Are you one of those who enjoys new workouts now and then? Doesn't it take you to a whole new level of excitement?
What if I told you that kettlebells are nothing to be intimidated by? These are some of the fitness industry's most excellent gym gears bestowed upon us.
The kettlebells are perfect gym gear as they allow you to work up your core, legs, and arms while enhancing your grip and balancing skills as well.
Since they resemble the shape and style of a teapot and kettle, they are referred to as the kettlebells.
These kettlebells come in various colour-coded weights and are an excellent tool for all fitness levels. They allow you to enjoy moderate to intense workout sessions and enhance your metabolic rate while helping you to burn more calories and stabilize the muscles.
But that's not it; there is a lot more to kettlebells that you don't know just yet. We have an entire list of 15 reasons we believe that kettlebells are excellent gym equipment and are determined to get you investing in one of these bells soon.
Benefits of Using Kettlebell
1. Promotes Better Postures
The disruption caused by COVID-19 pandemic and technological advancements have resulted in more at-home jobs.
Working on laptops for longer hours while sitting on the bed leads to poor postures and leaning shoulders. These positions press down on the lungs, which leads to short, stressful breaths in our shrunken chests.
Using a kettlebell to perform kettlebell swings helps you improve your body posture and avoid anterior dominance in your body.
2. Ensures Controlled Body Movements
Kettlebells seem to be easy gym gear and similar to dumbbells. But let me break it to you, the kettlebells are nothing like dumbbells.
Performing weightlifting and strengthening exercises with kettlebells requires excellent coordination, balance, stability, and control over your movements.
Their cannon shape requires you to control the balance of your grips and control your movements so that you're not just swinging the weights in the air but engaging and exercising the muscles involved.
3. Efficient Training
Nowadays, our busy and demanding lifestyles have made it very difficult to carve out some time for ourselves every day. Fortunately, constantly trying to meet societal living standards has made us lookout for efficient and effective ways.
Training with kettlebells is easy, fun, effective, and yet efficient. Exercises like kettlebell swings, single-legged deadlifts, etc., allow you to target various muscle groups together and give you a full-body workout in limited periods.
4. High-calorie Burn Rate
There can be no better gym gear or a better workout that can offer you a variety of exercises, multiple muscle engagement, and a high-calorie burn rate. Fortunately, kettlebells offer all the above benefits and even more.
One of the greatest benefits of kettlebell workouts is the high-calorie burn rate. These unique kettlebells allow you to level up your already intense workout sessions by adding in more weights, which in turn burns calories at a faster and greater rate.
5. Perfect for Your Core
One of our goals is to trim down the waistline and enjoy a flat tummy whenever we work out. Unfortunately, this is not an easy area to tackle and requires consistency and patience.
But here's the good news, working out using a kettlebell can help you thoroughly engage your core throughout the workouts and burn away the bulging tummy.
Kettlebells are great for targeting your core because kettlebell exercises require constant body balance and engage various muscles throughout the body, resulting in core muscles getting toned from all sides.
Related Article: 10 Signs You Have a Weak Core Strength and How to Fix it.
6. Reduced Risk of Joint Injury
Lifting heavy weights and strength training exercises can be a task if your joints are sensitive and unable to bear much weight. Well, the kettlebells can help you reduce any risks of joint injury when training your muscles.
Wondering how? Well, the kettlebells, compared to barbells and dumbbells, exert less stress on the joints with their quick, controllable, and easy movements. Especially when performing exercises like deadlifts and back squats, a kettlebell helps you spare your joints from the excess pressure and still enables you to enjoy strength training.
7. A Perfect Cardio Workout
Cardio exercises are all those activities that elevate your heart rates and get you fighting for breath in a few minutes. Kettlebell workouts are an excellent alternative. The extra oxygen going in your body means that you are burning more calories and ultimately losing the unwanted fat from your body.
Kettlebells are not your everyday cardio exercises; instead, these are an accelerated form of cardio. Performing 100 kettlebell swings consecutively will get you gasping for breath and burning more calories per minute like no other cardio exercise.
Related Article: Sweat It Out With These 17 Cardio Exercises
8. Posterior Chain Muscle Activation
In layman’s terms, posterior chain muscles are the backside of our body. These posterior muscles mainly involve the erector spine, glutes, calves, and hamstrings.
According to 2017 research, having strong posterior chain muscles helps you reduce back pain, improve your posture, enhance athletic performance, reduce risks of injuries, etc.
As per the American Council of Exercise, contracting and lengthening exercises are the best way to build strong posterior chain muscles. Kettlebell swings are the best workout for building strong glutes while targeting hamstrings and calf muscles and engaging the core and upper body strength.
Related Article: BCAAs Vs. EAAs: What are They & Which is Better for Muscle Growth?
9. Grip Strength
Grip strength refers to your ability to hold on to things. Not just how long you can hold but the amount of weight you can hold as well.
When it comes to building up strength and muscles, you need to hold on to heavyweights for longer durations as well, and in case you're going through a muscle growth plateau, you'll be required to go heavier, which calls for even stronger grip strength.
According to 2018 research, working out using a kettlebell restores muscle mass and improves grip strength in older adults. This betterment in grip strength is explicitly seen because of the shape of the kettlebell handle and the continuous powerful grip needed to perform the kettlebell workouts.
Related Article: How to Fix the Issue of Losing Your Grip During Lifting
10. Improved Body Balance
Performing workouts with controlled movements and holding your body stable on the ground while lifting heavy weights require serious balancing.
Specifically, when using a kettlebell to perform workouts like kettlebell swings, a lot of body balance and stability are required to keep your feet grounded on the floor while simultaneously swinging a heavy kettlebell in the air from the ground to your shoulder's level.
This is why, amongst the many benefits, using kettlebells for exercising allows you to improve your body balance and focus on muscle movements instead of giving into the momentum.
11. Promotes Body Awareness and Coordination
Talking about body stability and balance, another reason to incorporate the kettlebell workouts in your fitness routine is these weights' body awareness and coordination.
Using a kettlebell for exercising means performing dynamic movements; above you, below you, on the sides, in between your legs, and more. Doing such dynamic movements requires a lot of mind and muscle connection so your movements can coordinate and you can get into a rhythm, which means that you must be aware of your body and its actions.
Body awareness, body coordination, and a strong mind and muscle connection result in greater muscle activation and better results.
12. Helps Identify the Weak Muscles
To become resilient towards injuries, you need to develop strong muscles and joints. Exercising using dumbbells, barbells, and other gym machines can keep your weak muscles in hindsight.
When you exercise using the kettlebells, you move your hands in various directions, allowing you to identify your weak muscles quickly. Once you recognize your weak side, you can focus on it more and improve mobility.
Overcoming weak muscles allows you to reduce injuries and use your force instead of momentum to work out and build lean muscle mass.
13. Offers Greater Glute Strength
One of the many exercises performed using a kettlebell is the kettlebell swing. This workout requires the individual to stand with their feet opened hip-width apart, swing the kettlebell from between their legs till their eye level, and move back and forth while stabilizing their feet firmly on the ground.
This specific workout engages the posterior chain muscles and strengthens and develops speed and force in the hips. Having strong glute muscles reduces the risks of injuries and allows you to improve your athletic movements, such as sprinting and jumping, etc.
Related Article: The Ultimate Guide to Building Bigger and Stronger Glute Muscles
14. Versatile Workouts
Who doesn't like adding versatility and variety to their routine? Having a variety of fun workouts to perform every day will elevate your motivation and excitement level as well.
Kettlebells can be used in various workouts, like HIIT, TABATA, circuit training, as many rounds as possible, cross-fit workouts, and many more. Secondly, since the kettlebells are portable, you can take them outdoors for a change of view, which allows you to add more excitement to your workouts.
The more variations a gym gear offers, the more you can challenge your muscles and avoid any muscle growth plateaus.
15. Easy to Use
One of the biggest reasons to add the kettlebells to your everyday workouts is the simplicity they offer, along with greater and far more effective results compared to dumbbells and barbells.
These are such wholesome gym gear that you can perform any basic workout using them, like squats, swings, clean press, push-ups, etc., and you'll be training your strength, endurance, balance, and flexibility just like that.
To achieve the best results, you must invest in high-quality and durably constructed kettlebells. The kettlebells by DMoose are cast-iron weights in a cannonball shape and have handles attached that provides a comfortable and stable hold. The gently textured handle ensures a secure hold, whether you're using it with one hand or two.
Conclusion
Kettlebells may seem similar to dumbbells, but they are quite different, not just in shape and size but also in the benefits they offer. Yes, they may take a little time to get habitual of the grip and the weights, but their effectiveness and efficiency can weigh out anything and everything.
While the compact and portable design of the kettlebell offers you the ability to use them indoors and outdoors easily, their versatile use allows you to engage your posterior and anterior muscles efficiently and help you burn greater calories in a short period.
The key is to start with lighter weights and gradually build up the stamina and include a variety of workouts so you can understand how to engage maximum muscles, develop a mind-muscle connection, and use your force to exercise instead of the momentum.
Reading List
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Article Sources
- Chen, Hung-Ting, et al. ‘Effects of 8-Week Kettlebell Training on Body Composition, Muscle Strength, Pulmonary Function, and Chronic Low-Grade Inflammation in Elderly Women with Sarcopenia’. Experimental Gerontology, vol. 112, Oct. 2018, pp. 112–18. PubMed, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2018.09.015.
- De Ridder, Eline MD, et al. ‘Posterior Muscle Chain Activity during Various Extension Exercises: An Observational Study’. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, vol. 14, July 2013, p. 204. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2474-14-204.
- Exercise, American Council on. American Council on Exercise (ACE) Study Reveals Kettlebells Provide Powerful Workout in Short Amount of Time. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-council-on-exercise-ace-study-reveals-kettlebells-provide-powerful-workout-in-short-amount-of-time-83876187.html.
- Godman, Heidi. ‘Should You Try Kettlebells?’ Harvard Health, 19 Feb. 2019, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-you-try-kettlebells-2019021916025.
- Vancini, Rodrigo Luiz, et al. ‘Kettlebell Exercise as an Alternative to Improve Aerobic Power and Muscle Strength’. Journal of Human Kinetics, vol. 66, Mar. 2019, pp. 5–6. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.2478/hukin-2018-0062.