Bag Sparring
Kettlebells and martial arts conditioning: the dirty truth
MARTIAL ARTS CONDITIONING PUTS UNIQUE DEMANDS ON THE BODY
Unlike some athletic pursuits, martial arts is all about skill. While conditioning, strength, and flexibility are undoubtedly important, they’re just the building blocks upon which your skills are perfected.
Therefore, you need a conditioning regimen that boosts muscular endurance to unprecedented heights of achievement, but leaves you with enough energy to devote to your skill training. If your conditioning workout leaves you dead tired, your martial arts will suffer.
KETTLEBELLS AND MARTIAL ARTS CONDITIONING: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIE
So do kettlebells and martial arts go together like two peas in a pod, like the kettlebell marketers will have you believe? The proven answer is: NO.
In fact, the best martial arts conditioning workout is to perform the art itself. Just like boxers can’t dispense with Boxing Training — hitting the bags, sparring, shadow boxing, etc — martial artists can’t neglect their skill training in favor of a kettlebell workout that doesn’t involve specificity to a martial artist’s goals.
So don’t let kettlebell hype influence your training methods to the point where you are actually hurting your chances of reaching your goals. Kettlebells offer a minimalist approach that appeals to many of us, but when looked at objectively, they fail to deliver as well as the standard workouts utilizing dumbbells.
MARTIAL ARTS CONDITIONING: GUARANTEED BETTER WITH DUMBBELLS
Unlike with kettlebells, conditioning workouts utilizing one or two adjustable dumbbells are scalable. That is, you can easily adjust the weight until you are able to challenge yourself with the rep range you need.
This is in direct contrast to kettlebell conditioning workouts. In these sub-standard workouts, you are forced to adapt your workout to the kettlebell, instead of adjusting the tool to your needs.
One rarely-voiced fact about kettlebells is that they tear up the skin on your palms. Unless you spend literally months developing thick, resilient calluses, a good set of kettlebell snatches will earn you a magnificent crop of painful, debilitating blisters. Dumbbells, on the other hand, have ergonomically-designed handles which don’t promote the formation of blisters. And, unlike a kettlebell’s off-center weight configuration, dumbbells won’t spin and twist during the movement — in short, they don’t cause blisters when you use them in the standard way for snatches and other exercises favored by kettlebell enthusiasts.
Dumbbells are also better than kettlebells at maintaining joint integrity in the shoulder, elbow and wrist. Anyone interested in martial arts conditioning knows that these joints are crucial to the proper pursuit of the pastime. With kettlebells, you risk hyperextension and repetitive stress injuries, especially during the high-rep work necessitated by a non-adjustable kettlebell of less than ideal weight.
DUMBBELLS ARE OVERLOOKED MARTIAL ARTS CONDITIONING TOOLS
Virtually anything you can do with a kettlebell, you can also do with an Adjustable Dumbbell. The only difference is: dumbbells allow you to do it safer, more efficiently, and with less expense than kettlebells.
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