Charm City Kettlebells Week In Review

Charm City Kettlebells had a great week. Some great private sessions with clients and I continue my own quest to develop my strength and conditioning. We also had a Charm City Kettlebell Meet Up yesterday at Towson High School. Please email me at sandysommer@charmcitykettlebells.com if you'd like to join us for the next one sometime in August. We had tons of fun and I had a chance to introduce the kettlebell to a few newbies and give some insight to some veterans.

As you probably are aware, kettlebells are my preferred mode of strength and conditioning. Recently I finished the Viking Warrior Conditioning Conditioning Cycle and am deeply immersed in a new raw strength cycle that Marty Gallagher put together for me. Marty is one of the most respected minds in the world of strength training and Pavel Tsatsouline has mentioned Marty as one of his mentors.

My current training is a blissful marriage of my take on Enter The Kettlebell, Power To The People and Marty Gallagher. The union lasts until October 2, 2009 and at that point I will take a week off and then attack the Viking Warrior Program again.

Here's what my training looked like for the week.

Monday I weighed in at 194 pounds on the dot. Since I commenced my current program 6 weeks ago I have added 10.8 pounds of body weight. I'm as lean as I was when this started on June 1, 2009. Around May 15, 2009 I weighed 181.1 and was 11 % body fat. I will test again in mid August but I think I am around the same body tissue ratio.

Each day this week I started my workout with Turksih Get Ups. I find this is really one of the best compound movements to do in order to get the juices flowing and the joints properly lubed up.

Monday Wednesday and Saturday I did ETK. Lots of ladders and low reps for the clean and press. I am looking to build raw power. I should mention that with the added weight I haven't gotten much bigger. Just a lot denser and that is my goal. Density and not size. In addition, I rolled the dice and did the presribed one hand swings. My hip power is growing and growing.

Tuesday I did narrow stance conventional deadlifting. Mark Chaillet and Marty Gallagher tweaked my form slightly a few weeks ago but I was pretty solid having learned a lot from Doc Cheng in June and it is paying dividends as my pulls are improving mightily. I also did staright bar front squats and pull ups along with pistols.

Thursday I started with heavy loaded cleans with the next bigger bell above my pressing and did heavy snatches too. Then back to dead lifting.

Friday all I did my Pull ups.

I'm seeing steady improvement in all my lifts. Even the Pull ups though I've added mass. Very excited about this and will keep you posted.

Please email me any questions and be sure to leave your thougths and comments as well.

Sandy Sommer, RKC