When we got home from work, a package was waiting for us on our doorstep. The Beast had arrived! A month before, we had ordered a new kettlebell for Alex's birthday. It was a special order from the U.S. - when we researched it online, we quickly discovered that this kettlebell is widely nicknamed 'the Beast'.
The kettlebell was packaged in a giant box, on top of a wooden skid - they must have used a small forklift to transport it from the truck to the doorstep. Getting it downstairs to our workout room was a great warmup for our leg workout. It's a solid 48kg - 106 pounds!
For our leg workout, we decided to focus on two exercises, the kettlebell swing and the alternating kettlebell deadlift. The kettlebell swing is the first exercise we learned with our very first kettlebell (Tannys started with an 8kg and Alex with a 20kg - both of which seemed very heavy to use at first). The swing is a great exercise which works the full posterior chain. When you do high reps, it also becomes a fearsome cardio/conditioning challenge.
In the first part of our workout, we did four sets of kettlebell swings, using drop sets. A drop set is where you do a certain number of reps with your heaviest weight and then continue, without rest, using a lighter weight. You can string together as many mini-sets as you wish in this manner (we did 4 increments):
Tannys - 24, 20, 16, 12kg kettlebells
Alex - 48, 40, 32, 24kg kettlebells
For the dropsets, we did 15 reps with each weight for the first 2 sets, then 10 reps with each weight for the final 2 sets. This meant that we did 200 total reps (or 50 reps with each weight in total).
Next, we moved onto alternating kettlebell deadlifts. For this exercise, we did a reverse pyramid. Thus, we picked one weight (Alex - 48kg kettlebell; Tannys - 24kg kettlebell). We set up a timer and then did:
- 40 seconds of exercise, followed by 20 seconds rest
- 30 seconds of exercise, followed by 30 seconds rest
- 20 seconds of exercise, followed by 40 seconds rest
- 30 seconds of exercise, followed by 30 seconds rest
- 40 seconds of exercise, followed by 20 seconds rest
This is a 5 minute block of exercise, with the peaks of activity at the start and end. It's different from the more traditional pyramid (where you peak in the middle) and worked well with this exercise.
To finish off the workout, we each did a bonus set of pistol squats.
It was awesome to try out the Beast and even better to think back to where we started using kettlebells a couple of years ago. Back then, our first kettlebell exercises were very challenging and intimidating. By sticking to it and slowly building strength, we've managed to increase those weights by 2 to 3 times what we started from. In our mind, the trick has been consistency - it has been a journey made up of many small steps...
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