Fitness Weekly Discussion

Finished Dan John's 10,000 kettlebell swing workout. I'll copy paste a portion of my thoughts from my blog I wrote up about it a bit:

This is as much a workout for your brain as it is for your body. There’s so many reps and swings are not exactly fast reps compared to a curl or press. The result is you have a lot of time in your head just swinging and swinging and swinging. All the while, your lungs are screaming at you to give it a rest. My heart rate would regularly spike around 170 bpm and I burned insane calories on this compared to Suspension Training. Usually, I’d burn about 7 calories for every minute in suspension training, in this it was 11 or so.

John mentions that the workouts should be going faster as you go, but I found the opposite to be true, at first. But then I re-read the design and saw that I was giving myself about a fifth of the rest time John has in the program. This is MUCH more satisfying with the rest actually done properly. It also meant my form didn’t go to shit quite as much. The big thing that goes for me after getting tired swinging is to let gravity do a lot of the work on bringing the kettlebell back down after it gets to the top position. When I did it as designed, I kept tight and more in control.

End result: I went from about 40 minutes (when doing proper rest times) to about 33 minutes per workout. Now when I wasn’t doing proper rest, I was getting one in 31 minutes, but that felt absolutely awful. Still, this can be done in less than a half in hour if you’d like.

All of that said, after about 5,500 swings I found myself sort of dialed into to what this program was doing to me. A switch flipped and it didn’t feel like I was torturing myself.

But, make no mistake, while this is a nominally a strength activity, really it’s cardio. This is why it’s not too surprising to hear John say that every athlete he tested on this increased in conditioning, gained lean muscle mass and lost some fat (well, went down in pants size and ab visibility improved, which is a good indicator for most people). This shreds through calories, as I mentioned. Though I didn’t really see this, it’s possible I was eating more calories without really realizing it and that’s why I stayed about the same weight. I’m not counting specifically at all these days.

Though I will say aesthetically I did notice my arms looking a little smaller, but measurements show it’s a pretty insignificant amount. Given that I noticed it based on how my favorite shirt was fitting different, I think it’s very possible I got some good back growth out of this, which would line up with doing this many swings and everything else.

John also mentions that every athlete came back and shattered personal records lifting. It’s tough to say how much of this is the actual program versus just taking a 4–5 week break from, say, powerlifting, while staying active, and then coming back. But results are results. I wasn’t able to test my PRs, but this selling point doesn’t sound far fetched to me.

To close out on aesthetics: the lack of chest work in this program is really the only glaring problem. Even the alternative movements don’t touch the chest, which is pretty important aesthetically these days. But, as I said above, this program isn’t trying to make you into a bodybuilder, so it may be unfair to hold this too much against it.

The design of the challenge makes it go much easier than it sounds from the outside. 10,000 seems like a rather large number of swings (and, well, it is). But the ladder scheme makes getting in 500 swings a day seem to go by relatively fast. By putting all these swings into small, bite sized, amounts, you can keep going. Once I did this with the proper amount of rest time, I honestly found myself feeling like I could do a lot more than 500 a day. Part of this is having only a 40 lbs kettlebell to work with versus the prescribed 53 lbs. John mentions in the design that if you don’t feel completely defeated after finishing, you probably don’t have a heavy enough bell.

I also probably got in more than 10,000 swings. On some runs through the ladder I found myself doing 15, 20, even 25 once, on that first set of 10. At first I balanced this out by giving myself a break on other sets (usually subtracted from the big 50 rep top rung), but after week 1 or so this seemed like more mental energy than it was worth. So, I just did extra swings, the horror. At only 40 lbs (later 44 lbs) rather than 53 lbs as written, this is more than fine.

While I got the expected work on my posterior chain with this being a hinge exercise and all, the unexpected benefit was my grip. My forearms and hands definitely got tired doing this and felt like one of my potential points of failure should I have done these to failure. So while this isn’t deadlifts, it sure feels like a way to basically get in the same work that deadlifts give without needing the access to a barbell and all those weights.