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ANyone use Kettlebells for the Max Strength aspects of the program? I've been having difficulties getting to the gym to lift barbells but have access to several Kettlebells in my garage. Wondering if people consider them a viable substitute for Barbell work?

I would imagine that you can use KB IF you have enough of KBs to apply progressive overload. It might work if you have both kilos and lbs kettlebells for instance. Or you have some magnet weights to add to the KB.

Personally, I would choose to do strict KB overhead press (one arm or both arms), Bulgarian Split Squats (or Goblet if weight is sufficient), heavy swings, and WPU.

Good luck!

Barkadion wrote: Personally, I would choose to do strict KB overhead press (one arm or both arms), Bulgarian Split Squats (or Goblet if weight is sufficient), heavy swings, and WPU.

Good luck!

Solid cluster!

You're not going to completely replace a barbell with kettlebells for max strength. You just can't load kettlebells like a barbell. You can still get strong with kettlebells though.

The exercises Barkadion listed are great. I would also add double KB front squats and Turkish get ups if you can do them. Both of those exercises really work a lot of muscles. Heavy double swings are great too.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and happened to find this thread, since I'm coming up to a month or so when I'll have to workout at home instead of visiting the gym.

I was thinking of treating the one arm kettlebell press in the same way as bodyweight pullups, performing a percentage of my max reps with the weight I have. For example, if I can do a max of 10 reps I'd do 3 sets of 8 on 80% day.

Does that make sense?

If you have a wide enough range available, you can do it. I would load them as close to the sizes as possible. For instance, if your max one arm press was 36kg, you would press 24kg for 70%.

I was running a cluster of one arm press, double front squats, pull-ups, and heavy swings. It was great and I would still be using it if that gym didn’t shut down.

I've been playing around with this in our gym. Rather than trying to alter the load, we have been altering our reps.

For example, for presses, we use a bell that's about our 8RM weight. Our 70% week would be three ladders (we've found 2/3/5 ladders to be effective), our 80% week is four ladders, then our 90% week is five ladders. So total reps look like this:

Week 1 - 30
Week 2 - 40
Week 3 - 50

It sounds like a lot of volume, but there are a lot of easy sets in there.

Once someone feels ready to move up to the next bell, we change their ladder to 1/2/3.

It's been working well for us.

RileyNadoroznick wrote:I've been playing around with this in our gym. Rather than trying to alter the load, we have been altering our reps.

For example, for presses, we use a bell that's about our 8RM weight. Our 70% week would be three ladders (we've found 2/3/5 ladders to be effective), our 80% week is four ladders, then our 90% week is five ladders. So total reps look like this:

Week 1 - 30
Week 2 - 40
Week 3 - 50

It sounds like a lot of volume, but there are a lot of easy sets in there.

Once someone feels ready to move up to the next bell, we change their ladder to 1/2/3.

It's been working well for us.

I did something similar for kettlebell sport. I would figure out the reps I needed to qualify for that level (say 120 snatches in 10 minutes) and then do as many minutes at 12 reps per minute I could until I had to stop (say 8 minutes). I then started calculating percentages off of the time - 70% would be about 5:30 so I would do a 2:45 set per arm. The contest didn’t pan out so I changed gears to a different training method but I’m curious to return to it and check the progression.

RileyNadoroznick wrote:I've been playing around with this in our gym. Rather than trying to alter the load, we have been altering our reps.

For example, for presses, we use a bell that's about our 8RM weight. Our 70% week would be three ladders (we've found 2/3/5 ladders to be effective), our 80% week is four ladders, then our 90% week is five ladders. So total reps look like this:

Week 1 - 30
Week 2 - 40
Week 3 - 50

It sounds like a lot of volume, but there are a lot of easy sets in there.

Once someone feels ready to move up to the next bell, we change their ladder to 1/2/3.

It's been working well for us.

That's a very nice idea! Maybe this could be combined with some A+A Snatch protocols for conditioning and strength endurance.