Sweat pouring off your brow, bent over with your hands on your knees, head pounding, lungs aching with just a hint of the taste of blood in your mouth.

Great conditioning session, right?

At least that is what you have been told. It needs to be hard — in fact, it needs to be brutal. You should be begging to be finished and wishing it was the end.

Except…what if I told you it could be easy? I think it can be. But let’s start from the beginning.

Conditioning 1.0

The traditional approach to conditioning is to have either a set amount of work to be done, or a set amount of time to work for. This might look like a circuit where you do a certain number of reps per exercise for a certain number of rounds, or an “AMRAP” where you work for as many rounds as possible for X number of minutes.

The exercises that comprise the work are usually coordinated to spread the work out evenly over the body without overloading any particular part. If you’re training for a specific sport, ideally the movement will be specific to the sport. For example, a large part of a rugby player’s conditioning might be exclusively sprinting since that makes up the majority of their sporting movement.

If you’ve been following what I write about for any length of time, or if you’ve been through my free Gym Movement eCourse, you might immediately recognize the problem.

The problem is that everything you’re doing is arbitrary. The movement may not test well, you might be doing it for too many or too few reps, and you might do too much or too little total work. More often than not, conditioning work is done in a distress manner. You may remember from the GM eCourse that eustress is stress that is easily resolved. A workout with a tested movement done without elements of effort only until it doesn’t test well is a eustress workout. A distress workout is an untested movement done for an arbitrary number of sets and reps regardless of how it tests.

Why is most conditioning approached in a distressful way? I think the answer to that lies in a remark Frankie Faires made to me once, which has borne out to be completely accurate:

“Results happen faster under distress, both intended and unintended.”

In other words, yes, your conditioning will improve more quickly under distress conditions. Right up until the point of injury, burnout, etc.

A minimal effective amount of distress training is necessary and useful for athletes because even though the needs of an athlete are largely predictable, there is always some degree of uncertainty in competition. Sometimes you just have to do the work, whether or not you’ve prepared for it within the boundaries of your training.

What if we approached conditioning from a different perspective, in a smarter way?

Before we look at how we can do this better, I’d like to define the purpose and intent of conditioning clearly.

For what purpose?

The only practical purpose for conditioning is to increase the amount of work a person can do in a given amount of time. This can be either for a sport, in which case the amount is dictated very clearly by their sport, or for general physical preparedness, in which case the amount is the minimal effective. In the context of the majority of the people I train, they need to be able to run through the airport to catch a flight without getting winded. Not much more.

We do not ever use conditioning as a tool for fat loss.

When it comes to sports, the parameters are often very clearly defined. People like to talk about how athletes need to be prepared for anything, but that is utter nonsense. Sports have rules, and rules clearly define the boundaries. Take rugby, a sport for which I have trained many athletes, for example.  There is lots of data on rugby work volume, and it speaks very clearly. The greatest distance run in a rugby match is seven kilometers (five miles.) We know that matches last about 80 minutes, which gives us an important set of parameters. We now know that a rugby player doesn’t need to be able to run more than 7 km in 80 minutes. Of course that’s not much to go from, but there’s more.  From the studies of game data that have been done, we know that 67.5% of the sprint efforts are under 20 meters (about 30 per match), and that they are followed by long (greater than five minutes) recovery. Sprint efforts over 40 meters only occur less than 10% of the time, or less, depending on position.

Without turning this into an article on rugby conditioning, you can see that a picture emerges very quickly about what a rugby player actually needs to be able to do. There is very little mystery.

You can disassemble any sport you want and determine very quickly what they need to be able to do and how much time they have to do it in.

On the other end of the conditioning spectrum, if you are simply doing conditioning for general physical preparedness, you have an even more clearly defined parameter for where to direct your training: wherever you are. Start with what you can do, and seek to do more if it in less time. You’ll know you’ve done enough when you don’t get winded doing everyday tasks.

Conditioning 2.0

Now that we’ve established our purpose for conditioning and we have a pretty good idea of the parameters of our training for sport or life, we can get to the actual training. As I mentioned earlier in the article, much of what people do for conditioning is totally arbitrary. Randomly selected movements done for an arbitrary amount of reps for a pre-determined amount of time. Not best.

If you’re at all familiar with the biofeedback testing approach I teach, you could imagine that we might be able to test some or all of the parameters of the workout. If this is new to you, the shortest version is this: why not look for a physiological or biometric marker to determine if something is good or bad for us in real-time? This approach works exceedingly well in strength training, and though less often applied, it works just as well when it comes to conditioning work.

The big mental paradigm shift is that conditioning work is not special — we are simply looking at optimizing a different metric from strength work, which focuses on intensity, whereas in conditioning we are optimizing for density.

Once you understand that, you can take into account an acceptable degree of distress and intelligently design the workout to suit the needs of the individual.

In the case of general fitness or GPP we can maximize the eustress approach because we want to optimize progress, minimize unwanted effects like injury, and there isn’t an unknown that we need to be prepared for. Do what you can.

On the more athletic end of the spectrum, we can use more distress training to elicit faster response and to create more capacity for performing in distress. I want to be clear here: the maximal effective amount of eustress training and minimal effective amount of distress training still applies to athletes.

To create a conditioning workout you have three parameters to work with: the movement(s), working time (time interval or number of reps), and total length or time, which is a proxy for your rest.

Here’s an example conditioning workout:

10 sets of 10 burpees, as fast as possible.

Or

As many rounds of 10 burpees as possible in 10 minutes, resting as necessary.

How could we make this into a more intelligent workout?

For starters, we could use a tested movement instead of burpees. If they didn’t test well, we could test bodyweight squats, for example.

Next, instead of setting a rep count to 10, we could simply set the parameter “do as many as you easily can, then stop.”

Finally, instead of setting the total volume at 100 or setting the time to 10 minutes, we could test after each round, stopping whenever the tested volume of work occurred.

In three small changes we’ve transformed this from an arbitrary and possibly harmful workout into a fully tested eustress workout.

Without further ado, here is the matrix I designed which was the genesis of this article:

As you can see, you have eight different ways you can structure a workout from completely tested to completely untested.

A fully eustress conditioning session can be downright easy, working within your limits to expand your limits. To move it a little closer to distress training, you might opt to select an untested (or purposefully poorly testing) movement but maintain eustress parameters when it comes to the actual work output.

Ultimately, the choice is yours and only yours. Disregard the cookie-cutter program — using this framework, you can become your own n=1 experiment and develop your own best conditioning system.

P.S. This week ONLY! I am going to GIVE AWAY my book, Lift Weights Faster and Smarter which expands on the ideas in this blog post and completely lays out for you exactly how to make 20 workouts hit the precise stress target you need to EVERYONE who buys Lift Weights Faster during the last chance sale. With LWF2 on the horizon you will never again be able pick up the critically acclaimed first Lift Weights Faster on its own – much less at 50% off like it is this week.  My advice? Nab it while you still can and you’ll score Lift Weights Faster and Smarter for FREE.

How a certain piece of benign training equipment was able to gain such a personality of it’s own is sometimes beyond me, but the kettlebell has done that. The level of misunderstanding and confusion surrounding this one tool is unmatched by any other equipment. All it takes is hearing some variation of the familiar refrain to see it all reflected at once:

“I do kettleballs.”

You don’t do kettlebells. You do random acts of kindess. You do drugs. You do not do kettlebells. You lift them, or train with them, but you do not do them.

It is also not a kettleball.

But, you can thank the person who got excited about this “kettlebell craze” for the kettleball class at your local community center.

Enter The Bullshit

Then you have the truly well intentioned yet misinformed. There is a certain population for which the kettlebell is the end-all be-all tool of strength and conditioning. These people have been convinced, not through the indoctrination into the strength secrets of the former union of Soviet socialist republics, but through cunning marketing and a lot of theater that there is one path to unyielding strength and it is through the kettlebell.

Let’s get something out of the way right now: Using a kettlebell to build maximum strength is like using a tack hammer to build Tōdai-ji. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying you will die long before completion.

Here are three of the biggest reasons the kettlebell is a ridiculously ineffective tool for building maximum strength:

Their size: A pretty good deadlift for a man is double-bodyweight. The average American male weighs 175lbs. That’s a 350lb deadlift. The largest kettlebell you can acquire anywhere (to my knowledge) is a 92kg monster that weighs 203lbs. Do you see the problem? Kettlebells simply don’t get weigh enough to elicit a response when we’re talking about serious strength.

Progressive resistance: Traditional free weights allow weight changes down to 2.5 or 5lbs, and even smaller increments if you have fractional plates. Kettlebells are traditionally sized in 4kg increments which means 8-9lb jumps. For overhead work this can be absolutely devastating especially to women. That’s assuming you have the luxury of bells in increasing and decreasing sizes, which in the case of most kettlebell trainees is not true. You’re lucky to have one or two, much less a full complement in 4kg jumps from 12kg up to 48kg. If you tell me that you can build the level of strength required to deadlift double-bodyweight or overhead press your bodyweight with a 35lb kettlebell I am simply going to laugh in your face.

Leverage issues: For better or for worse, due to the offset leverage and awkward size and shape the kettlebell can present several problems in developing greater strength. Two examples to highlight what I mean. In an overhead press with a kettlebell, due to the positioning on the outside of the wrist, the bell pulls the arm into external rotation and requires muscular force to counter that leverage. Besides simply not being a good force vector for some people, fighting against that leverage cuts into what you can direct upward into the path you’re actually trying to achieve:the overhead press. Another example is my experience with doing a goblet squat with a 203lb kettlebell. It is nearly impossible due to the extreme forward bias of the weight and the amount of pressure it exerts on the arms to hold it in place. It is much harder than a 203lb barbell front squat. I have yet to goblet squat it in the traditional way of holding it by the handle due to the pressure on the biceps, upside down works better. One could make the argument that it takes more overall strength to squat with a kettlebell in this way, so how is that a downside? Well first of all, I can assure you I did not build up the leg strength to be ABLE to squat it by squatting kettlebells, I did that by squatting and deadlifting over twice that weight. Second, unless you have access to bigger and bigger bells, in progressive increments above 100lbs it is fallacious to argue you could develop that strength with kettlebells. You simply are not going to make the jump from goblet squatting a 24kg to a 92kg kettlebell.

They’re uncomfortable: This isn’t strictly a strength issue, but I know some of you are fellow trainers and this is important. A lot of your clients don’t like how the kettlebell feels on their arm or wrist. Especially female clients. You can be an idiot and tell them things like they will get used to it, like I did when I first started training women. This is a mistake of incalculable proportions. Most of your clients don’t want to toughen up, get used to it, or develop scar tissue on their forearm that prevents them from being hurt by the ball of iron resting on it. You can try to tell me that if your technique is perfect then it will float gingerly on your wrist, but you neglect to acknowledge individual anthropometry and the  FACT that meets at a painful intersection of thin skin and bone.

The ultimate conclusion is that the kettlebell simply is not the best tool to develop maximum strength. There are a lot of really strong guys out there who now train with kettlebells, who developed their strength using other, more productive tools. There are also a few genetically gifted individuals like Ivan Denisov who possess the kind of freakshow maximum strength we’re talking about and claim the kettlebell (specifically heavy double-kettlebell long cycle) as their training tool of choice.  Considering there are less than a handful of these beasts in the world, it’s not unreasonable to assume they would have developed that strength if they had chosen table tennis as their sport.

As a final consideration, since to me it is always important but secondary, it’s worth considering the efficacy of the kettlebell for muscle hypertrophy or in the context I care about: “looking good naked.” To this I will only say one thing, and that I make it a general rule that if I want to look a certain way I do more of what the people who look the way I want to look do (and use.) What do bodybuilders use (besides drugs?)  Start there.

Then Why Do You Have So Many?

Great question! I love kettlebells! I think they’re a fantastic tool for what they’re most suited to. In few words:

Kettlebells are best for moving a small weight quickly.

Some of the most fundamental and popular kettlebell movements highlight this fact. Swings and snatches make up the foundation of ballistic kettlebell work. To that I would add the push press and/or jerk as one of the very best things you can do with a kettlebell.

You can swing a dumbbell, but it simply doesn’t work as well. Either you hold it by the head, and you don’t have a good grip on it or you hold it by the handle and it’s too wide to fit in between your legs and the handle is too narrow.

You can snatch a dumbbell, but without being able to do the backswing as in a kettlebell snatch you have to do a dead snatch or hang snatch, and both can get pretty sketchy after many reps. The biggest issue I see with the dead snatch is that the handle is so low to the ground it forces people to round their backs over to get lower than their hips allow them to. At that point they initiate the pull by extending at the spine rather than at the hips. Not great.

Push presses work fairly well with dumbbells, but there are aspects of the size and shape of the kettlebell that allow you to better transfer force from your legs to the bell. This makes it more efficient and allows you to get more out of the energy you put into it.

Here’s a good challenge for you that will test your strength and conditioning. It also happens to be a great fat loss workout.

The goal is 500 16kg (12kg for women) one arm kettlebell push presses in under 15 minutes.

By the end of this workout challenge you will have moved 17,500lbs. Double or more the volume of most people’s entire workout, and in 15 minutes of high density work.

That is exactly the type of thing the kettlebell excels at. Swings are equally fantastic at building posterior chain strength while keeping you moving at a pace that is productive for conditioning and building work capacity.

One of the great features of kettlebell work that I think is often overlooked or under-appreciated is that it can be fun to go through a kettlebell circuit due to the way that you’re constantly moving and doing movements in often wider ranges of motion than say a barbell complex. People like Jen Sinkler are exceedingly creative in packaging brutal workouts into creative packages that you can enjoy sweating through.

Kettlebells are great – just don’t try to use a wrench to do a hammer’s job.

This past Black Friday to Cyber Monday (I hate those terms so, so much) I ran a special offer on my deadlift and biofeedback book, Off The Floor. The sale was a phenomenal success and I am so excited to hear back from all the people who picked up the book and their progress over the next few months.

As promised, I had some bonus gifts in the mix for people who purchased it during this sale. Now, it occurred to me (and a few people told me) that some of these purchases were holiday gifts for various loved ones who are readers of my blog. As such, I don’t want to spoil the surprise if one of those people is reading. Here are the winners’ initials:

• Hylete Shorts: RK
• Fat Gripz: DP
• Coaching: SD

If you won, I’ll be reaching out to you via email.

If you didn’t win, you are still a winner because you obviously picked up Off The Floor when you had the chance.