Brett Jones is StrongFirst’s Director of Education and Master SFG. He is also a Certified Athletic Trainer and Strength and Conditioning Specialist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Mr. Jones holds a Bachelor of Science in Sports Medicine from High Point University, a Master of Science in Rehabilitative Sciences from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).
With over twenty years of experience, Brett has been sought out to consult with professional teams and athletes, as well as present throughout the United States and internationally.
As an athletic trainer who has transitioned into the fitness industry, Brett has taught kettlebell techniques and principles since 2003. He has taught for Functional Movement Systems (FMS) since 2006, and has created multiple DVDs and manuals with world-renowned physical therapist Gray Cook, including the widely-praised “Secrets of…” series.
Brett continues to evolve his approach to training and teaching, and is passionate about improving the quality of education for the fitness industry. He is available for consultations and distance coaching by e-mailing him at [email protected]
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Brett Jones about everything you need to know about kettlebells.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How kettlebells are like cannonballs with handles, providing a unique way to train.
– Why kettlebell training helps with force absorption and redirection, which benefits other activities.
– How efficient alignment is more important than brute strength in kettlebell training.
– Why different thumb positions affect kettlebell gripping and alignment.
– How the kettlebell shouldn’t hit your forearm when you are performing a snatch.
Connect with Brett:
Guest Contact Info
[email protected]
Links Mentioned:
strongfirst.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
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@xeroshoes
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facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Whether you have used a kettlebell, have not used a kettlebell, don’t even know what a kettlebell is, you’re going to like this episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Usually starting feet first, those things to the end of your legs so that they’re responsible for stuff like balance, agility, mobility, stuff like that. On the podcast, we also break down the propaganda, the mythology, and often the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or jump or play or do yoga, or crossfit or dance, whatever it is you like to do, and to do those things enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. And wait, did I say enjoyably? I’m getting a little old and I forget. That’s a lie. I don’t forget. It was a trick question. Of course, I said enjoyably, because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep doing whatever it is. So find something you enjoy doing.
I am Steven Sashen, co-founder, co-CEO of xeroshoes.com, and we call this the Movement Movement podcast, because we, that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement. Letting your body do what it’s made to do. The part where you get involved is really, really easy to spread the word. Give us a great review. Give us a thumbs up. Share, hit the bell icon on YouTube to find out about new episodes. In fact, you can go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no secret handshake, there’s no dance we do every morning, at least not one that I tell people about. It’s just that’s where you can find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can find us on social media and all the places you can spread the word. So in short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, let’s get started and have some fun. Brett, tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Brett Jones:
Awesome. Steven, first off, just fantastic to have the opportunity to be on the podcast and to speak to you and your audience and looking forward to today’s conversation. The long story made short of how I got here is I’m certified athletic trainer. I’ve been involved in the fitness industry for over 25 years. So certified athletic trainer, CSCS to the NSCA. Made the decision in February of ’02 to go get certified in kettlebell training with Pavel and started teaching with him a year later in April of ’03. And then got hooked back up with Gray Cook, who I had worked with in my training room in his clinics from ’95 to ’97, and started teaching and working with FMS and Functional Movement Systems in 2006. And so over 2 years now of being kettlebell certified and 21 years of teaching it all across the globe.
Steven Sashen:
Well, let’s back up, because 2002, that was really, really, really, really, did I say really enough times, early in the wonderful world of kettlebells. So how did you even hear about this? And then how’d you get connected with Pavel Tsatsouline who’s the guy who everyone basically associates with bringing kettlebells from Russia to America? Do the way back machine and talk about that.
Brett Jones:
Awesome. I was running a hospital fitness center at the time, so we were doing post rehab before post rehab was a thing, and we were transitioning a bunch of people from physical therapy to our wellness program and doing training with them.
Steven Sashen:
I just like how you put air quotes around both post rehab and wellness. I think that…
Brett Jones:
I am an air quotes guy. You’ll be seeing that pretty frequently.
Steven Sashen:
I tend to err in that direction as well.
Brett Jones:
I love it. Nobody puts baby in a corner. If I air quoted it, you can’t hold me to it. So one of my former employees, somebody that worked with me for a little while comes back and says, “Hey, you should really check out this Pavel guy.” And I said, “Okay.” So I got his Power to the People book and Power to the People was revolutionary in its time, because it was the anti-bodybuilding message. It was, you only need two lifts. You need to prioritize strength and not muscle size, minimalist routine, things that have been at the heart of Pavel’s teachings from his beginning as a teacher. And so at that point, the kind of marketing machine kicks in and I start getting the newsletters, and this is the days of getting actual mail and printed materials. And so started hearing about kettlebell kettlebell kettlebell. Bought the book Russian Kettlebell Challenge, read it, said, “I can do all that with a dumbbell,” and threw it in a drawer and ignored it for a little while.
And then in the back of my brain, it’s just kind of picking at the back of my brain. So I get it back out and I’m like, “Okay.” So I hook up a 50 pound dumbbell and I’m going to try one of the snatch workouts that’s in the back of the book. And so I like to joke that when EMS revived me, and that’s a joke, there were no emergency services activated, but by the time I was done with the workout, I said, “I should go get trained in this.” And I missed the opportunity to be a part of the first ever certification in October of ’01, but I did go to the second certification of February of ’02. And we were throwing water balloons at each other in sub-freezing temperatures at nine o’clock at night. And it was a really different experience than what we’ve cultivated to this point. But yeah, that’s the way back machine story for how I got exposed.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so first of all, water balloons in sub-freezing temperatures is the kind of thing that you expect with Russians. My gymnastic coach when he was at the Worlds was hanging out with a bunch of, and was traveling with a bunch of Russian gymnasts, and he said, “To say they have a different sense of humor as an understatement.” Here was their favorite joke. Two bricks are sitting on the top of a roof. One brick falls off and the other brick yells, “I hope you land on someone’s head.” And they burst in a hysterics, and it’s a classic Russian joke from that era at least. So just for the fun of it, if you had to give yourself a number for what number are you for people who were certified back then, if you were in the second round, where would you put yourself?
Brett Jones:
In the first 30. So I think there were seven or eight people at the first cert in October of ’01, and I think there were 22 people at my certification in February of ’02. Now, how many of those people were still-
Steven Sashen:
Still there.
Brett Jones:
… there swinging bells? I’m pretty sure I’m the only one.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. Okay, so let’s back up a giant step for people who are completely oblivious to what a kettlebell is and why in fact it is different than a dumbbell. Jump into that if you would.
Brett Jones:
100%. It’s a cannonball with a handle on it. You’ve got this massive weight and then you’ve got this handle on top, and so it looks very brutish and simplistic, but what you get in that thick handle and offset center of mass is a weight that becomes very alive in your hands. As you are swinging it there is this displaced center of mass that you need to deal with, which increases and gives us the ability to swing it between our legs, creating a very unique overspeed eccentric position. You can only swing a barbell between your legs once, and then you’ll decide, probably not going to do that again.
Steven Sashen:
I’m not sure you can even do it once. I think you can get halfway and then you’re in the hospital.
Brett Jones:
Yeah, you’ll stop. It’s self-correcting. So the thick handle, offset center of mass, the loaded eccentric position, the way that when you rack it in the clean or get up or for the press, that offset center of mass literally up to a certain point, guides your shoulder into better positions. Then once you reach a certain point and the displacement is great enough, it’s a challenge to be overcome that actually provides a lot of additional strengthening.
Steven Sashen:
So for the sake of doing this for normal human beings, let’s define two things. Let’s define what the overloaded eccentric is, and let’s also talk about what the rack position is. Which is for people who have used kettlebells, we’re going to then jump into why many people stop using kettlebells is because they don’t understand how the rack position works and they end up smashing the crap out of their forearm and they think that the solution is to just build up forearm calluses or something. So let’s do the overloaded eccentric, and then let’s talk about positioning and how people may have that upside down in their brains.
Brett Jones:
Absolutely. So the eccentric position of a deadlift or the athletic hinge that we use in the swing is that position where you have sat back into the hips and you’re absorbing the load of the kettlebell.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to do this a little differently just to paint a picture. So imagine for the fun of it that the motion that we’re talking about is, and this is not quite accurate for a number of reasons, but let’s refer to it as like… Oh, actually it’s not too bad. I was going to say getting up off a chair, getting back into a chair, but it’s actually better to say toilet, because when we’re going to go sit on a toilet, we really stick our butt back further than we do if we’re sitting on a chair. And when we get up, we’re kind of, for lack of a better term, thrusting our hips forward to get up off the toilet.
So the eccentric is the sitting back part. And when we have the kettlebell, the kettlebell, when we’re standing upright in a kettlebell swing, the kettle bell, your arms are extended, for lack of a better, there’s variations, but basically straight out in front of you. So perpendicular to your body, parallel to the ground. And so what’s happening is as you’re sitting back with your arm straight, the kettlebell is going to be swinging between your legs. So you’d be crushing your toilet and then having to go to Home Depot to get a new toilet.
Brett Jones:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
So that’s the motion that we’re talking about.
Brett Jones:
Yeah. And we could picture a broad jump or a vertical leap to when you sit back and hinge into that to load the hips. That’s that eccentric position.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, but that picture doesn’t involve a toilet, so it’s not as good.
Brett Jones:
It lacks a certain degree of clarity without a doubt. So when you sit into that eccentric position, and what’s happening with the swing in particular is on the way up, we’ve produced this force. We’ve created this great hip extension, we’ve created a ballistic action with the kettlebell. So we bring it from this eccentric position into that concentric position. It’s going to swing up in front of us. All the energy the kettlebell is ever going to get is going to come from our hips coming up into that extended position. Then we got to let gravity do its thing or assist gravity slightly by reconnecting the arms to the body and then sitting back into that hinge position.
The amount of load we’re able to achieve in bringing that bell into that eccentric position and then quickly turning it around into another swing is really unique. And I’ve been on a force plate. I know that I produce between three to three and a half times bodyweight eccentric load doing a two-handed swing with a 24 kilo bell. So I can produce a lot of force. I can absorb and redirect a lot of force within that kettlebell swing. And so that overspeed eccentric, and if you think about it force, absorption and redirection, what sport did we not just talk about? It is everything that we do, whether it’s walking, running, jumping, playing.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s another interesting thing about that that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, which is how people misunderstand even basic weightlifting or basic strength programming with one essential idea. And it has to do with the force curve. It’s like where you should be applying force and where things should be getting easier. And for the sake of using an example of the bicep curl… Well, I’ll use the bicep curl. So many things have been done, because we know that that last little bit of doing the bicep curl can get hard. And people think, “Oh, what we need to do is something where we’re accentuating the hardness at the end,” but the right force curve is that it’s actually hard at the beginning and gets easier at the end, because that’s the way your muscle works.
So ironically, there’s this whole thing about using bands and bands get harder and harder as you stretch them and people go, “Oh, that feels really good.” But it’s the exact opposite of what you typically need. And with kettlebells, you’re getting that correct force curve. So when you’ve sat back in the swing, the kettlebell is between your legs a little behind you, and you’re about to start pushing your hips forward to send the kettlebell flying, that’s where it’s the hardest and then it gets easier and gets a little weightless at the very end. That’s the right force curve for building that kind of strength that just as you said is appropriate for pretty much everything we would ever do on our feet.
Brett Jones:
Yeah, no, 100%. And I think that’s-
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Were done, good night ladies and gentlemen.
Brett Jones:
Be sure to tip your server. I think that it really is the secret sauce of kettlebell training in general, because when we take it into the swing to clean the snatch, we get into slightly different force vectors there. Where with the clean and the snatch, we’re a little bit more vertical, more like a vertical leap versus the kind of broad jump force of maybe the swing to put it into general categories. We used to call it the what-the-heck effect. And so people would start swinging a kettlebell and PR their pull-ups. People would start swinging a kettlebell and PR something that they hadn’t been training, whatever that may be. Pardon me. I really think it comes into that loaded eccentric and overspeed eccentric and just how much force we can start absorbing and redirecting and how that transfers into so many other things that we want to be doing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s not an uncommon thing to think about that sprinters are known for having butts, and it’s all from that hip extension. And just to clarify that hip extension, if you imagine standing up and you lift your right foot off the ground half an inch, and then you just pull it behind like kick your heel behind you, that’s hip extension. But when you think about that from a seated position, if you think about getting up from a seated position or that bottom of the deadlift and kind of thrusting your hips forward more than the idea of standing up in like a squat, that’s the way that showed up there. So let’s then go to the whole thing of this whole problem that people run into when they’re starting to get into things like the clean or the snatch and they smash the crap out of their elbows, or sorry, their forearms and think, “Oh, this is not for me.”
Brett Jones:
Absolutely. And if we take it down into something like the get-up, you’re going to roll on your side side, you’re going to establish your grip on the handle, you’re going bring it over.
Steven Sashen:
You got to back that one up. For people who’ve never seen a Turkish get-up, and I don’t know why it’s a Turkish get-up, it probably didn’t come from Turkey. Yeah, who knows? It’s like Bulgarian split squat didn’t come from Bulgaria. It’s a thing. So walk through what that would look like if somebody didn’t know what it was, because they were from another planet and they were watching a video.
Brett Jones:
So if I was laying on the ground and I had a weight shoe-
Steven Sashen:
On your back.
Brett Jones:
… balanced on my fist. So let’s say that I was holding onto a dumbbell or I had a kettlebell in the rack position, or I had a yoga block balanced on my fist and I was going to get up from the ground to standing and back down without dropping the yoga block, that’s a get-up.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s –
Brett Jones:
So you can kind of visualize coming through the different positions that you would come through, getting to the elbow, getting to the hand, sweeping the leg, Cobra Kai, getting straight, and then progressing into the standing position and reversing that… Gray Cook called it alignment with integrity under load. So it’s like a moving yoga, a loaded yoga-ish sort of thing where we move through these positions to get the standing and then we come back down. And we’re really concerned with maintaining our alignment, because regardless of what load you’re holding, what’s holding the load is the ground. You are aligning your structure so that the weight centers through you most efficiently to be held by the ground. So there’s actually a lot of benefit. Get-up’s one of my favorite exercises. I do them every time I train to some degree. Some days it’s one or two, some days it’s five. It just varies.
Steven Sashen:
Well, first things first, I think we need to make more Karate Kid references during the rest of this conversation.
Brett Jones:
100%.
Steven Sashen:
If no one got it, rewind. Secondly, what you just said, I never thought of the get-up that way. And I’m going to add a little tweak to that image. Imagine you’re lying on the ground on your back. Your arm is pointing up towards the ceiling, and you’re holding a glass of water that’s full, and you want to get up to standing without dropping a drop. Which by the way, reminds me of a thing from Art Linkletter, and this is showing how old I am, Kids Say the Darndest Things. It was a collection of kids saying funny things, and one of them was my favorite. A kid was asked to describe how it rains, and he said, water forms around a piece of dust until it forms a drop, and then it does, which I just love.
So you’re holding a glass of water pointed towards the ceiling. You want to stand up in a way that’s most efficient that keeps the glass from the water from spilling and then getting back down as well. So once you can imagine that, now just imagine having anywhere from, I don’t know, let’s make it 10 to 40 pound weight that not only are you holding in your hand, but it’s a little offset. So it’s not just holding in your hand. It’s a little out of whack. So it’s trying to force you to not have that perfect alignment, but it’s showing you what that alignment is, because the better you do, the more weight you can handle, because it’s not about strength as much as it is about alignment.
Brett Jones:
Yes. Yeah, 100. I love it. I love the description, and I think that as we move through something like that, I’m going to take a little bit of a left turn potentially. And because you may have had people on to talk about foot structure and how we’re loading the foot and how there’s some uniqueness in there.
Steven Sashen:
Why would you think that I’ve ever talked to anybody about that? That is-
Brett Jones:
It’s a guess. It’s just a guess.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, try again, but okay, keep going.
Brett Jones:
But when we come up into the hands, what we see are some unique hand and wrist structures that influence how we hold the bell. And the reason I’m getting into this is because to your point of people not being comfortable with the bell in that rack position, A, the back of our forearm is some place we typically don’t bear load. So having any weight sitting there initially is like, “Dude, that’s weird. Don’t like it. I feel pressure there. And I’ve potentially never felt that before.” You’ll adjust. But when we look at hand and wrist architecture and I sit here and I snap my hands up, it looks like I’m waving. I have a very ulnar deviated hand and wrist position, and I have a thumb that is very high in my palm. So the reason-
Steven Sashen:
Okay, again, so for people who aren’t watching, so imagine just putting your hand up sort of at face level with your palm facing away from you, so your palms facing the same way your face is. And if you do that kind of naturally, yeah, your pinky is not pointing straight up. I’m using my right hand, it’s pointing at two o’clock. And that creates an interesting bit of alignment from the base of my thumb to the base of my pinky that is pretty much horizontal parallel to the ground that most people have never thought of.
Brett Jones:
And so now there’s two other wrist archetypes. So you and I, you’re not as ulnar deviated as I am, but you appear to be a bit ulnar deviated. My friend Fabio Zonin, who is one of our Italian instructors, and he has a product with StrongFirst called Victorious, which is all about the kettlebell military press. So I started using his grip for the military press, because I saw it in the video and I’m like, “Oh, that sounds cool. I’m going to start doing it.” Well, I irritated both my shoulders and I was blaming everything else. I’m like, “I changed my grip on my pull-ups, or maybe I did this or maybe…” And then I’m like, “Well, you dummy. The only thing you changed was your grip on the kettlebell.” And so in looking at my hands, very ulnar deviated thumb, very high in the palm. Fabio was a very radial deviated with a thumb that’s very low in his palm.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Brett Jones:
So he goes pinky side of the bell with the bell very deep in his palm. I go thumb side with the bell angled at the direction of my wrist and calluses, so to speak. I go deep as I can without putting pressure on my thumb, because again, my thumb is very high in my palm. And then there are people who are neutral. They’re neither ulnar nor radial, and the thumb position is varied in there.
So in establishing this, we really started taking a look at how people were gripping, because okay, if we’re doing a static move, like the get-up, maybe we can get away with just going neutral for everybody. But once you’re pressing and you’re actually moving load through this mid-range of the shoulder, how you align that load and how you’re moving that force through your structure really matters. And so for me, thumb side angled grip, I get a really strong push. Shoulders are healthy, everybody’s happy. For Fabio, it’s pinky side, deep neutral grip. And people that are neutral, middle of the bell, parallel with your calluses. There’s kind of a very general recommendation. So as I’m getting in position for something like the get-up or I’m thinking about where I want that bell to end up in my clean, we can increase our comfort by understanding our hand and wrist architecture and then appropriately gripping, pardon me, gripping the bell either towards thumb, middle, or pinky, depending on hand and wrist.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. So what often happens for people if they’re doing the clean, which is basically you’re bringing the bell from the ground or from swing to essentially your shoulder. For that, and also for the snatch where you’re bringing it again from either the ground or part of a swing all the way overhead. What people will sometimes experience often sometimes, or sometimes often, is that the kettlebell will smash into the back of their forearm. And so part of what we’re talking about with the grip is one piece of trying to eliminate that. What, if anything, are other things that people need to pay attention to, whether they’re doing a clean or a snatch or anything else so that they’re not getting that massive forearm smashing phenomenon.
Brett Jones:
Absolutely. So easiest way to think about, let’s talk about the clean specifically for just a moment. You want that to roll up into the rack position. You do not want to flip the kettlebell up into the rack position. So just that visual of very smoothly rolling that kettlebell up into a position so there is no impact. We want the kettlebell to come into the rack position like a butterfly with sore feet. It should be very gentle and arrive in the rack position at the same time your arm ends up in the rack position. If your arm ends up in the rack position first and then the kettlebell shows up, bad news, because that’s going to be a knock and potential bruise. So we want to think of rolling up. And one of the quickest ways we can learn that is two things, cheat clean.
So if I go neutral grip with the handle on the ground and I want my right hand to end up with the bell, and my left hand comes over and covers my right, and I kick it back and pick it up, I’m going to automatically kind of tame the arc and not let that bell get way away from me. It’s going to kind of naturally guide me into that. Roll it up to the rack position.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Brett Jones:
And another thing that we could throw in there is don’t clean it to your shoulder, clean it to your hip, because the biggest problem people have with the clean is they just do too much with it. We’re actually not moving the bell that far. If we swing at a seven out of 10 effort, we’re cleaning at a two. It’s a massive difference.
Yeah. And then the other thing is, if you picture me kind of in that hinge position, but rowing a kettlebell, so I point my thumb back and then as I row it, I point my thumb forward. So a little twisting row there.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, back and forward. I’m trying to explain back and forward.
Brett Jones:
So thumb points behind you. Thumb points to your shoulder.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, so basically so here. You’re doing Brutus is sending Christians to the lions, thumb down. Come on, I can do it. When you’re in the hip hinge and then as you’re coming, it’s coming towards your shoulder, you’re basically hitchhiking, so thumbs pointing to your shoulder.
Brett Jones:
Yep. So in that rack position, I can actually touch my collarbone with my thumb. So that’s the kind of positioning we end up in. But if I’m performing that row down in the hinge position and then during the row I stand up, you’ll bring the bell right into the rack position and probably not over clean it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s a brilliant cue. It’s as if you’ve been doing this for a while. That’s cool.
Brett Jones:
Picked up one or two things along the way.
Steven Sashen:
You said there was two things about this. Did we cover both of those or did I-
Brett Jones:
We did, the cheat clean and the row roads to clean will really help clean up the clean and yeah, kettlebell humor. It’s all we’ve got.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, don’t open with it. As a former professional stand-up comic, I know you got to work the room. You just really got to know who your audience is. And look, even in a kettlebell conference, if that gets a laugh, that’s a real problem.
Brett Jones:
Agreed. But I do it anyway, because it’s not for them, it’s for me.
Steven Sashen:
That’s a very Norm Macdonald approach to comedy. It’s like if he likes the joke and the audience doesn’t laugh, they’re wrong and he’ll just wait. Well, he did before he died. Now he’s waiting for a very long time. So that kind of gets us through the clean. Let’s chat about the snatch version of that. And the Snatch, again, is taking the kettlebell from basically the ground or swing to all the way overhead.
Brett Jones:
Yes. And so what happens there is, and we went on a 20 plus year journey with this, where in the original RKC book, Pavel describes the snatch as a clean that ends up overhead. Somewhere along the way, people started talking about the snatch being a swing that ends up overhead. But when you do that, you arc the bell in a much wider arc away from yourself, and now it has to come over at the top. Whereas if I’m treating this as a clean, that ends up overhead, I’m turning that bell over much differently and arriving at top at the same time. And so when you treat the snatch as a swing that ends up overhead, the potential for getting hit at the top of the snatch is much, much greater.
Steven Sashen:
That’s interest, because I imagine people’s natural inclination if you’re going to say, “Hey, go from that swing to getting overhead,” would just be to swing harder to get your hand up there, and you’re setting yourself up for that bell coming around your hand and just smashing into your forearm. There’s nothing else it could do practically.
Brett Jones:
Well, paint the fence. So another Cobra Kai or Karate Kid reference. If we think of the snatch being this paint the fence sort of motion, then you can see how the bell’s going to just kind of float up and very gently turn over at the top. And then on the way down, I’m painting the fence on the way down. And that sort of really tight arc where I’m working in this motion really helps with how we’re performing the snatch.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really cool. Okay, so we’ve kind of talked about the four things that most people think about when it comes to kettlebell training. So we’ve got the get-up, we’ve got a swing, we’ve got a clean, we’ve got a snatch. What is there beyond that most people are not aware of that has real value?
Brett Jones:
Oh, boy. Well, the military press right away. I think in the pre-bench press days, how much you could military press was the judge of overall strength. And so I think performing the kettlebell military press is a really tremendous move, something that people should be doing. The goblet squat and the kettlebell front squat, whether you’re doing it with one bell or two bells, really nice vertical. And when we contrast this with a barbell front squat where you really have to create either the Olympic rack position, which I am not physically capable of doing-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I can’t do it very well either.
Brett Jones:
… because if I actually put my hand in the rack position, the barbell is halfway through my face, or I’ve tweaked my wrist to the point where it actually damages my wrist to a certain extent and inhibits my grip strength, which I would never want to do.
Steven Sashen:
So wait, so you’re saying after all this kettlebell training that’s supposed to make you rock hard, you just can’t tolerate throwing a barbell to your face?
Brett Jones:
Correct.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, just checking.
Brett Jones:
Especially through my face. I could probably hit it once, but not through my face.
Steven Sashen:
You wouldn’t remember.
Brett Jones:
Right. And then it wouldn’t matter. So the traditional barbell front squat where we’re either in the kind of bodybuilder rack, the zombie rack or the traditional Olympic rack position, how you have to handle that load is changed by the implement, the barbell. Whereas with the kettlebell, that kettlebell is going to sit over on my forearm in this little triangle in between the bicep and the forearm, and it centers with my body and the rack position compresses my rib cage so that I’m actually strengthening my breathing musculature and my diaphragm in a very different way than I would if I was using a barbell. And so I think the kettlebell front squat is one that we can definitely move towards. And then if we kind of peek behind the curtain of some moves that are still possible, the push press, the jerk, the bent press, the windmill, there are some other exercises in the lexicon that really have some tremendous benefit to them. And again, we-
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Brett Jones:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
Speaking of someone who understands weightlifting terminology, I got all of those, but the windmill. So the push press here, just again for people who don’t… Push press like a military press, but what you’re doing is getting your legs involved. I mean, whether it’s a kettlebell or anything, so you’ve got that at your shoulder, you take a very shallow squat, and as you’re pushing up from that, that’s when you’re also getting your hand overhead. Wait, what’d you have after that? Your push press-
Brett Jones:
Jerk.
Steven Sashen:
What’d you have?
Brett Jones:
Jerk.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, jerk. Similar idea, except that you’re really accentuating the leg part. And rather than just worrying about getting whatever the weight is over your head, you’re dropping further. So you’re squatting more. So as much as the weight is going up, you’re going down to kind of catch both at the same time. What do we have after that one?
Brett Jones:
The bent press.
Steven Sashen:
Bent press, what? I don’t even know that.
Brett Jones:
Bent press is an old school lift where we open up into this back rack position, and then it’s actually not a press. It is me pushing myself underneath the weight. And so there is an old continuum and we’ll focus more towards the barbell for just a second, where if we were talking about the barbell military press and you progress to a point in load where you could no longer press it, you would almost naturally begin to dip and drive and use some leg assistance to get that overhead and the push press is born. Where you continue to push press until the weight’s so heavy that the momentum from the first push requires you to then drop underneath of it to fully lock out the arms and stand up. And so there’s this continuum from the military press to the jerk that kind of happens very naturally as we go up in load.
Steven Sashen:
No, you know what this really is? This is bro gym stuff from 100 years ago where guys aren’t willing to admit that they can’t really lift that weight. So they find ways of faking it so they can go, “See, look what I did.” And it’s like, “No, you just faked it. You didn’t move that weight at all. You basically just dropped faster than the weight could drop until your arm was straight up and then you stood up. But that’s not the same as lifting something.” And then arguments flare.
Brett Jones:
100%. And the difference between something that is more of a grind, pure strength lift versus that ballistic lift where you’re using momentum and actually trying to take advantage of your speed. Nice continuum there. And with the dumbbell or the kettlebell, we talk about the single kettlebell military press. Well, once it’s heavy enough, we’re going to kind of open up a little bit and push it away where the body and the bell are moving at the same time, side press. Then the bell gets so heavy that I have to create this support position and drive myself underneath the weight. So pardon me, once I establish the rack position, my job is to statically drive myself away from that weight. So I end up underneath it in the bent press position. You can look up Arthur Saxon, Eugene Sandow, Earl Liederman and some others.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I mean, it’s like one of the classic bodybuilding pictures from the early-1900s.
Brett Jones:
Well, the Olympia Trophy with the… That’s Eugene Sandow performing side press.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Clever. And windmill.
Brett Jones:
So the windmill is kind of back to one of our loaded yoga sort of moves where I’ve got my feet underneath my hips, I turn my feet 45 degrees away from my working side. So if I’m going to have my right arm overhead, I’m going to have my feet angled to the left 45 degrees. Then I’m going to push back into at a 45 degree angle, that right hip, because once you shift the feet and get into this position, the hip is going to be slightly offset. So then my job is to push it back at a 45 degree angle to get it vertical. And then I continue to hinge into that position performing windmill.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. Weird.
Brett Jones:
So we get a good piriformis and hip stretch. Too many people will get into the windmill and shoot for a hamstring stretch, and that’s really not what we’re shooting for. When we do the windmill, we’re trying to get into those hip rotators and piriformis. One of the things that I’m a little bit passionate about as far as foot positioning for things like swings and deadlifts and squats, is using the amount of foot out turn that you need. So in those symmetrical stance positions, single leg stance goes by its own rules. In those symmetrical stance positions, and I’ll use myself as an example because it’s all I’ve got, I have a 62 degree alpha angle cam style FAI. Anterior labrum is completely torn, anterior superior labrum is torn.
Steven Sashen:
Let me just say, for people who don’t know what that is, you will continue to not know what that is, because we’re not going to dive into that diagnostic.
Brett Jones:
I have square pegs in round holes. Easiest way to think about it. So if I do not go with a hip out turn, I cheat myself of a lot of hip range of motion. And if your hip stops, your back starts.
Steven Sashen:
Stops. Yeah.
Brett Jones:
That’s a bad trade-off. And so creating the foot position that you need to move effectively means I do my swings, my snatches and everything, squats with my feet turned out. Well, the hip rotator is going to get a little tight, a little short in that position. The windmill is how I stretch those and maintain some balance in my hip and keep things opened up.
Steven Sashen:
And to think about how some kettlebell biomechanics apply to other things, what you just said, for anyone who goes to a gym and uses any sort of leg press machine, whether it’s a hack squad or a leg press or any of those, similar idea, if you don’t turn your feet out a little bit, you’re going to be limiting the range of motion you have, not getting the full impact on your legs and your hips. And it’s all going to either not be effective enough, because you’re not getting a stretch, or it’s going to then start going to your back in ways that are not, let’s say, non-ideal at the very least. But you mentioned something a moment ago sort of in passing, and it was not a Karate Kid reference, thank God, but it was single leg. And what got me to getting my first kettlebell was as a sprinter, I was doing a bunch of stuff and I got really into doing single leg, not stiff legged, but it’s a misnomer, stiff legged deadlifts.
It’s basically slightly knee bent, but doing single leg deadlifts. And I kind of spit and paste and swizzle sticks an approximation of a kettlebell with a bunch of weights and a bunch of electrical piping. And then a friend of mine who was actually at the time selling kettlebells, was so offended by my little contraption that he gave me an 88 pound kettlebell. So that’s something that, again, most people hadn’t even thought of as being a kind of kettlebell exercise. So there’s these other exercises that are non-ballistic that are other things that are kind of round out the pantheon of kettlebell exercises. So single leg deadlift being one. What else do we have in that domain?
Brett Jones:
Well, it’s almost anything you can do with a dumbbell, you can do with a kettlebell. So if you want to do some one-arm rows, you want to use it for deadlifts, single leg deadlifts, suitcase deadlift. You want to use it for a goblet squat, all of those things. So basically think a bridge floor press or a floor press sort of situation. So working on the pecs and the chest if you’re into that sort of thing. I don’t know why anybody would want to do that.
So yeah, picture, pretty much anything you could use a dumbbell for, you could use a kettlebell for, but the kettlebell is easily passed from hand to hand. And that offset center of mass continues to have a lot of benefits where a single leg deadlift with a dumbbell may take you beyond the range that you can control and really, you shouldn’t be going that deep. The kettlebell because it sits off the ground, especially if you’re using an appreciable weight, say 24 kilo and above, you’re going to be far enough off the ground to where your range of motion is almost naturally limited to a more ideal range.
Steven Sashen:
One of the things about both kettlebells and dumbbells that becomes an obstacle for some people is getting a range of weights. Sorry, I’m having a flashback. Some super skinny to the point of anorexic distance runners that I used to be on the track with at the same time, their coach had them doing some kettlebell work after they were done running. And these are guys who, I mean, these were world champion distance runners who couldn’t do a push-up and they were using a two-pound kettlebell for doing swings. It was just humiliating to watch, which makes no sense, because I’m not humiliated, I was just watching, just shaking my head. But nonetheless, getting a range of bells or a range of dumbbells can be off-putting for some people. Have you played with any of the adjustable weight kettlebells?
Brett Jones:
I haven’t. And I’m going to make a pitch right now for, and if we go back to the traditional set of kettlebells would’ve been a 16, 24, and 32 kilo. So in Russian measurements, it was poods. So you had one pood, one and a half pood, two pood. So 16, 24, 32 kilo. And an eight-kilo jump-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, for the fun of it, let’s do the math on that for people who don’t think in kilos, because we are holdouts for not using kilos. So 16 is roughly 35 pounds-ish. 24, so we’re talking about 50 pounds, plus minus-
Brett Jones:
53.
Steven Sashen:
There we go. And what’d you say the other one was?
Brett Jones:
32 kilo. So 70 and a half pounds.
Steven Sashen:
There we go. Okay.
Brett Jones:
Yep. So the jumps there, the 16 plus pound jumps that you have between those loads, there’s actually a benefit to that. And so we tend to think nowadays in incremental loading fashion, right? We’re going to go up a pound to two and a half pounds, five pounds, whatever it is, we’re going to do these nice little small incremental jumps. And over time, if I just add a pound to my bench press a day, I’ll be bench pressing 360 whatever pounds more, because it’s a leap year, so I can’t remember how many days there are. So we’ll end up benching 300 pounds more. And of course this is fiction. The benefit of having step loading forced upon you. So let’s say you get this 16, 24, 32 kilo bell, and you can press the 24 kilo right now, but you can’t press the 32. So instead of going out and buying all the micro weights, you’re forced to stay with the 24 kilo bell, build skill, build tissue, build the neurology and patterning and volume that leads to being able to press the 32 kilo bell.
And that progression where you’re forced to stay at own, build volume at and adapt to that load before you take on the heavier load, has tremendous benefit. And when you look at periodization in general, and you look at a six week mesocycle, why is it six weeks long? We know that within two weeks you get a tremendous bump in strength and progression, because of the neurological adaptations. Well, it takes another four weeks for your tissues to catch up. So stabilizing the results quickly lost, or sorry, quickly gained, quickly lost. So if you want to maintain a progression, you need to stay there for a little while and own it and build that volume and skill and progression. And so step loading and the kind of what appears to be this brutish sort of forced march towards owning one weight before you take on another actually has a lot of benefit.
Steven Sashen:
That’s very interesting. What was I going to say? Had another thought about that. Oh, so you were shaking your head at things like eight pound kettlebells and these tiny little baby bells that are just sort of silly. Please say more for those people who have those and are now feeling embarrassed or justified, either one works for me.
Brett Jones:
Well, I think that from a general fashion, people are stronger than they think they are. Now, obviously that goes wrong and people end up in situations where they’re not as strong as they thought they were, and they run into problems. But a lot of people will sell themselves short.
And so early in the kettlebell days when they only came in kilos and nobody understood kilos because we don’t think like that, I would say to somebody, “Hey, go grab that eight and go ahead and do this movement.” And it could have been a deadlift, a single leg, deadlift, a row, whatever it was. And at the end of the set, I’d be like, “Well, how’d that feel?” And they’d go, “Yeah, eight pounds. That felt fine.” I’m like, “No, no, that was almost 17 pounds.” They’re like, “What?” “Yeah, you just moved 17 pounds really easily.” “Oh, I might be a little stronger than I think.” “Yeah, you’re a lot stronger than you think. So now let’s grab that 12, 26 pounds, and let’s do something with that.” You could only get away with it for so many times before they started doing the math on their own.
Steven Sashen:
No, you’re wrong. When I was doing heavy lifting, which I’m not doing now, because I’ve got spine issues, I like to lift in kilos because even though I knew I could do the translation into pounds, I didn’t. And there’s something different about lifting 200 kilos versus 440 pounds, and which I never did 200, I did 150. But nonetheless, it’s a very different thing in your brain. I remember the first time when I was lifting pounds and I deadlifted 400, first of all, it was just a psychological barrier. So to get psyched up for doing, I was totally able to do it, but I was just so terrified about the number four at the beginning of what I was lifting, that it took a little while to get ready to do that.
Then it got worse, because as soon as I deadlifted 400, I had two thoughts immediately thereafter. The first was, “Oh crap, now I got to go for 500.” And luckily the second one was, “Hey, you’re a moron.” So I never did that. So my gosh, so we’ve talked about the lifts independently. Let’s talk about just sort of workout structure, if you will, and how using a kettlebell for that is a different game than what many people are thinking about or used to if they’re thinking about getting in shape, getting strong, et cetera, et cetera.
Brett Jones:
So we’ll create two different categories. We’ll talk about grinds, which would match up more with traditional strength training, sort of progressions and training plans. And we’ll talk about ballistics, which really start to play by their own rules. So if I’m structuring something like a military press program with the kettlebell, you’ll see some fairly traditional programming show up in there. Maybe I’m working on a five by five approach, or maybe I’m working on ladders and performing 1, 2, 3, 4 reps. So we have rungs, one rep, two rep, three rep, four rep with rest in between. It’s not a continuous thing. And then I’m progressing to the point where I can do five ladders to five, which is actually about 150 presses if you’re doing both arms. And so it’s a lot of work to build up towards five ladders of five. So within squats, presses, bridge floor press, things that we talked about, you’ll see some more traditional programming kick in there.
Although we might take a bit of a higher volume approach. With ballistics, which we would consider swings, cleans, snatches, jerks, things of that nature, the loading is so quick and so brief because we are really doing, I think Verkhoshansky would call it a power metric move, not a iometric move. But we’re pretty far on the power side of things when we’re doing swings, cleans, snatches, jerks.
So now the volume that I can accrue, because the amount of time I’m loaded is so short, I can really start to pump the volume a little bit. And if you look at something like Pavel’s Simple and Sinister, he recommends basically a daily training volume, about 100 swings. Well, most people never think in terms of doing 100 bicep curls and nor should they. I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, and there is a classic restaurant there in Roanoke called the Texas Tavern, which is this old steel counter thing that at 2:00 in the morning is the place to be downtown. And there’s 10 little stools, and you have the every walk of life represented. And there’s a line out the door and there’s a sign behind the counter that says, “We can serve 1000 people, 10 at a time.” So I can get 100 reps out of you, five at a time. And so we break it down into these high-power, high-quality chunks, but the total volume that we can achieve is pretty significant.
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting. I like the idea. I’m a big fan of doing little things often, just because I’m fundamentally lazy.
Brett Jones:
I’m with you.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. There are people who like to go to the gym for two hours, I’m not that guy, it’s just not my thing. But the other day, happily my home gym is right next to where we have our television. So I did a little something before TV watching, did a little something after TV watching. Now, granted, the things I’m doing are not easy. So I’ll do Nordic hamstring curls until I fall over, which is now is getting to be more and more, because I can go all the way down all the way back. So it takes a while until I fall over. But I’ll just do that and then go watch TV. And then when I’m done, because I’m vain, back to your point about working chest, I will… Actually, you know what it is just for the fun of saying it and being a little transparent, whatever the hell that means, I’ve been doing more things to build more muscle, because I’m 61, and having more is better.
And so I’m working on all of those body parts that otherwise I don’t really care about other than it would be nice to take off my shirt and have my wife go… Or even better to have other women who are 30 years younger do the same thing. I have to confess, that would be fun. So I’ll do some significant chest related something. And lately my favorite exercise is the reverse grip dumbbell bench press. So it works really well in a whole lot of ways that are entertaining. I could do with bells too actually, now to think of it. But anyway, so yeah, I’m a big fan of those little things more often. And it’s one of those things that’s interesting. Many people just don’t think about breaking it up. They don’t think that you have to go to the gym for this amount of time. You have to do the workout for this amount of time, rather than just making it such an integral part of your day where the problem is, it just doesn’t feel like you’re doing as much.
And so there’s a weird psychological component to if you don’t walk out of there just sweaty and pumped and tired and exhausted and thinking people are staring at you when they’re not. So with that, back to my single leg, stiff legged deadlift… I got to bring that bell. We’ve moved offices, so I don’t have it here, but I used to have it right next to my desk and just four or five times a day, I’d do a set of 10. And it was, yeah, I got to bring that thing in here. Of course, then if I do that, I won’t have it at home. I got to buy another one. Okay, there we go.
Brett Jones:
There you go.
Steven Sashen:
All right. Go ahead, sorry.
Brett Jones:
My bells have expanded in number over the years, so there’s several of them upstairs.
Steven Sashen:
Yes. So if someone’s looking to just get started with kettlebell things, and obviously this leads to talking about you and what you’re doing or it can, but before we get to how they can connect to you. If somebody is looking to get started, whether they’re looking to just integrate this into what they’re currently doing as something that can be helpful for whatever sport they’re participating in, or if they want to think of it as just a workout thing the same way you would go to the gym and do whatever else, how would you recommend people think about that, let alone do that?
Brett Jones:
So there’s a couple of different things. Pavel Simple and Sinister program is a great starting point for pretty much anybody. The get-ups involved, the swing deadlift, the swing, you’re going to go through the goblet squat, the hip bridge, and the halo. And there’s a lot of benefit to just getting started there. Now, I’m always a fan of getting an individualized approach. If I can learn something, well in the immediate term, I can do better with that thing over the long term. So rather than suffer on my own for six months or a year trying to figure something out, why not just get a coaching session?
And even if you just want to get coached on the swing and the get-up, one or two sessions there can save you months of frustration trying to figure it out on your own. So those would be my two biggest recommendations. We have workshops that we do that are four and a half hour kind of bite-sized things that take you through different aspects of kettlebell training. But somewhere in that mix of Simple and Sinister book or online course, an individualized session and a workshop where you still get some individual tips, great ways for folks to get started.
Steven Sashen:
Awesome. And so if they’re going to do this, I mean, this is a perfect segue for if people want to get in touch with what you are doing, describe what you’ve been doing since you’ve been doing this now for over 21 years. Holy crap. Isn’t that crazy? Talk about how they can get in touch with you and how they can learn things with and from you.
Brett Jones:
Absolutely. I do articles and things through strongfirst.com. I have my Instagram feed a@brettjonesssfg where I post videos and do things. My website is appliedstrength.com. I have now three different products on strongandfit.com where I have the Iron Cardio video, Iron Cardio book. And my new program that just came out is Mind the Gap, which is all about filling in those mobility, stability, and strength gaps. When you follow a minimalist routine and you don’t want to be in the gym for hours at a time, you have to accept the fact that that minimalist routine will leave potentially some gaps. So how do you fill those gaps in a time-efficient fashion? And how do you do your training so that you feel good? I think people’s unspoken desire in fitness is to feel good. They very rarely come in and say that. Typically, it’s, “I want to lose weight. I want to do this, I want to do that.” But in the background is, “I just want to feel good.” And so that’s kind of the direction there.
Steven Sashen:
Beautiful. Well, I should have asked this before I said how can everyone get in touch with you, but is there anything we left out? You could go on forever probably, but anything-
Brett Jones:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, we could have a bunch of different conversations, but I think that the overall thing is I’m 21 plus years into using this thing called a kettlebell, and I learn something every time I pick it up. You’ve been running for how many years?
Steven Sashen:
Well, actually-
Brett Jones:
A couple five years.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’ve been doing it for a little while. And you know what? But it’s a good point. I mean, I was at an event, oh, when was this? Let’s call it November and I bumped into a guy who gave me a cue that after all the years that I’ve been sprinting changed my sprinting form in a positive way. It was like, “Oh, that answers something that I’ve been trying to do that I couldn’t figure out on my own.” It was brilliant.
Brett Jones:
Yep. And so approaching this as not something that you’re going to master in six weeks, but knowing that I’m 21 plus years into swinging a bell and I learn something every time I pick up a bell, every time I clean it, every time I press it, is an opportunity to learn. Boy, wouldn’t we approach our fitness in a different way rather than then to just work-out. And that’s why at StrongFirst we very strongly lean in the direction of, we don’t refer to our training sessions as workouts. They’re practices. We are practicing the skill.
Now, Dr. Ed Thomas, who was a mentor of mine and somebody that I learned a lot from, always said, “I never went to the gym to work out. I went to the gym to learn. Now in the process of learning, did I get tired? Did I get sweaty? Did I get, quote, fit? Yes. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to learn the next progression. To do the previous progression better. To enhance my skill. To learn.” And you’ve been doing it for a lifetime of running and sprinting. There are Olympic lifters, powerlifters, there are musicians who have been practicing the same piece. There’s a famous cellist who at 92 was asked why he was still practicing. And his response was, “Because I think I’m starting to make some progress.”
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wait, Ruth Gordon had that line when she won an Academy Award. Anyway, yeah, no, it’s a brilliant approach. Sorry, keep going.
Brett Jones:
No, I would love for everyone to approach their training as an opportunity to learn. And that would, I think, really change people’s relationship with fitness. And I’m hoping one day to do a perfect swing, but we’ll see if that ever happens.
Steven Sashen:
Good luck on that one. I think of it like a Japanese art form, it’s like calligraphy or tea ceremony or any of these… The idea is to get it perfectly right, knowing that that’s impossible. And that little paradoxical thing is what makes it interesting. And there’s always something there. I just remembered Ruth Gordon’s line. She was like, I don’t know, she was 80 years old when she won the Academy Award. Her line was, “I can’t tell you how encouraging this is.”
Brett Jones:
I love it.
Steven Sashen:
Good. Well, Brett, as always, and I say as always, because we’ve now had this, not this conversation, but we’ve had two big chats. An absolute pleasure. I’m really thrilled that we got to share this to everyone. I do hope for anyone listening slash watching that you take advantage of just exploring this and seeing if kettlebells are something you want to play with and integrate into what you’re doing. I highly recommend it. There are, as we are kind of alluding to, lots of applications for these where you’re just replacing something you’re already doing with something maybe a little more interesting for you physically, let alone something that looks more interesting in your basement where people are going to walk by and have some opinion. That could be an interesting conversation too.
So anyway, thank you, thank you, thank you. And for everyone else, just a reminder, check out everything Brett said and all the places he was pointing you to. And on my end, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com for previous episodes. A place to engage with us on social media, places to find the podcast if you’re not happy with where you already found it. And if you want to drop me an email because you have a recommendation or a suggestion, or a compliment or a complaint or someone who you think should be on the podcast, I’m still trying to get someone who thinks I have a case of Craniorectal Reorientation syndrome, who’s willing to spar with me about that. That’d be fun. You can drop me an email. You can email me at Move, M-O-V-E, at jointhemovementmovement.com. And until then, as always, just go out, have fun and live life feet first.