4 Lessons in 16 years...
One tool changed my life in April 2010, here's what I learned.
16 Years ago, my life changed.
I entered this week in 2010 as a hardstyle kettlebell instructor, after completing the RKC level I with Pavel Tsatsouline and his leaders.
When I say my life, not my career, my business, or my workouts, I mean it.
Becoming an instructor in this program, and committing to its philosophies and practice, has bled into every part of my life, in one way or another.
Here are the ways that I’ve understood most.
Refine, Don’t expand: In 16 years, I’ve learned many ways to use a kettlebell, but the overwhelming majority of training has been 5 or 6 movements. Doing the same movements, over and over, repeating them to a skillful level, changing volume and intensity, but not the movement. Knowledge is expansion, but wisdom is refinement.
Intensity is a spectrum: Push to the limit, go hard or go home, no easy days…these are all good slogans for a t-shirt, but not in the practice of creating a life of strength. There’s times when you have to push hard and stretch your limits, but many days of kettlebell training are medium and light. On these days, the focus is not exclusive to the physical, but the mental. To bring a mental intensity, a mental focus to a day when you’re not gasping for air or testing your max effort, this is the essence of training for Mastery.
Be a quiet professional: This is the first line of the StrongFirst code of conduct. To possess strength without needing to boast it is a different form of competence. The strongest, most impactful lifters I know don’t need to showcase their strength and feed their ego. It’s the best framework I’ve learned for “walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.”
Tolstoy’s weapons: It took me months to pass the snatch test. It took me a year to press half my bodyweight. It took year(s) to go from a 48k to a 56k getup. Strength takes time, the things which me value the most take time. The two greatest weapons we can wield in the process, as Tolstoy said: patience and consistency.
Onwards to the next 16, one rep at a time.
Much Love, Michael