Kettlebell juggling

Posted in: Sport

For the last few months I've been training exclusively with kettlebells, an old-skool form of weights used in Russia. They're like a cannonball with a handle on them, provide some brutal work-outs, and have recently been popularized in the US by Pavel Tsatouline. They're mostly unheard of in the UK¹. Credit Karen in SF for putting me onto them.

They're amazingly good fun, and today I tried playing catch with one - complete with cheesy video.

The first encounter on a seminar by UK expert Lee Hadden I told him this was the most fun I'd had weight training, ever. The fact I was practically disabled from three hours of throwing iron around the next ten days only barely diminished that ;-)

Anyway, there's a sub-discipline of juggling which is throwing KBs in the air and catching them. Bear in mind the standard unit of KB is a 'pood', 16kg. That's a bit heavier than a typical car battery.

I had a go at it today, and guess what: amazingly good fun!

Here's an unedited video 3.4MB. I'm not throwing it super high and I drop it too. You should see the garden. (I put down some doormats and garden rugs to soak the drop. The doormat got ripped to shreds.)

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¹But then people actually doing any exercise at all in this country is mostly unheard of so what can you expect.

Posted by Paul Makepeace at January 18, 2005 15:11 | TrackBack