Ward Wilsey's Site

The One-Weight No Excuses Workout

Ok, so what if you’re sitting there, reading this, and suddenly I’ve convinced you to get in shape and work on your physique. I’ve convinced you that weights, rather than just running, is the answer, and you’re ready to shed pounds, get strong, and build muscle. You’ve bought into my garage gang concept and have invited some buddies to get fit with you.

But you’ve got no weights, and no money to buy a fully equipped garage gym. No problem. Let’s get you started with the kettlebell. The kettlebell is an old Russian training device, and according to legend it was used as the sole training implement by Russian special forces while on deployment. I’ve got no clue whether that’s right or not. What I do know is that the kettlebell is an awesome tool to buy first for your garage gym. It’s cheap, and your garage gang buddies can buy their own so you can get started right away. You can also throw this in a car every time you take a trip and have a mobile gym based on the workout in this section.

Generally, men should start with a 16kg kettlebell. I’m not going to get mad at you if you just buy a 35lb kettlebell, but I personally believe it’s more respectful to go with the kilogram method as used in the Eastern Bloc. Whichever method you use, this one tool should last you for a good 3 months or so of work before you’ll need anything else. You’ll want to buy heavier ones over time, but this is fine to start. Ladies can use a 12kg kettlebell to start.

What’s cool about the kettlebell is that there’s a ton of barbell and dumbbell exercises that are easily adaptable. You can have literally hundreds of exercises available with a simple tool. But you’ve got to learn a few simple concepts about how to use the kettlebell first. There are five main exercises that are very important to learn:

1. the swing
2. the clean
3. the goblet squat
4. the press,
5. the get-up (often called the turkish getup).

There’s a ton of other exercises I’ll mention below in the workout, but most of those you can learn easily by watching them on youtube. The big 5 above take a bit of practice, and you should really study a TON of videos on youtube before training to reduce the risk of injury. I want to stress the importance of educating yourself on how these exercises are done, especially with videos. I’m going to give you some descriptions to the best of my ability, and hopefully you pick up a cue or two that works for you, but nothing beats visual, in my opinion.

I’d really suggest you buy Pavel Tsatsouline’s Enter the Kettlebell video for a first rate explanation of how to perform these exercises. It’s old school, funny, and is the best instructional I’ve ever seen on this topic from the master who popularized kettlebells in America. I’ll do my best to explain these five below, but you really need to do a little work here on your own. For written material, I really like everything that Dan John’s ever written on the exercises below as well.

Get to it! Here’s my description of the main five kettlebell exercises.

The Kettlebell Swing

The KB Swing is the first exercise you’ll need to learn. There’s a million videos on this via youtube, but

Basically, you’ll start in a bent over position as if you were going to hike a football. You’ll snap the kettlebell backwards to start, almost throwing your wrists at your crotch, with the bell traveling safely just under. There should not be a ton of space there. This is more of a hinge than a squat, and your focus should be on extending your tailbone back. Keep your chest up, and your head held high, which will prevent your back from getting rounded.

Once you reach the full back position, with the bell passed through your legs, you’re going to snap forward with your hips and hamstrings. You should not be using your arms to throw the bell forward. You should think of your arms like ropes, which are just attached to the KB to keep it from flying forward. Your grip on the KB is the only thing that is keeping it from flying 10 feet in front of you. Focus hard on hinging the bell forward with your hips.

Because you’re intentionally using your arms in the swing, you will be able to “catch” the bell with your lat muscles somewhere between your navel and pecs. Snap the bell back through your legs, and start the process again for the next rep.

Once you’ve got this down, it’s a good idea to learn three alternative swings, which you can insert in the workout below for variety. They are:

1. The one-handed swing;
2. The alternating swing: and
3. The American style (or overhead) swing.

The Clean

The clean is a fundamental barbell exercise that you probably learned in high school during weight class. It uses a wide variety of muscles in your body, including all of your legs, back, arms, traps, etc. The kettlebell variety is quite similar, with the exception that you’re going to start by swinging the bell back (just like a KB swing), and end up using your hips to snap the weight up to your shoulders. This is a bit of a difference from the barbell clean, where you’re effectively “jumping” the bar from the ground (power clean) or knee (hang clean) level.

That’s an important distinction, because while you could jump the KB from the ground or a hang, there’s a lot more risk in that motion than when one starts with a snap between the legs. The jump is looser, and more risk of injury, especially to the elbow joints when you catch the weight in my opinion.

Start with the bell on the ground in front of you, and snap it between your legs just like KB swing, except with only one hand, rather than two.. As you explode forward with your hips, instead of letting your arm hang like ropes in front of you, you’re going to keep your elbow tight to your ribs, and let the bell swing up to your shoulder.

This will take a little practice, but you’ll soon be able to swing the bell up to your shoulder, and have it fall into the space between your shoulder and bicep, coming to rest on both muscles. Your hand, controlling the handle of the bell itself, will come to rest at shoulder level with the part of the handle held between your thumb and forefinger pointing directly at the very end of your clavicle.

Now snap the bell back between your legs, taking pains to externally rotate your hand as you go down, and perform your next rep.

The Goblet Squat

The Goblet Squat is a pretty simple concept. Hold the kettlebell by the handles so the top of the handle is essentially touching your bottom lip. It’s like you’re about to down a large goblet of wine, hence the name. Then you’ll go ahead and squat down so that your thighs dip at or slightly below parallel, and you’ll come back up. Here’s a few things to think about.

Since the bell is under your chin, it’s center of gravity is a bit forward compared to a traditional barbell squat. Therefore, it’s easy to lean forward, and put unnecessary stress on your lower back if you’re not careful. Therefore, make an extra effort to keep your chest and chin high on these, to make sure your back doesn’t round.

Go super slow on these. A common theme with a lot of exercises, especially pushups and goblet squats, is that the tendency is to go WAY to fast and make it more of an endurance exercise, cheating your muscles in the process. This should be done on a 2x1x2. That means I want you to go down for a count of two seconds, pause for a count of one at the bottom, and go up for a count of two. This is not a race. Really focus on your muscles in your quads, hamstrings, and glutes firing to bring yourself up and down.

Goblet squats are not a race to see how many you can get in a short amount of time. By my method above, you should experience these times to complete sets using the following rep schemes:

• 4 Reps – 20 Seconds
• 6 Reps – 30 Seconds
• 8 Reps – 40 Seconds

This time under tension will become more important when we discuss the workout below. But just keep in mind that with all weight training, it’s really important to lift using control whenever squatting. Here, there’s going to be less of an emphasis on putting up heavy weight numbers, like with barbell training. You can’t add another 5 pounds. Therefore it’s extra important to make these slow and smooth, otherwise you’re just using momentum to bounce up and down, and you’re not really accomplishing anything.

The Press

The press is another simple concept that is much more complex in practice. It’s an awesome fundamental strength exercise, can help build muscle and core strength, and will be useful to you for a long time, so pay attention here.

The first step is to clean the bell up to shoulder level. Often, performance of this exercise will be in the form of a clean and press, so the two go hand and hand. What I don’t want to do is to try to muscle the bell straight up from the ground along my entire body up to shoulder level. My concern is stress on the elbow joint. I’ve heard stories about people messing up their elbows with kettlebells, and you want to be very careful of this issue with every KB exercise you do.

Once the bell’s up to shoulder level, you’re going to press it up straight vertically. Your elbow will be held tight to your rib cage as you start. As you press up, you’ll notice that your wrist will externally rotate. This is correct. This is also vastly different than the movement you’d experience with a barbell, and that’s just fine. It’s almost like a ¾ Arnold Press.

Your feet should be shoulder width apart. You’ll want to have your soles feel like they’re corkscrewing outward into the ground, with your legs and glutes engaged to keep yourself steady. As you press up, extend your offhand to the side and contract your entire core to hold you steady. Lift the bell with your arm, don’t jump it up with your legs. That’s a push press, which is a different exercise.

I’m going to repeat this next paragraph at the risk of sounding redundant. Go slow. This is at least a 2x1x2 (the 1 is at the bottom). This is one where it’s easy to use momentum to jerk the bell up and down. That will (a) increase your chance for injury and (b) reduce your muscle contraction and therefore muscle gains. Slow, please. Remember:

• 4 Reps – 20 Seconds
• 6 Reps – 30 Seconds
• 8 Reps – 40 Seconds

The Get-Up

The Get-Up, which is also called the “Turkish Get-Up” of “TGU” for short, is an extremely effective exercise that, while hard to learn, is REALLY good at targeting your full body. It is also a very “functional exercise” in that it will help your body perform a lot of general athletic activities much better.

Ultimately, the get-up is all about pressing a kettlebell straight up from a prone position to a standing overhead position. How different people get there is different, depending on whose version you watch. I’ll give some general pointers, but you’re going to need to fill in the gaps through video study. Again, there’s a ton of videos on youtube for this purpose.

Let’s break this exercise into some sub-movements

1. The prone press
2. The thrust-to-elbow;
3. The knee slide to hand support
4. The kneeling overhead position; and
5. The standup

The prone press starts with you on your back with the bell next to you at shoulder level. Let’s do a right side press first, so pretend the bell is on your right shoulder. Roll towards the bell, and grasp with both hands. Roll back to prone, now with the handle of the bell on your right pec. Push straight up with both hands, essentially bench pressing the bell up.

You’ll now perform the thrust-to-elbow. Using your abs and hips, thrust the bell straight up, while working your way up to support yourself on your left elbow. Your left butt cheek is on the ground, directly under the bell, supporting it. As with all parts of the get-up, focus on driving straight up, because if the bell goes off to one side, it’s going to fall.

You’re now going to thrust your hips up and slide your left knee through to the point on the ground that is directly under the bell. At the same time work your way up from your left elbow to left hand.

Now work your way up to a position where you are right knee up, and left knee down, with the kettlebell held up high with your right hand.

Finally, push down hard with your right foot and stand up.

Now repeat the process to get back down to ground. This is one rep.

The One-KB Workout

This workout is designed in an every minute on the minute format, and is designed for a working period of 20-40 seconds, and a corresponding rest period of 20-40 seconds, until the bell rings for the next minute. There’s a ton of apps you can get for free on your phone that will provide a ring sound each minute, so you know when to start your next round. I’d also suggest putting in another tone to signify when the working period is over, and the rest period beings.

The workout consists of several clusters of 4 exercises, all built around one of the big 5 exercises. You’ll perform each of the 4 exercises back to back, starting each exercise on the minute. Therefore each cluster set should take 4 minutes, and with 3 sets for each cluster the total cluster will total 12 minutes. The workout should therefore take 60 minutes total, which leaves time for a warm up beforehand.

We’re going to think in terms of time here, rather than reps. In fact, I’m not even going to list reps, but obviously the longer you’re “on” for each set, the more reps you’ll do. When you start, you’ll do 20 seconds on with each exercise, followed by 40 seconds off. As time goes on, you’ll increase the amount of time you’re “on” with each exercise by increasing either (a) the reps or (b) the time under tension. You should perform this workout for 12 total weeks, 4 times per week, and by the end you should be able to hit 40 seconds on and 20 seconds off for each exercise.

This workout is designed to help you strip fat, but you should see some increased muscle growth, provided that you pay attention to my time for the up and down portion of each exercise. One of the biggest problems you’ll see with weightlifting is going much too fast on both the up and down portion of each exercise. While this allows you to lift more weight for more reps, you cheat yourself, as the time under tension is a HUGE factor in muscle growth and strength gains. Go slow here. Make that a habit early on in your physique journey, and you’ll reap huge dividends. Again, think in terms of seconds, with 5 seconds for each rep, meaning:

• 4 Reps – 20 Seconds
• 6 Reps – 30 Seconds
• 8 Reps – 40 Seconds

Work on increasing the number of reps you perform as time goes on,

Here’s the workout:

Warmup 25 jumping jacks.

Cluster 1

Kettlebell Swings

Pushups (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Kettlebell Swings

Pushups (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Cluster 2

Kettlebell Presses Right Arm (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Goblet Lunges Right Leg (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Kettlebell Presses Left Arm (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Goblet Lunges Left Leg (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Cluster 3

Goblet Squats Goblet Lunges Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Lying KB Bench Press Right Goblet Lunges Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Goblet Squats Goblet Lunges Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Lying KB Bench Press Left Goblet Lunges Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Cluster 4

Get-up Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Bent Over Row Right Arm (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Get-up Left (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Bent Over Row Left Arm (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

Cluster 5

KB Clean Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

One Leg KB Deadlift Right (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

KB Clean Left (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)

One Leg KB Deadlift Left (2 seconds down, 2 seconds up)