Kettlebells can add enormous value to your workout. Not only do these improve your strength, endurance, balance and flexibility, working out with this equipment also burns a lot more calories during a workout.
Kettlebells are also portable, which means you aren’t confined to the gym to do your workouts. This makes it easy to include them into your workout routine wherever you go.
Here’s how you can effectively incorporate kettlebells into your workout routine:
Replace exercises from your current routine
If you are already using traditional weights such as barbells or dumbbells in your routine, you can easily replace these with kettlebells.
There are different ways you can go about this:
- Replace similar movements: If you are doing a dumbbell overhead press, simply replace it with a kettlebell overhead press.
- Upper body: You can replace upper body exercises with kettlebell exercises, like presses and rows, and keep using barbells for lower body exercises.
- High rep exercises: Try using kettlebells for high rep exercises like snatches and swings, and use barbells for the low rep heavy exercises.
- Single leg exercises: Replace exercises where you use one leg and weights, like pistol squats, with kettlebells.
Warm-ups
If you are not ready to incorporate kettlebells into your entire workout, try replacing warm-up exercises with kettlebell exercises.
Some exercises:
- Turkish Get-Ups
- Windmills
- Halos
- Slingshots
- Good Mornings
- Single-Leg Deadlifts
- Bottoms Up Clean
Conditionings
Kettlebell workouts include many ballistic exercises which are great for conditioning. These exercises can challenge your cardio both aerobically and anaerobically.
These conditioning exercises usually come at the end of your workout as a way to improve your cardio or burn additional fat.
Some exercises are:
- Swings
- Snatches
- Thrusters
- High Pulls
- Clean and Presses
Two days a week
If you have a very strict sport, running or martial arts regime then it can be difficult to include kettlebells in your workout. However, you can add two days of kettlebell training to your week.
You can adjust these workouts to your goals and as a way to enhance your performance in existing workout regimes.
Try replacing these with a kettlebell exercise
- Dumbbell Shoulder Press with Kettlebell Military Press
- One-Arm Dumbbell Row with One-Arm Kettlebell Row
- Seated Cable Row with Double Bent-Over Kettlebell Row
- Standing Barbell Press with Kettlebell Clean and Press
- Barbell Front Squat with Kettlebell Front Squat
- Incline Bench Press with Incline Kettlebell Press on Stability Ball
- Dumbbell Alternating Curl with Kettlebell Alternating Curl
- Barbell Stiff-Legged Deadlift with Kettlebell One-Legged Stiff-Legged Deadlift
If you want to incorporate kettlebell workouts into your normal workout routine, try switching out exercises you normally perform with dumbbells and barbells with kettlebell exercises. You can gradually integrate them into your workout routine by including them in your warm-ups, as conditioning after an exercise, or even twice a week.
Contact Trifocus FitnessAcademy
To learn more about kettlebells and how you can incorporate them into your workout, or into the workouts of your clients, we really recommend that you do our kettlebell course. For more information, please follow this link.
