...or whatever you want to call it - it's dope as fuck. I mean they're good enough for Mariusz and clearly he knows what the fuck is up.
This exercise is a great adjunct to benching, especially if benching is causing:
Caveman or computer posture i.e. slumped, rounded or forward set shoulders.
Pain radiating down the arms.
Pain in the front of the shoulder.
Really any benching related malady other than sore wrists.
The reason being that while benching tends to tighten the muscles on the front of the thorax and thus reciprocally inhibit the muscles opposite to them. Push press behind the neck (PPBN), when done properly (we'll go over that in a minute), causes intense contractions of the posterior shoulder girdle and thus reciprocally inhibits the tight frontal muscles. So you could think of it as being kind of like a 'bench remedy'.
Further, because we're doing a push we are removing the "danger zone" at the bottom of the lift that seems to irritate some people's shoulders. Obviously a good thing if you have high mileage shoulders or hooked acromion processes. This exercise is also sweet because one does not require a spotter, use bumpers and just bail if things get hairy.
Another advantage to the push is that you'll be able to handle more weight. This is always good, people rail on about how you need to use control, feel the mind/muscle connection blah, blah, blah. Arnold used swing curls (275lbs.) to build his seriously freaky biceps, same with Magnus Samuelson (315lbs.). Guess what: muscles get bigger and stronger in response to heavy loads. My god this is clearly rocket science.
Magnus
Arnold
How to do:
Copy Mariusz in the video.
Squinch (technical term) your mother loving shoulder blades together and push them down while pressing. This forms what I call the "virtual pelvis" and is the true magic of this exercise.
Keep abs tight as fuck, otherwise you'll be weak and shitty and hurt your lower back.
If you bench: do these. If you don't bench: start benching and do these.
People love kittens and babies and really horrible television shows. I love kettlebell swings. They are possibly the best exercise there is: period.
The big issue is the name, it makes people think that the exercise is just swinging a KB around. I have some news that may shock and discredit you: it's not. The KB swing should really be called something stupid like: "ballistic weighted standing hip extension with isometric contraction". Thankfully it's not because that sounds really, verily lame but it does get the point across that there is in fact much more to swings than swinging.
The big thing that people fuck up is not jamming their feet hard into the ground during the acceleration phase, this leads to the concomittant failure to fully extend the hips at the top and flex them isometrically before the deceleration phase.
So very, very wrong. Nice tights dumbass.
These points remain the same whether you are doing the squat style swing (which is asinine to begin with) or the hinge style swing or any combination thereof. What should happen as a result is butt soreness. If you don't have sore hip muscles from doing swings you have just failed an intelligence test, thankfully you can take the test as many times as it takes for you to get it right.
The next big fuck up is trying to muscle the KB up with the arms and shoulders, this is WRONG people. Try that with deadlifts and see how far you get. The swing is like a ballistic deadlift and there's so arms in deadlifting (upper arms anyway). Women are actually way worse for this, I'm not sure why and I don't care: just knock it off!
For such a simple movement it's surprising how infrequently I've seen them done right, not really surprising given the human penchant for dumbness. The plus side is that when done properly the rewards are nothing short of astounding:
Restores length/tension relationships between agonist/antagonist pairs. As in: fixes your hips, back and knees.
Better looking butt and abs.
Downright shocking metabolic load so you get super fit as well as buff and awesome.
Improves practically everything.
Chunks out massive doses of GH from your pituitary (for free!).
Did I mention these actually fix your body as opposed to messing it up?
Easy to go heavy, no light KBs required.
That last point is a big one: use lots of weight. Swings with anything less than a 36 lb (female) or a 72 lb (male) better be happening because you just got out of surgery. No this isn't some macho bullshit, the KB has to be heavy enough to cause you to have to breathe with the movement, if you aren't you're not getting even close to maximum benefit from them.
The next point is this: you do not have to swing the KB any higher than your shoulders. Higher is not better and if you use a mega heavy KB and can only swing it to waist height that is totally fine. Use weight, not height. Brace your damn abs and tighten your hips at the top. Stand up as straight as you can at the top and avoid leaning back too much, people who do that are usually substituting spinal mobility for hip mobility and that means tight and weak hips, do it right and your tight weakness will be a distant memory.
More could be said about tight weakness, length tension relationships, reciprocal inhibition, etc. but fuck it. You know you should do them and you should go do them instead of reading a bunch academic fluff talk.
British people, as an overt generalization, are fat, pale and kind of look like babies. Well it turns out they are about as smart as babies too - but apparently a lot more sadistic. You see while studying new ways to punish people (?) Rebecca Roache and her fellows came up with perhaps the most hideously sterile and horrible of all punishments: time dilation.
I'm not sure where to start with this: the fact that a philosopher has failed in the use of the most fundamental tenet of philosophy (reason), that said philosopher is granted awards from allegedly prestigious institutions or that anyone even listens to her. Fail, fail, fail. Big heap fail. Collectively, humans have leaped from the roof of the house of dignity and justice, obliterated the folding table of logic and reason and now are screaming in pain in the backyard wrestling arena of the universe.
Firstly, we have been using punishment as a method to discipline the non-conforming aspects of society for thousands of years. Clearly it has failed to bring about any positive changes in the punishee because recidivism (in the US) is approximately 50%. If this were an exam we would have failed it. So why do we continue to enact the reciprocating idiocy of Einstein's definition of insanity? Perhaps it's because the people in charge of the "justice" system make way too much money off of exploiting an inbuilt psychological construct from childhood: the notion of punishment by authority ("this hurts me more than it hurts you" "It's for your own good" etc.). Maybe it's because anyone who is in a position to do anything about it is likely a psychopathic megalomaniac who derives pleasure from the suffering of others - a wetigo (and here) in the words of the Ojibwa.
Maybe it's because humans are psychotic barking reptiles (psychologically speaking) who are apparently incapable of thinking. Thinking being the application of reason to a situation via conscious abstraction on the part of the thinker and not merely the act of engaging your inner dialogue. Studies wherein a method of subconscious 'priming' were used to asses the plasticity of the human decision making process show us that humans are not well equipped when it comes time to actually think. Hence reflexive R-brain mediated decision process, hence stupid barking reptiles dressed in human suits.
Man as master of his own destiny is apparently a crock, your environmental stimulus seems to do the "thinking" for you. Weird, yet much like in 'They Live' - "it figures it would be something like this".
Next we run into some heavyweight philosophical issues: who has the authority (right) to punish another at all? I would argue that the injured party does. When I say injured party I am not talking about the state nor am I speaking of non-tangible injuries. For example: if one doesn't wear a seatbelt, which is generally a legal infraction, who is damaged by this act? As such who has any right to claim against the alleged 'offender'?
Example two: thought crimes: if one were to publish a racist pamphlet, who is tangibly injured? No one is forced to read it and further, no one is forced to agree with it. If someone were to act against another based on racist ideas garnered from said pamphlet the fault for the crime still lies with the offender, not the writer, as the offender was not forced or coerced to conform to the ideas of another. Still, we have hilarious yet savagely hypocritical 'hate speech' provisions in "law".
In the excellent albeit very long documentary film 'Evidence of Revision', J. Edgar Hoover lays it out very simply. When asked about justice, he sidesteps the question and explains that "law and order" were his primary concerns as director of the FBI. Justice and law are two uniquely different concepts, one is the aspiration of a free and responsible people and the other is the mandate of tyranny.
Why is this not patently obvious to all? Because: reptiles, barking reptiles.
It's for your own good Johnny.
Perhaps the primary cause for punishment being so socially counterproductive is denial. When a psychological stressor is placed upon someone, say an abusive superior at work, humans generally respond with a denial mechanism to deal with the stressor. Denial works in one of two ways: the subject identifies with the stressor and accepts it as logical (wrongly) and thus posing no threat to personal integrity, or the subject rejects the stressor as being inherently flawed and completely dismisses the validity of the stressor; in essence completely denying it. In abusive human relationships these behaviours show up in such classic cliches as the beaten wife explaining to herself that "he does it because he loves me" which is her trying to identify with the abuser, or the cliche of the rebellious teenager who thinks "don't trust anyone over thirty" and rejects the veiws of his abuser (parent, teachers, etc.) out of hand.
Denial is so very prevalent today that apparently even the 'intellectuals' of our world are not only vulnerable, but downright happy to engage in these ridiculous mind games. The worst part is that because they are credentialed, other people believe their game is valid and abdicate their free will to another who is apparently acting out a delusion. The upside is that now you know what it is you may have some chance at making better, more informed decisions in your life. Or perhaps you'll engage in a denial pattern to avoid the stressor of having to admit your huge perceptual weaknesses.
So what happens when we allow the 'the state' to punish 'offenders'? We encourage denial patterns on both sides of the law enforcement fence, leading to what is ultimately a more psychologically sick collective.
Despite all of the incredible psychological weaknesses humans suffer from, we do still have the ability to reason and make sound decisions if we apply ourselves. Further all of the people who have propagated these thought viruses are dying off and being replaced with new people, we are them, let's not make the same mistakes.
