Advanced Body Weight Training Methods to Compliment Your Kettlebell Workouts

Body weight training and kettlebells are like a match made in heaven.
A few reasons why:

• Training with kettlebells provides many of the benefits body weight – only training does … but also compliments and adds to where some body weight exercises come up short
• Using kettlebells, you can get a super efficient, amazingly effective workout in a very short amount of time
• Kettlebell exercises are largely full-body and highly ‘functional’
• The balistic nature of kettlebell training provides benefits that body weight – only workouts – or most any other type of training – cannot

In short, if you’re a body weight training enthusiast and you haven’t incorporated kettlebells in your training mix, you’re missing out!

BTW, if for some crazy reason you haven’t started with kettlebell training yet, here’s an article to get you started (it’s the all-time most popular post on my Kettlebell Basics blog).  It’ll point you towards literally dozens of ready-to-go (and totally free) kettlebell workouts: Kettlebell routines, exercises and more at KettlebellBasics.net

Today’s article actually assumes you’re already training with kettlebells … it’s an article I wrote originally for another site that I’ve decided to re-publish here for your benefit.  I hope you learn something new from it to add to your body weight training arsenal!
- Forest
Advanced Body Weight Training Methods to Compliment Your Kettlebell Workouts
By Forest Vance, MS, RKC, CPT II
Kettlebell training is fantastic for building strength, cardio conditioning, and overall athleticism. But we all know that we can’t train with kettlebells exclusively - other strength training implements and modalities are a great addition to your training program. Here are three advanced body weight training methods to take your training program to the next level:
1. Tabata Intervals
This is a high intensity interval protocol. The ‘Tabata’ method, just for a quick review, is a simple interval protocol. It involves twenty seconds of all-out work, ten seconds of rest, and is repeated eight times. Then puke, fall down, pass out, etc. It works great with a variety of body weight exercises, like Squats, Push Ups, and Sit Ups.
2. Static Holds
Here’s a somewhat unorthodox technique for building strength. A static hold is, at it’s most basic level, where you simply hold an exercise at a particular point in its range of motion. It’s a great way to make exercises that are easy when you reach a certain fitness level – like Push Ups – more difficult.
As an example, to use this technique with a Push Up, you could do three static holds of 30 seconds each at the bottom, middle, and top of the range of motion of the exercise.
3. Using Body Weight Exercises For Cardio
In the same vein as Tabata intervals – if you hate doing traditional cardio (like I do), you can do a body weight circuit instead. You simply need to string together a series of body weight exercises and make sure that they:

• Keep you moving non-stop for a period of time
• Keep you heart rate up
• Aren’t overly intense – you should be able to maintain the flow for at least 15-20 minutes

As much as we all love kettlebell training, you gotta switch it up every once in a while to keep yourself from getting bored and to ensure continued progress with your fitness program. So here you have three body weight exercises to add a new dimension of intensity to your kettlebell workouts.
Keep training hard and enjoy!!

PS - For more exercises like these, check out this Sacramento personal trainer at http://www.forestvancetraining.com/.