Kettle Bell Journey: A Love Story

In honor of it being a week before Valentine’s Day I felt it only appropriate to share a love story. A tale as old as time. It started as a love/hate relationship and grew into a blossoming relationship that I am happy to report is still going pretty steady. My hopes are that once I share this story you might find a new found love as well!

The story begins in the spring of 2020. In the beginning of that spring it was safe to say that nobody knew what was going on. I ended up closing my practice for a month. I had a six-month-old and little toddler and I thought, "Well, I'm never going to get this time again with my kids so I'm going to take advantage of these little moments at home with them”. It turned out to be the best because it’s not very common that we get to spend a good amount of time on maternity leave with our new ones but to also get to spend even more time at home during those big developmental months. The newborn stage is really rough because you're not sleeping anyway, but I was able to be home with them and I had more sleep at that point, so it was just so fun. I wasn't just in survival mode anymore, if that makes sense.

So let’s get to the part of the love story and when kettlebells came on the scene. I was at the point post pregnancy that I was wanting to do something, get active again, ready to start working out and lifting more, and craving that strong mama energy.

I was trying to think of ways where I could still utilize heavy loads or start and not lose everything I had already gained by pushing the weight around and whatnot. I found a guy by the name of Darius Gilbert on Instagram through Craig Liebenson and was just watching some of his workouts and videos and thinking to myself, "Wow, this looks hard, but really fun."

I really hadn't done a lot with kettle bells up until this point. Gosh, I think I might have touched a Kettlebell maybe five times in my entire life and I had no idea what I was doing. My technique was all off, I just felt really awkward with it so I avoided using the equipment and doing any of the exercises all together. An out of sight out of mind type of thing. Just the way these people were moving the weights around looked honestly so beautiful, challenging, and athletic. Pure strength and athleticism. So seeing that, I was like, "Okay, I want to take a class, I want to be able to do that."

To paint the picture, remember this was at the height of spring 2020 so the only available way to work with someone or take a class was doing online virtual classes. I signed up for a class with Darius and he really helped me understand the philosophy and the science behind these movements. This masterclass was full of talented clinicians and personal trainers and to say that it inspired me was a total understatement. You were able to just watch everybody and be in awe about how good they moved through their swing and snatch and other movements. The athleticism with everybody was so inspiring and so I wanted to be like that.

Darius recommended that I work with someone at Reload PT who is a personal trainer named Angelica. She ended up really making me understand and that not only in my swing, but in every single aspect of my athletic abilities, I was not utilizing my hips enough, which means I was not getting full hip extension in every single movement you can think of, like at the top of the movement basically. So if you think about your squat, I wasn't fully hip extending at the top of the squat. I wasn't fully hip extending at the top of the deadlift. I wasn't fully hip extending on any movement that I should have been when I was doing any sort of training.

I think there's a few different reasons for this. One, I was not pushing through my feet enough, and if you don't push through your feet enough, you limit your ability to extend your hips. I would say one of my weakest links is my feet. That’s because my whole life I've had flat feet and so not pushing through the ground and pushing through with my feet again inhibited my ability to extend my hips fully and most explosively.

So without that, I then started having to rely on different areas because I wasn't getting full hip extension, because I wasn't using my feet well enough, I then started having pain in my lower back and actually also have dealt with lot issues with my feet. But lower back pain and pelvic floor issues had been a direct result of not understanding how the feet and the hip extension play such a huge role or how interconnected they are.

Angelica helped me realize all of this. She gave me a few simple exercises to make me understand the feeling she wanted me to get with what it felt like to be in full hip extension. Once I got it, I realized that I now understood what she's trying to get me to do in these positions, and then I applied it to my swing and kettlebells movements.

I think that’s what has been a big deal in creating my big driver in the pelvic floor problems I've had in the past, through postpartum and being pregnant. Now that I have figured that out, I can feel when I'm being lazy and not doing things correctly, because I can tell what my pelvic floor is doing. I'm just way more in tune. If I don't hip extend my hips fully, I'll either have mom pee or I'll feel something is off in my pelvic floor. Now you see why I’m such an advocate for pelvic floor health!

It's just really, really interesting how my feet, just by swinging kettlebell and learning it the right way, I've been able to address my weaker areas. I thought it was my lower back, but really it's my feet that drives that hip extension piece, which then has created, again, that lower back pain, but it's all connected, and I wouldn't have found this information out had I not started working with people like Darius and Angelica.

Now I'm super pumped. I'm now working on seeing Angelica for lower leg strengthening exercises because my feet aren't where they should be, so just getting them to be building up a strength in my lower leg will continue to help me understand what it means to push through my feet and also continue on with that hip extension, and then will further continue on in prevention of lower back pain.

I know this little love story is unlike any other and you know what they say, “you’ll meet them when you least expect it”. When it comes to your health, physical fitness and so on I think we often times detour ourselves from trying or picking up new things we don’t know how to do or feel uncomfortable with. We just avoid and steer away from them. It’s ok to not have the answers or not know how to do something. It’s also liberating and wonderful to seek out help and want to improve something in an area of your life or learn something new. Sometimes a new little change can open up a world of possibilities and healing.