Busting Through Plateaus in Your Kettlebell Workouts

I’ve gotten into the habit of planning my kettlebell workouts in 4-week phases.  I do this because it’s what works for me.

Planning a new workout every 4 weeks allows me to keep things fresh, to not allow myself to get bored and, most importantly, allows me to NOT plateau or burnout.

Does that mean that I go hard each and every week to try to make the most possible gains?

Absolutely not.  In fact, I think that it’s possible for anyone to go hard/all-out for the entire duration of their program.

And so one of the key things that I have been doing since I started training people for a living is building in a strategic “de-load” week.

This is a week where each workout session is reduced in volume and intensity to allow the body to recover, for the mind to get refreshed and to either learn new exercises or to brush up on technique of the exercises you are currently doing.

For beginners, the deload week can usually be scheduled in every 6, 8 or sometimes – for absolute beginners – every 10 weeks.  But for those of us who have been training for a long time, it’s important to get that deload week in every month.

If you’ve got a training age of more than 5 years (if you’ve been training consistently for more than 5 years), your body’s ability to adapt to any training stimulus increases and thus it’s important for you to change things up.

Now that doesn’t mean to change the training FOCUS of your program every month.  If you’re trying to get stronger, then you’ll need at least 12-16 weeks of focusing on getting stronger to see a significant difference in your strength levels.  Geez, for me it feels like I’ve been trying to get stronger my entire life!

If you’re trying to lose fat, then you focus on that goal and adjust your training accordingly with minimal rest periods, lots of big multi-joint exercises & complexes and lots of interval training.  You do that for however many weeks it takes for you to get to your goal and you plan your deload week(s) within that time frame.

Specifically speaking, if you’re looking to plan a de-load week, here’s how I would do it.

Say you’re about to start a new program and one of the foundational exercises are weighted pistols.  In weeks 1, 2 & 3 you’ll grab your weighted vest, kettlebell or whatever you use for added resistance (sometimes I use one of my children), and perform the exercise trying to out-do yourself each successive week.  You’ll try to out-do yourself by either performing more reps or adding more weight/resistance.  This is called the overload principle and it is the ESSENTIAL principle in the TT Kettlebell Revolution.

=>Check out the TT Kettlebell Revolution HERE

Then on the 4th week, you drop the weight altogether and just perform bodyweight pistols for HALF the amount of reps that you performed with weight in Week 1.

So, if you performed 10 Pistols per leg holding a 24kg kettlebell in Week 1, then I would deload in Week 4 by doing 5 bodyweight-only pistols and just really focusing on form and getting really great quality reps.

Sound simple?  It really is.

Why We De-Load

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you feel like you don’t want to train or go to the gym?  Where the thought of going makes you anxious but at the same time you’re overwhelmed with feelings of guilt if you DON’T go?  You’re great for 6 weeks going hard at every workout and then there comes that one week where you wake-up on Monday and you just don’t want to train that day.

You find every excuse in the book to not go to the gym or to pick-up that kettlebell.

And then you end of going anyway and push yourself to do so and you have a sub par performance that your 75 year old grandmother could have beaten.

Chances are, you were somewhat burnt out and could have used a De-Load Week.

So as I go into my 2nd week of a new program and take a look at the progress I’ve made thus far, I’m looking a couple of weeks ahead to my strategic deload week and am looking forward to not having to go as hard knowing that I’ll be making HUGE gains as I take it easy.

It’s a win-win situation!

Chris Lopez, RKC

Tags: kettlebell swing weight vest, weight vest kettlebell workout