Heavy Stuff.... A Workout with Laurel Blackburn RKC Level 2 at Tallahassee Kettlebells

Good friend and fellow RKC Level 2 Instructor, Laurel Blackburn and I had a whole lot of fun this past weekend at her gym.    She'd had a HUGE week - when she donated a training session to the Tallahassee Police TAC team - they showed up and apparently so did the press, and the local news, and and... it sounded like if someone had showed up with a food truck, Tallahassee Kettlebells could have considered itself a small city.   Anyhow it was super cool to hear all about it - and how the TAC team really did well learning the kettlebell swing, squats, etc.  Needless to say, if you're anywhere near Tallahassee, you know THE place to train with kettlebells.   This also means that there are a TON of kettlebells of all sizes there - up to... THE BEAST.   In a previous post from this weekend that I wrote haphazardly in a sleepy fog (need to go back and possibly make some grammar corrections!) I'd mentioned doing some beast swings.    Having tried it and liked it the previous day, it was time to turn it into a little workout.   Even if you don't have a 48kg kettlebell, choose something very large for this if you're ready for it.   If not, that's cool too - but here's what I did on Sunday (after practicing random things on gymnastic rings, and some of the MovNat climbing skills - gotta love those...):

10 Beast Swings, 30 battling rope throws  - 4 rounds

Then starting with the heaviest kettlebells, I did 10 swings of each size (and she has all the in-between sizes too... aahh!!!) so it went 48kg, 44kg, 40kg, 36kg, 32kg, 28kg, 24kg, 20kg, 16kg, and 12kg - which by this time felt so weird it was surreal.  

Amusing Sidenote: doing the heavy swings has actually had some kind of bizarre psychological effect on me - its like... the spell is broken or something, I know what to expect and now EVERYTHING feels so much lighter.   Today I knocked out some very solid swings with the new 32kg kettlebell I brought back for my collection (and for the class), and it wasn't a big deal to me.   Look out world... LOOK OUT.

Sidenote #2: kettlebells at the yet-to-be-disputed hardest-core gym in 32789 now include multiples of: 8kg, 12kg, 14kg, 16kg, 20kg, 24kg, 32kg, and 36kg  Literally something for everyone - come here if you want to learn RKC Hardstyle kettlebell lifting!

We caught a lot of this on video as well as some random fun things.   Including an exercise that Laurel and I think may not have been captured on video yet - at least we weren't able to think of anyone who had done it - and we were pretty sure... a search of youtube turned up a similar lack of this particular combination thing.    But you'll have to wait until I get all the video clips put together.   Of course it was a very good thing that we had snacks with us, I had quite a bit of high protein yum things from Ostrim and Perky Jerky - this kept us sane, but we still ended up eating an amazing amount of eggs, bacon, beef and bison over the weekend too.... GOOD TIMES! :)