Weekend Training

I'm still trying to organize my training a little bit better since having to split it up into Sport and general strength/fitness and conditioning.  The one great thing is that I only need kettlebells for both!  I've had to add a fourth day, Sunday, in order to completely separate one from the other at least one day a week.  On Tues/Thurs I train both, so it's a nice relief to only train GS on Sat and only HS on Sunday.

This past Saturday I invited a former student, now a fellow GS athlete and coach, James MacNeil, to train with me in our garage gym. It was nice to watch him do his sets, double 16kg jerk, and to learn a little more about that lift as it's only done in competition by the men.  It was also nice getting some feedback about my jerk as he saw it, now that he's also coaching the sport.  After we both completed our jerk sets I, pretty much, made him snatch a lighter bell along with my during my set, just for fun!

Here is my (our) 10 minute set.  My training required the 14kg to be done at a 18-20 rpm, so with James using the 12kg I knew we could pretty much snatch in tandem without any problem.  After watching the video, and counting reps I was really pleased that we stayed almost exactly at 20rpm pace, only doing 3 additional reps R, and 1 on the L.  Final count was 103/101.  Watching this side by side video comparison brought to light a couple of subtle differences between how each of us snatches the bell.  Even if you are not interested in watching the entire 10 minutes (yawn) you may be interested in simply watching bits and pieces just to see if you can notice the slight variations of both of our styles.



Sunday is my own HS training, but I have been doing a little GS coaching with Maribel ad Meg for the first 30 minutes of our 90 minute training session.  I use a light weight and focus on technique, while I have the other two train more challenging sets in order to build up the grip endurance as well as practice technique.  We then go on and train double presses and/or snatches, some Max Vo2 sets, and end with a solid 30 minutes of crazy high volume swings!

Yesterday we did a couple of 10 min GS sets which took about 40 min in total to warm up and recover leaving less time for swings at the end...we never got to do any high volume snatches (mv2).   Double swing / clean presses for 1 min intervals with only 30 sec rest meant that I had to go a bit lighter on my double bells.  I've been using "dbl swing / clean press" or "dbl swing / snatch" for weeks now for many reasons, but mostly because I want to get those double swings into my routine.

I thought I would include this short video of a one min set of "dbl swing / clean / alternate press"!  This combination is great when you get too tired to double press, but not too tired to double swing / clean, and you want to keep going!  One minute intervals for double bells is quite a workload, especially with 1/2 the amount of rest to recover between sets.  Although I was able to complete my 10 sets of "dbl sw/cl/pr x 10", if I had time to keep going I surely may have done an additional 5-10 sets of alternating presses, but I had to get to my swings!



16kg swings, 11 sets of 40 reps with only a 15 sec rest period! We only had less than 20 minutes left of class and I did not want to do continuous swings, so the next best thing was to take the shortest rest interval possible.  One minute of work with 15 sec rest x 11 sets = 440 swings, 13.5 min.  I used my swing progressions in this order:

2 hand swings x 40
transfer swings x 40
1 swing, 1 transfer swing x 20
1-5 swing ladder
5/5 x 4
2 hand swing x 40
5/5 x 4
5-1 swing ladder
1 swing, 1 transfer swing x 20
transfer swings x 40
2 hand swings x 40

120 2 hand swings
320 one hand swings