Kettlebells

I will be honest. I was a bit sceptical about kettlebells. I didn't really fancy the idea of swinging, throwing and lifting a big round ball of metal. But I gave them a shot anyway. When I first quit swimming I had an ongoing back issue that had stemmed from when I had stress fractures through my spine and pelvis when I was 15. At the time I was required to take three months off training and was not allowed to walk for more then 10 minutes at a time. When I was finally allowed to return to sport I had some pretty massive central sensitization due to the pain I had been living with for the past 2 years. As a result of the chronic pain I also had some pretty massive imbalances, all of which took a long time to really identify.

The biggest of all my imbalances, my left glut did NOTHING! I'm saying didn't even know how to switch on. This was magnified hugely when I did quit swimming and started taking on other types of training. So I started doing some kettlebells training, which if you have never really done before, is all about using your arse! So where do I start because my arse did nothing? With dead lifts.

I did normal dead lifts, stiff leg dead lifts, single leg dead lifts, dead lifts up right rows, burpee dead lifts....I did dead lifts to the death (hahahaha I'm good!). I would throw in a few swings every now and then but because my butt was so terribly weak any more then 5 swings and my butt would give out and my back would take over. So I dead lifted for I would say a good 10 months.

In about April this year (almost one year later) I started high reps of swings....pain free!!!! yeah I still get a bit of back pain after 50 or more but that is most definitely to be expected of anyone- back injury or not. Kettlebells use a functional training method to give you a whole body, full chain workout that needs everything working with good time, control and contraction.

On a side note I am excited to say that yesterday I bought my first two kettlebells. I am thankful that I was introduced to this training technique to really help a lot of the weakness I had developed because of my injuries and can't wait to share it with more people.