activation than squats.”

“Finally, for the hamstrings quadruped hip extensions, step-ups, lunges and four-way hip extensions garnered significantly more EMG activity than squats…”

Hmm, isolated study? How about a study where researchers from the University of Arkansas and Eastern Kentucky University looked at muscle activity of squats compared to lunges. The study looked at female college athletes and found, “ that there was no greater muscle activation when performing any of the squat depths to that of the body weight lunge. It was revealed that the body weight lunge did indeed produce more activation in the majority of all muscles analyzed when compared to the three squat depths.”

Why mention the body weight lunge? The real shock here is that the lunge was compared to a weighted squat! That says a lot about the power lunges do possess.

Don’t worry though, all this lunge talk doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the squat. I just want to open your eyes to the often overlooked lunge and maybe have all of us re-evaluate how we implement this great drill.

More Than One Plane

The lunge represents a less stable body position, this level of instability actually causes a lot of often underutilized muscles to turn on. Turning on these smaller muscles (stabilizers) helps build strength in a more indirect route. By improving the whole body stability of the body we develop a stronger foundation in which to develop force and strength. As goes the old saying, “you are only as strong as your weakest link!”

The less stable body positions also represent a highly underutilized form of training, multi-planar. Basically, multi-planar training is when we move in one plane of motion (there are three in natural human movement) and resist motion in other planes.

Even something as simple as walking actually has us moving in all three planes at once, however, we rarely train this in the gym. Remember, we want to connect our strength training to our every day living as much as possible.

What does multi-planar training look like? When we step forward in a lunge we actually are also resisting forces that are pushing us to the side and trying to make us rotate. We can use kettlebells to actually enhance this effect.

Multi-planar training increases stability, makes our nervous system smarter, and yes, can be awesome for improving conditioning. This is something we don’t really get the opportunity to train in our more stable lifts such as squats and deadlifts.

More Than Up and Down

Think of your favorite athlete, look how we do most things in life, rarely in either case do we see movements that are strictly up and down patterns. We are reaching, twisting, moving in all sorts of positions often at once. This is something we can really use the lunge to help improve.

One of the more overlooked benefits of lunging is the fact we don’t just get force when we move up and down, but by lunging in different directions we get some really unique forces acting upon the body. A big reason that knowing the right direction to progress your lunges is important is because we can greatly increase the intensity of a lunge just by changing direction.

For example, when we lunge forward, more of our body must be decelerated as we step forward than when we step backwards. Drop lunging (lunging backwards) keeps our most of our center of mass over our base of support. Huh? Forward lunging is harder than backward lunging because we have more of our body to stop as we step in that direction. This is something we see very often in sport and every day life.

Consider all the various directions we can step when we lunge and you have a wide array of ways to progress and challenge the lunge beyond just the weights you use!

Bring in the Kettlebells

Kettlebells add such a great dimension to the lunge. With all the patterns that kettlebells can create, there seems to be infinite ways to progress the lunge outside of just going heavier. Today’s training video actually features how we manipulate kettlebell holding positions to create some very unique training effects .

Using these strategies allow you to use kettlebells for more than just adding weight to the body. There becomes specific means of challenging the various benefits of lunging.

Since we often program the most demanding exercise (in both coordination and neurological energy) first, you might find that you start prioritizing your kettlebell lunges and then perform some of your squats and deadlifts after. You may even be more shocked that you get better at squats and deadlifts even though you have de-emphasized them.

Once you try these kettlebell lunge variations you might find the lunge having its revenge in your workouts as well!

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References: Also: Dwelly, P., Oliver, G. Blair, H., Keeley, D. Hoffman, H, “Improved Muscle Activation in Performing A Body Weight Lunge Compared to the Traditional Back Squat,” University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

***

Josh Henkin, Senior RKC, CSCS has been a RKC instructor since 2003 and has implemented kettlebell programs for major Division I programs, SWAT teams, and many different general fitness programs. Josh is also the creator of the DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training system where he is a highly sought after presenter worldwide. He can be reached at info@ultimatesandbagtraining.com or http://DVRTFitness.com.

sandbags

Are You Really Missing Out?

Revenge of the Lunge!