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Comment by maurys | Hacker News Reader

Especially with most of us shut at home, I've found kettlebell to be excellent as medium for strength and conditioning.

The focus on the posterior chain helped resolve a lot of back issues I had from sitting at a desk all day. I could feel my posture improving in a week or so.

Unfortunately it does have a bit of learning curve to it, but it's still something I recommend friends try as an effective quick workout.

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For strength training, you want exercises that can be performed with increasingly heavier weights (e.g. barbell exercises). This is how you get stronger. If you always lift the same weight you won't get stronger.

That's straight away misinformation. Your body doesn't know how many plates your lifting, all it cares about is intensity and time under tension.

There's a few ways to increase that without increasing weight:

- more time under tension (duh), in other words same movements but slower

- harder exercice variations

Now to mention that kettlebells can go pretty high in weight.

And a last point: what is your goal? Kettlebells will never allow you to compete in bodybuilding, but if what you want is to have a better quality of life and aesthetics? The answer is much less cut and dry. Kettlebells have some really great functional exercices. If you can do a turkish get-up with a 50kg kettlebell you're strong enough.

Doing many repetitions with light weights will elicit a different physiological adaptation than doing few repetitions with heavy weights. In particular, your body will become better at lifting light weights for many reps, but you won't get necessarily stronger. If your goal is to get stronger, you want to train by lifting increasingly heavier weights (progressive overload). Any other training strategy, is less efficient, for the purpose of getting stronger, or simply ineffective.

And what I'm saying is that you can achieve progressive overload with harder variations and more time under tension. There's plenty of ways to keep you in the strength rep range using kettlebells and/or calisthenics.

For pure strength and size nothing beats barbells, I already said that, but unless that's your only goal, kettlebells can be an alternative.

Kettlebells go all the way up to 5 poods bro

kettlebells are awesome. You have to start at the lower weights though and resist the temptation to be adventurous with them. It's my "home gym". A 6x4 mat, a jump rope and a kettlebell.

This is what I do, as well, plus taiji. I think of it as my "zombie apocalypse survival regimen."

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