Lance Swings

Lance Swings






and so does Ross:

The one arm swing

more swing doctrine...

Anyone else heard of Captain Swing?

The "American" Swing

Jeff Martone has done a series of videos recently on the Crossfit site demonstrating kettlebell exercises. I have already pointed to the Turkish Get up tutorials.

Here he takes the basic kettlebell swing (which I showed him demonstrating here) overhead, into what Crossfit call an American Swing.



The basic swing taught by Pavel and others sees the kettlebell stop at around shoulder level, what Crossfit call the Russian swing. Their contention - explained in this article (pdf) - is that:

When we swing the kettlebell to overhead, the American swing, we nearly double the range of motion compared to the Russian swing and thereby double the work done each stroke. For any given time period, the power would be equivalent only if the Russian swing rate was twice the American swing rate.

One thing I've noticed is that if you do a swing with a dumbbell, for me the natural end point is with the bell overhead, possibly received with a slight dip in the knees or even a split stance. That is how the old time strong men like Grimek performed the lift in competition. Remember this video?

Ross shows what I mean 3:05 into this video:

Kettlebell Swing tutorial

Here is a nice tutorial from Jeff Martone on the kettlebell swing ("RKC" style for those that get wound up about such things):



Jeff has also written a nice article explaining what he is doing: Kettlebell Basics Drills for Improving Your Swing

For the reasons explained here, Crossfitters tend to take the bell a bit higher as shown below: