Benefits for athletes
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Here are the major benefits kettlebells can offer athletes:
The classic Olympic lifts become more accessible using kettlebells. They are less technically demanding than using a barbell, but still provide the benefits of ballistic training. Ballistic drills teach the body how to generate and transfer power from the legs to the arms. An essential and valuable skill for any athlete.
Full body ballistic kettlebell drills build power endurance and work capacity/ GPP (General Physical Preparedness)
The kettlebells’ displaced centre of gravity and cumbersomeness uniquely challenges the body’s stabilizer muscles and forces the entire body to participate in the movement, recruiting more muscles and joints, providing a much more realistic and functional approach to conditioning.
The kettlebell’s centre of gravity is always changing. Coordination, timing, awareness and agility are required to properly execute the drills.
You can train muscles and joints from many angles with numerous challenging drills that target the entire body, while generating and controlling forces from the ground up.
Since most kettlebell drills involve multiple joints, you learn to absorb force over a great range of motion using many joints. These shock absorbing qualities conditions players to the demands of full contact sports.
Kettlebell training builds strength, flexibility and helps injury prevention. Due to the displaced center of gravity, muscles are often loaded and stretched through a greater range of motion than with classical training, closely simulating in the training room what happens on the field.
The posterior chain gets trained explosively through a full range of motion with kettlebell throws and swings.
Kettlebell training involves many unilateral drills, exposing weaknesses and imbalances throughout the entire body. Also, standing unilateral training mimics the athletic demands of most sports, and fully engage the core muscles in every drills.
Kettlebells teach the body to absorb force and redirect it, and to accelerate and decelerate weights . It is a skill athletes use when they change directions while running for example.
The displaced center of gravity of the kettlebell allows you to use significantly less actual weight to elicit positive training effects. The leverage disadvantage requires greater force production than if the weight were much heavier but balanced in the grip like a dumbbell. Since the actual weight is so much lighter, the soft tissues don’t accumulate the stress and damage that they do with compressive equipment, such as dumbbells and barbells.
It is a great tool to warm up with and stimulate the athlete’s nervous system before entering the field of play.
Kettlebells are extremely durable and can be used anywhere for a variety of training purposes, making them an ideal adjunct to your current training. They take up very little space in the gym, and can easily be carried around for training outside.
High repetition ballistic drills improve grip and finger strength.
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