I declared a while ago that I was going to expand this blog to encompass overall fitness as well as horseback riding — and I’ve not mentioned working out since. This isn’t because I haven’t been doing anything. It’s because I haven’t been doing anything in a very focused manner. The result is I’ve lost a lot of strength and my workouts have been highly inconsistent.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to get back on track with the kettlebells, but I was finding it difficult to get very excited about the stuff I was doing. My favorite exercises (turkish get-ups, swings, and presses) are feeling a bit boring to me lately, and since I’ve lost strength I’ve been getting frustrated when I have to use the lighter bells. My typical workout would pretty much consist of wandering down to the basement, staring at our array of bells for a while, and trying to do something different than I’d done the last time I went down there.
But yesterday my fantastic husband mentioned something interesting. He said he’s come across a number of fitness and kettlebell gurus who really adore the swing as an excellent tool for breaking out of a workout funk. The beauty of the swing is that it is simple, yet it works on the entire body. Brian told me about a guy who did 200 swings a day for a month and ended up looking and feeling better than he ever had in his life.
So, while I not currently strong enough to manage 200 swings a day, 100 is totally doable. That is my new plan. It’s easy in the sense that I don’t have to think about it much, and hard in the sense that I’ll get a good workout. Yesterday I used the 35lb bell, and did swings in two sets of 30, two sets of 15 and one set of 10.
I was pretty well exhausted by the end.
But today I am not sore. Still, I don’t want to wreck myself to start, so I might use the 35lb bell for half and the 26lb bell for the other half today. We’ll see. But I’m pretty curious to see how I’ll be feeling in 30 days.
I just emailed you a video.
Can you link me to what a "swing" is? Sounds like it might be something doable. I need a workout plan, too…. Bad.