Day 21: Pood

Weigh-in day. This week I'm down 0.03 Jesses, for a grand total of 0.31 Jesses. Yes, I've lost nearly a third of a whole person. Not a very big person, but still.

I did my bodyweight/kettlebell workout today, and I feel great. So allow me to rhapsodize a bit on the virtues of the kettlebell.

I've done a lot of weightlifting in my days. I've done higher reps and lower reps, lots of sets and not so many sets, this exercise split and that exercise split. Mostly what I've done over the past few years is heavier weights and lower reps. When I stick with it, I get good results; I can gain strength pretty quickly.

I have felt more and more over the years, though, that what I want is not to be strong, it's to be useful. I want to be able to do things in real life, not just in the gym. And while I can gain strength lifting regular weights, it's so strict and regimented that it never really made feel that I was gaining that usefulness.

So I've done some fooling around with designing bizarre exercises in hopes of mimicking real-life actions. They never really worked out that well, and I often felt like I was a millimeter away from injuring myself.

Sometime last year a read an article in Men's Health about the way that the Army is revamping its fitness program. They're going away from just running, push-ups and sit-ups to more functional exercises to prepare soldiers for the battlefield. The new program has six principles:

1. Train movements, such as pushing, pulling, planking, stepping, and squatting, rather than muscles.
2. Train to your side and three-quarter view, not just to the space in front of you.
3. Train on two feet.
4. Learn to control your body weight in a full range of motion, with good form, before adding loads.
5. Train speed.
6. Train the reduction of force — the ability to land and catch and absorb force and decelerate — as often as you train the production of force.

These ideas really appealed to me, so I've begun doing bodyweight exercises and more explosive-type stuff than I'd done before. I'd never really done much bodyweight stuff, 'cause I figured that's not really working. I mean, I carry my body around all day. But it really is a workout. So I added that to my kettlebell stuff.

Ah, the kettlebell. If you've never seen one, I can tell you that it's basically like a cannonball with a handle attached. The thing that makes it cool is that the weight is not centered in your hand, as it is with barbells and dumbbells, so the center of gravity shifts as you swing it around, causing your body (and pretty much your whole body) to adapt. As a result, you get a workout that trains you for strength (if not size, which I don't really care about) as well as cardiovascular fitness and endurance. Good stuff.

Now that I've been training with a kettlebell for a while, it's time to move up. I have a 20-pound kettlebell, but I plan to get a 35-pound one. See, kettlebells were invented by Russian weightlifters, and the standard weight was called a pood (an old Russian unit of weight), which is about 16 kilograms or 35 pounds. So I'm going after it. I'm sure I'll be jacked and lifting cars off of old ladies in no time.