Return of The Kettlebell-Training Log- Vacation Posts

This week, I'm on vacation and enjoying some peace and quiet in Cambria, a small coastal town in beautiful San Luis Obispo County in California.


The official start date of my vacation was on Monday, which also coincided with the start of my second grind block of the Return of The Kettlebell program.

For Monday's light day, I stayed with my 20 kg kettlebell for my heavier bell and used my 12 kg bell for the lighter kettlebell.

I started with 200 reps of rope skipping and then had my wife join me for four circuits of our 10-minute-warm-up. We could have gotten more than four circuits if we really pushed it, but we usually take the time to talk about our day and slowly get our bodies ready for the more intense exercise to come.

After warming-up, I set up my kettlebells with the 20 kg on the right side and the 12 kg on the left side. During my last block of grinds, I completed 3 ladders, so this week I did 4 ladders of 4 rungs each.

Remember that the program calls for completing 5 squats after finishing the top rung of each ladder.

I stayed with 20 seconds rest between rungs and 1 minute rest between ladders.

After my final ladder, I rested for 2 minutes and then completed 2 sets of sumo deadlifts of 20 reps each using the same kettlebells as I used for my presses.

We drove to Cambria Tuesday and I brought 2-20kgs along with a 12 kg for my wife to use. Ordinarily, I'll use a 16 kg and a 20 kg for medium day, but we ran out of room for the extra kettlebell, and I felt like I could do the two 20s with no problems.

I'd actually prefer to use a 20 and a 24 kg, but I want to give the RTK program a go as it's written in order to properly evaluate it's effectiveness.

At any rate, I was on my own today, so after warming up with 6 circuits in 10 minutes (I was energized!), I pushed through 4 ladders with 4 rungs each, using 35 second rests between rungs and 70 second rests between ladders.

These felt great and I was able to watch the ocean roll into the shore while practicing my presses. After my last ladder was complete, I set up my bells for sumo deadlifts and cranked through 2-20 reps sets.

Afterwards, I did a quick set of 20 pushups on the horns of my kettlebells before stretching out and relaxing for the evening.

I'll squeeze a couple days of variety work in Thursday and Friday before doing my heavy day on Saturday.

On another note, I just redesigned my main blog (hopefully the last time) and am pretty proud of the result. Feel free to stop by and check it out:

http://www.ironbellathletics.com