Gymnasium Blog!

Kettlebells Cure Your [Back, Yoga, Running, Crossfit] Pain?

Demonstrate the basic kettlebell swing to a newbie and you’ll invariably hear, “Won’t that hurt my back?”

Throwing some KB basics (the swing is right up front).

We’ve trained our bodies to be pressed into a chair, a machine, or a bench to work out. Or have been convinced the only workouts that don’t have the potential to harm are branded “healing,” “mind/body” exercise like yoga or tai chi. I also used to see those practices as the place to repair, refresh, and renew and any weight as a tool for training ability. But not anymore. And the answer is, “Not once you learn how to do it.”

There’s persistent compartmentalizing in the workout world. Does this sound familiar: “I do elliptical for cardio, see my killer trainer for strength, and follow this amazing yoga teacher.”? Know anyone who obsesses over their practice and then comes to believe it’s the answer to everything (I yoga! I kettlebell! I Crossfit!), and view everything else as an opposing tribe to address with distrust or disdain? I think a few of these people might lurk on the internets. So when an article comes out about kettlebells fixing backs and necks, or yoga wrecking joints, or running injuries healed by running, or anything Crossfit, each are met with venom because they go against what someone just knows to be true, which often closely aligns with a tribe-led (fed?) belief.

When I started using kettlebells, it was as much out of curiosity as anything else. But I’d like to believe, or at least apply my trusty 20/20 hindsight, that something in the basic patterns intuitively made sense to me. Then I began to feel the carryover to bar lifting, martial arts, physical labor, and a variety of athletic movements; I sensed a call for awareness through the practice that’s more akin to what I experienced in the kung fu school, not the gym. Though I couldn’t articulate it then, the notion of simply practicing better movement with lighter, primitive weights instead of trying to shove heavier and faster with bars and machines was definitely there. A kernel of truth cultivated in my years since with KBs.

The life of an athlete is about achieving numbers and managing injuries and pain. I had long mistakenly correlated increased quantitative athletic measures (my max bench, my mile PR, my 2000m time on a rowing erg) with increased health. Did those impressive numbers help my ego? Definitely. My health? Not so much. After my last athletics-induced back injury, I did tai chi, yoga, old-timey bodyweight calisthenics, and kettlebells in conjunction with medical therapy to return to function. Each helped in its way, but it was the synthesis that delivered the healing. Over my recuperation I gradually came to realize I was learning how to exist in my own body. Understanding its strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Something numbers don’t teach, and something I didn’t know I didn’t know. I remember realizing it while shoveling, a task that used to destroy my back even when my lanky levers could lift heavy bars like no(skinny)body’s business. I wasn’t practicing shoveling, but my path taught me what good movement really feels like whether a shovel, a kettlebell, or nothing, in hand. And hey, not for nothing: it was my last injury (and I move with people for a living now!).

Because I’m hopelessly human, my experiential truth with kettlebells beats the statistical kind for personal resonance. But it don’t hurt to flash some back up from the NY Times after a testimonial…

More fundamentally, it isn’t the kettlebell that heals, or the yoga that hurts–it’s the value of the movement underneath the label that determines the path. Running, deadlifts, and yoga all contain the power to heal or harm. Ego and specialization determine where a path will lead. If you think only of the measurable goal–whether a full headstand or beasting up a big weight–you are (or your local guru is) making it easier to arrive at injury. And some movements are so specialized as to have little value beyond the thing itself. In fact, most of what passes for exercise in modern gyms falls into this category. Worse still, a specialized practice also ingrains a specific, conditional worldview, instead of opening a broader horizon. If all of your training buddies are concerned with their bench press, their inversion progression, their mile splits, or their Fran time, well as the Buddha (might have) said, “What we think, we become.”

Another impressive display of Fran-tensity.

At Gymnasium, we don’t see lifting weights as distinct from yoga, or running as separate from strength. There is only movement. Every bootcamp exercise, every rep commanded at a strongman competition, every Sanskrit word  breathed by a yogi is just another movement. And when you line them all up you see specific examples of direct overlap. An old school strongman movement like the windmill/bent press looks an awful lot like yoga’s triangle. A yogic movement like down dog and up dog, looks a lot like an Indian wrestler pushup. There are a limited number of fundamental movement patterns, patterns that any exercise ultimately points back to. If you practice the fundamentals, your practice will translate into a level of ability in any physical situation. And avoid the specialized injury and undeserved ego.

A member here at Gymnasium is getting her yoga instructor certification, runs (when it’s nice outside), kickboxes, and is skilled with a kettlebell or club in her hand. The other day, she said of all the gyms and workout places she’s ever belonged to, she likes Gymnasium because it’s the only place that “swings kettlebells, but I leave feeling like I just finished a yoga class.” That’s exactly how we like it. Really though, why have it any other way?

Yes, Kettlebells can fix your back, and kettlebells can throw it the heck out. Yoga can heal your chronic pains, and put scary new ones in their place. A local Crossfit tribe can lift you into a sublime intensity addiction, and remind you where addiction leads.

All movement has a healing and hurting capacity. See movement as an exercise in the Middle Way, and don’t let your ego tell you (or a tribe sell you) otherwise.