Author: D C

Light kettlebells are still useful?
Yes! This is something that really surprises me. Why do some people think that when you’re able to use the 20kg, you have to throw the 16kg away? When you’re able to use 20kg dumbbells for curls, does your gym throw away the 15kg dumbbells? Of course not.  So why do people think that once you can use a heavier kettlebell, that the lighter weights become useless?
I personally use the entire range of kettlebells – from 4kg to 48kg. They are ALL useful. I use the 4kg for some shoulder and back movements that you CAN NOT use a heavier weight with. The double 8kg is perfect for me to use with overhead squat. The 12kg is one of the most useful kettlebells I own. I can take it with me any where. 12Kg is what I use for cardio/fat loss work, most of the time. A heavier kettlebell would perhaps interfere with my strength training unless I made it a part of my programming. For example, if I’m trying to increase my barbell military press, I have to be careful with pressing the kettlebells or I can interfere with my strength work. But using the 12kg doesn’t impact my strength work because it’s light for me. So I can use it for high reps to get fat loss results while still getting strong with the barbell.
The 16kg is also one of the most versatile weights you can get. I use it all the time to workout, even though I can swing the 48kg. Why? Because I don’t always feel like swinging the 48kg. Just because I can swing 48kg doesn’t mean I throw all the other weights away. Swinging the 48kg is strength training for me but I don’t always go as heavy as possible all the time. I can bench 141kg, but does that mean I never bench anything but 141kg?
I use the entire range of kettlebells for all kinds of training. Kettlebells are an investment that you can pass down in your family to your kids. They’re practically indestructible and there’s value in an entire set far beyond what most people see.

We got a comment last week on one of our clients. This client said he gained 7kg of muscle in 3 months, something that isn’t impossible but is at the upper end of the clients we’ve trained. The commenter seemed to not believe that our client could do this and said even advanced people can’t do that. My answer would be, of course – they can’t do it because they’re already advanced.
Here’s how we get those kinds of results:

1. maximize beginner gains. Beginners can make the fastest progress out of anyone simply because they haven’t trained before. We get a lot of beginners because we TEACH people how to work out and Formosa Fitness has become known as a place to learn this stuff. Trained properly, beginner’s muscles can respond very fast and they can gain muscle weight rapidly. More advanced people struggle with that because most of the easy gains have already been made.

2. We use whole body lifts instead of isolation exercises. Beginners need whole body lifts, not tons of isolation exercises. Bodybuilders used to know this stuff. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, whole body routines were done 3 days a week, often for 2-3 hours a day. But modern bodybuilders switched to a ton of isolation exercises as the sport got more professional. The problem is, beginners don’t do well with isolation because they haven’t built up the whole body yet. Whole body exercises build muscle all over body instead of breaking the body into pieces. Isolation work often skips important stabilizing muscles in between the isolation exercises.

3. We emphasize leg training. Gaining muscle weight quickly isn’t hard to do when you heavily train the biggest muscles in the body – the hamstrings, glutes, quads, and the back. I trained in mainstream gyms for many years. What does your typical guy looking for muscle gain do? Bench press, bicep curls, and front raises. These muscles are all tiny compared to the hamstrings, glutes, etc. Being completely ignored by most people, these muscles groups respond very quickly to training and since they’re the biggest muscles on the body, they gain size rapidly.

4. Training legs and the whole body causes the entire body to grow through increased protein synthesis. It creates an anabolic environment. When guys want bigger arms, I ask them about their deadlift. That surprises them, but if you want the body to grow, then you have to force it to do so. Training large muscle groups forces the body to improve protein synthesis (your ability to digest and absord protein), which benefits all the muscles of the body. Training biceps doesn’t force the entire body to change since the muscles are so small that the body doesn’t have to improve protein synthesis.

5. We stress eating protein and fat, which goes against what nearly everyone else says to do. If you want to stay skinny and look like everyone else, then keep doing what they do. If you want to be better than that, then stop listening to them! Nearly every guy that wants muscle is not eating enough protein and fat. Some of our clients struggle with this too, but after training correctly but eating inccorectly for a while, they usually agree to try it our way and then the gains come. But in order to get the gains, you have to turn off the normal fitness chatter. That’s hard to do for some people.

Once all these elements are in place, rapid muscle gain isn’t hard to achieve. This isn’t the only way to train but we’ve found it works pretty fast for most of our clients and the results speak for themselves.

We had our first Strength Camp in a long time recently and we had a great time teaching the basic lifts. One of the problems I see with bench press is that people aren’t used to putting their feet flat on the floor and pushing through the feet and the legs. They also aren’t used to keeping their butts on the bench and maintaining a slight arch in the lower back. Your friend should be able to slide his hand under your low back when you’re on the bench. Unrack the bar with straight arms, don’t have your arms bent when you take the bar off the rack. When you unrack it, use your lats to pull the bar over your chest. And we haven’t even benched the bar yet! All these things are called the “set up” and you should practice getting all these right every time if you want your bench to go up!

My little boy Nicholas got his first chinup a while back and he’s only 8 years old. I’m very proud of him! Here’s how we did it. We have pullup bars in each of the kid’s doorways. When Nicholas goes into his room, I have him jump up and hold onto the bar. He did this many times a day. As he got better at that, I had him jump up and hold his chin above the bar for as long as he could. We practiced that. At the same time, he often saw me and his mom doing real chinups at home on our own pullup bar. I occasionally test his ability to do a real chinup and a few weeks ago, he did his first one. Now, every time he goes under the bar, he does one chinup. This method is called “greasing the groove” and it’s a great way to get more volume on exercises that you need to practice often to get better at – like chinups or pullups. Try it!

Sometimes I have clients who work hard in the gym and still don’t get results. When what’s going on in the gym is right, then what happens outside the gym must be off. Three things might be off: eating, sleep, or stress. Of those three eating wrong is the most common followed by sleep and then stress. If you’re trying to get results in the gym, you MUST eat for performance not just pleasure or convenience. Same with sleep. If you aren’t getting a minimum of 8 hours of quality sleep then you won’t get results. I’ve had clients get almost no results despite working hard in the gym and apparently eating right. When I asked them about sleep, they said they were getting 4 hours a night! That will destroy whatever effort you make in the gym. Stress is less likely than the other two to prevent your results but the hormones that stress causes the body to release can be very damaging to your progress. Exercise is stress and when you’re already stressed out, your body can’t tell good from bad stress and will resist all of it. So if you aren’t getting results but the training is right, look at these three things.