- Learn how to lift with your legs and not with your back for real-world strength.
This is one of the reasons that this kind of practice becomes more appropriate as you age. As you age, the functionality of your joints become far more important to you than the size of your muscles. Your flexibility, balance, and stability are the key components to avoiding injury and being able to move gracefully as you get older. This concept of lifting with your legs rather than your back helps teach your body how to pick anything up off the ground properly.
- Build core strength in a way nothing else can.
Every kettlebell movement engages your entire core to stabilize and you are therefore constantly getting a core workout, as well as working the rest of your body, all at the same time!
- Create flexibility where you need it the most.
Tightness in your hips is the biggest cause of back and other chronic pain due to improper posture and motor patterns. Kettlebell training is about gradually developing the flexibility in your hips and shoulders to make you stand straighter and get rid of chronic joint pain.
- Unify your mind and your body
You will constantly be developing and fine tuning your motor patterns as you learn how to use your body more efficiently after each kettlebell session. After you have taken the time to master a certain lift, you can progress to a more challenging one and continue to learn and grow. When you are kettlebell training your mind is being forced to think about moving your body properly. This is something that most modern day exercises, such as running on the treadmill or bicep curls, don’t do for you.
- Build muscle and train your cardio at the same time
Full body weight lifting puts a significant demand on your ability to supply oxygen to many working muscles. You can increase or decrease this effect based upon your goals and abilities. By moving from one exercise to another you can train higher cardio and by taking short breaks you can turn your training into interval training.
- Develop strength evenly from side to side
Unlike many activities or exercises that allow you to develop a greater degree of strength on one side of your body than the other, kettlebell training develops you evenly. Generally speaking, as we age we will see a bigger variance in our range of motion (and therefore strength) from one side of the body to the other. One hip, or shoulder, becomes much tighter than the other causing all kinds of compensations. This ultimately leads to chronic pain and a diminished quality of life. Kettlebell training will prevent this, and can go a long way to help reverse it if it has already begun.
