Training mania

It is very rare these days that you will catch me doing a workout for more than one hour, let alone one for two hours! But, alas, I did one this morning. Two whole hours of sweating over a piece of steel. Yip, I went for a kettlebell class with one of my new fitness heroes, Trent Murgatroyd, a kettlebell expert from Fourways, Johannesburg and IKFF certified.

 We started our session with some joint mobility exercises and then on to a warm up. Now if you think a warm up is a lazy let’s stand in the corner and pretend to stretch our “very stiff” muscles, again, you are sadly mistaken. We were allowed to grab a light warm up kettlebell (I rushed for the pink 8kg bell!) and we started swinging, cleaning, clean and pressing and snatching a couple of times (felt like a couple of hundred times). Fantastic, you are all warmed up and ready to go. To make this two hour story a little shorter, we continued to swing, then do push ups, planks, cleans and clean and press, some snatches, with bridges and side bridges for a good 45 minutes. Then the gloves came off. Ok, not really, they came on.

We did rounds of punching a bag, skipping and swings and every now and then Trent felt it would be ok if we could steal a sip of water. We continued and finished off with some heavy cleans and throw in some heavy swings just for good measure and it is all good.

The question is. Why do we all flock to get our kettlebell fix these days? It is not a difficult question to answer really. You just look at a bell and you can feel your muscles ache. Not in a bad way though, a bell is probably the most versatile piece of fitness equipment that you can find these days. Use just a little bit of your imagination and you can conjure up the most wonderful workouts. These can be combinations of some running, skipping, boxing, body weight moves and then the basic kettlebell moves, swing, clean and press and snatches. The other good news is that you definitely do not have to train 2 hours a day to see results with these steal wonders. If you keep the intensity of your workout high, you can do a 20 minute workout, no sweat (ok, I lie, lots of sweat). You will burn calories and build a strong physique. No is that not what all of us want out of a workout?

Go ahead, be crazy and put a bell to the test. The Russians have been doing it for hundreds of years and they are scared of no one. Maybe they carry a bell in their bags wherever they go…

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