EAT THE BIG ELEPHANT FIRST: THE 10000 KETTLEBELL SWING CHALLENGE DONE IN 7 DAYS

 

 

The post that launched 10000 swings…It was Sunday, I had gotten in my typical “first thing in the morning conditioning blast” to get blood flowing and the metabolism fired up to earn my fantastic weekend breakfast the Mrs makes for me, and in the brief moment of downtime I had between when my workout ends and when my kid wakes up so we can watch cartoons in our pajamas together (if you ever want a fun challenge, try to STOP SWEATING before your kid wakes up), I was sipping my energy drink and logging the workout, and as my mind wandered, it waded into VERY stupid territory…and thus, “10000 swings in 7 days” was underway. 

 

And, of course, the relevant follow-up

 

 

 

 

Reality had dawned on me: the gears were already turning and there was no stopping this.  So later that day, I bought a 3 pack of mechanic’s gloves, because I had read enough horror stories of how this challenge shredded the hands of folks that took it on, and then did a 20 minute “proof of concept” pilot run where I got in my 22 swings per minute along with some daily work in between, and from there I knew what I was going to be doing for that next week.

 

**BACKGROUND**

 

* The week OF that Sunday, I had accomplished a major goal of mine of squatting 5x10x405lbs while running 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, which, if you’re interested, I did a write-up of here

https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2022/08/how-i-used-531-bbb-beefcake-to-squat.html

* But in the process of that, I had suffered some damage.  I documented it in that write-up, but basically, I tore a muscle somewhere in my tricep/teres minor after subluxing my left shoulder on a set of deadlifts, and my left bicep/forearm kept experiencing pops that led me to believe the tendon was on the verge of tearing/rupturing if I didn’t start being a little smarter…which I realize “10000 swings in 7 days” doesn’t sound super smart, but the swing was one of the few movements I could still do that wasn’t causing me any pain or discomfort, so it SEEMED like a good idea at the time. 

 

**THE ENTIRE PROCESS**

* I’m not solipsistic enough to imagine that people would want me to write about EVERY single workout here in the write-up, but if you DO want to view that, I start logging it here in my training log

https://forums.t-nation.com/t/more-trouble-than-i-am-worth-brute-force-and-ignorance-t3hpwnisher-log/276232/1749

 

* Instead, I’ll link all the videos here, documenting every single swing from start to finish

 

 

 

 

**THE FULL WORKOUT/GAP FILLERS**

 

* As per the post at the top: I stuck with 22 reps per round for 65 rounds for Monday through Friday.  EMOM was the original plan, and after day 1 I found myself resting about 26 seconds per round.  That was a LONG time spent NOT doing swings, so I shaved off 5 seconds per round for Tuesday, 2 seconds for Wed, 1 second for Thurs and 1 sec for Fri, resulting in 50 second rounds and over 10 minutes reduced from my starting time.  THAT was far more challenging, and turned the swings into a solid effort.  Once the weekend rolled around, I no longer had the luxury of 1 hour workouts, as I spend my weekends sleeping in and spending time with my family, so I chunked the workouts into 2 parters and tried to make them as FAST as possible…which is why I ended up doing 630, 715 and 800 unbroken swings.  There’s something to be said about the fact that, had I NOT built up over M-F with those hard, time reduced round based workouts, I would not have had it in me to really dig into those high reps.

 

* Because I am me, I can’t just take on a 20 day challenge and do it in 7 days and be satisfied with that: I had to add on to it.  Anyone that follows me knows that I make use of “daily work”: general physical activity that gets done no matter the training day.  On top of that, I tend to include 3-5 minute conditioning blasts on top of my training as just something that gets thrown in the middle of the day.  I kept up that trend through the challenge.  Don’t get me wrong: 10000 swings WILL transform your body, and the swing is an awesome movement that hits the most important muscles of your body, BUUUUUT…if you WERE to add on to it, I’m pretty satisfied with what I settled on: The Barbell “Bear Complex” run in a Tabata Protocol (20 seconds on/10 seconds off for 8 rounds) and 5 minutes of burpee chins.  You saw “TABEARTA”, as I’ve taken to calling it, in the final video, but this is a video of me getting “the rest of the workout” done after my swings

 

 

* The swing is hitting the posterior chain just fine.  What’s a Bear Complex?  It’s a clean, front squat, press overhead, bring behind the back for a squat, press it overhead and set it in front of you.  That’s ONE complex.  The way I run them is a Cluster (clean into a thruster, a thruster being a front squat into a press overhead) into a back squat thruster.  So with the swing, we have the hinge, and now we have two squats and two presses overhead added.  With the burpee chins, we have the burpee, which includes a bodyweight squat and a push up (horizontal push) and then a chin up (vertical pull).  In an ideal world, you jump up to the bar for the chin, but mine is too low to allow that.  Still, with swings, Bears and Burpee Chins, we have ALL our bases covered.  And by doing Bears as a Tabata workout and the Burpee chins for 5 minutes, that’s 9 WHOLE minutes of exercise.  We can all probably spare 9 minutes.  In turn, if I were to make this a “complete workout” or sell this whole 1 week experience, that’s what it would be: Swings-TABEARTA-Burpee chins.  Do that for 1 week and you will kickstart physical transformation.  I’d love to try pairing that with something like the Velocity Diet for a week as well, just to really see what happens when you burn the candle at both ends…and the middle…and just chuck the whole thing in the fireplace.

 

* In the most ideal of situations, this would be a whole separate workout later in the day, but, instead, because of my schedule, I’d finish my swings, down a protein shake, and then come RIGHT back into the garage and do this, at least for the M-F workouts.  On the weekends, it was chunked out a bit more.

 

* You can also see me getting in some more of that “daily work” I’m talking about.  Band work, abs, and ideally GHRs and reverse hypers too. 

 

**BEFORE AND AFTERS**

 

Here I am 2 weeks before I started

 

 

And this was me on day 6 of the Challenge

 

The change in such a short time was honestly nutty.

 

**OBSERVATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED**

 

* There is a CLEAR quality of rep improvement between the first video and the last.  I shared these videos with members of the kettlebell community and got some great feedback on how to improve my swing, and took to that task.  A big part of it was intent: prior to the challenge, I used the swing as a deadlift builder, and so I’d take the eccentric as far back as I needed to replicate my starting position and only focused on the concentric.  The value of a more deliberate eccentric was explained, and, with enough experimentation, I found some value in it.

 

* There’s also something to be said for how physically broken I came into this challenge.  And, along with that, my typical 0400 approach of doing absolutely ZERO warm-up before I start training.  As the week went on, my body continued to heal, which allowed it to open and loosen up some, and swing quality could continue to improve.  Plus, when you do something 10000 times, you get a little better at it.

 

* As the photos show: in a span of DAYS, I had shed any fluff I had accumulated over 6 weeks of eating big.  Vascularity had returned as well.  I keep referring to this as a 7 day physical detox, more of that in the next bullet.

 

* Here’s a weird one: I noticed my body odor getting foul as time went on.  I genuinely think that getting in so much work in such a short time was having a legit “detoxing” effect on me, as my body was just trying to force out ALL the bad stuff it possibly could in order to make me a better, cleaner running machine.  My philosophy on muscle building has always been that the body adapts to the stimulus you place it under, which is why I am such a fan of throwing a bunch of chaos at the body in order to make it “ready for anything”, and I’m sure after day 3 of 1430 swings it decided “I guess this is what we are now: let’s get rid of ALL this junk that is gumming up the works”.

 

* Armor: Despite running “Armor Building Complexes” every day for 5 minutes for the past several months, I needed some REAL armor to get through this. I could tell that swinging the bell that much was going to tear up my hands, and that ANYWHERE I had touch/contact points with my body needed to be adequately covered with material to keep from tearing the skin apart and suffering skin rashes. From review I’d read of the program, skin issues were the most common one. So, that day, I sprung for a 3 pack of mechanics gloves (you can see them in the video) and ensured to wear my fight shorts (a tip I got from Brian Alsruhe) on top of my traditional strongman shorts, in order to keep my inner thighs covered and prevent my forearms from chaffing the hell out of them. I also took to wearing my strongman belt, to keep my lower back warm and give my elbows something to brace against…plus it gives me something to play with between rounds. I went with my No Bull trainers, because they were close to what I deadlift in, and I ultimately wanted this experience to build my deadlift. And I kept my headband, because it’s awesome, and keeps the sweat out of my eyes.

 

* My appetite was through the roof!  This will absolutely turn the metabolism into a furnace.

 

* I wrote about how broken I was coming into the challenge, and what’s awesome is how much better I felt as it went on.  This was a VERY tonic experience.  The swing is a super benign movement.  Almost all concentric, minimal eccentric, no load across the body, just awesome for getting blood flowing and recovered.

 

* Now that I’ve done 800 swings in one set, the fire is lit and, one of these days, I’m sure I’m going to see JUST how much I can do.

 

**CONCLUSION**

 

* I have always wanted to do the 10000 swing challenge, and I am so glad I got to do it “my way”.  I learned a lot and I grew a TON in the span of 1 week, physically, yes, but just in general.  Dan John remains the man, and we are blessed to have all he’s written.