Stuff that is Good: Swings

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.

Now go: be strong.