And that’s that. The last swing workout of the ‘prepratory phase’ of this 12 week program is done. I was supposed to sets of 50 again like Tuesday, but I felt like doing a ‘little extra’ since this was this phase’s last swing workout. Sets of 60 sounded like a good plan. After finishing my 4th set of 60 I took 20s of extra rest with the plan of going all-out the last couple minutes or so until the timer expired. That last set of 100 reps just about reached complete failure. I really don’t think I could have done another 10 reps if I had the time. With the last monster set, and the increased sets of 60, I hit 340 reps. Again, it did not take that long to recover. I had a pretty sweet lower back pump going, but that went away after 15 minutes.
Next week is the start of the 8 week RKC Rite of Passage routine (I didn’t name it) which consists of clean and press ladders 3x/week, followed by snatches (once/week) and swings (the other two days). The first workout uses light snatches, the second ‘medium day’ workout uses uses moderate intensity swings, and the third ‘heavy day’ workout uses high intensity ‘max effort’ swings. The ‘catch’ with the swing and snatch segments is that you do them for a duration dictated by a dice roll. If I roll a 6 on the first workout of the week that means I do snatches for sets of 20 with 1 min rest for 6 minutes. If I roll a 12 on heavy day then I go to failure. Enter the Kettlebell basically dictates that if you roll anything over a 5 on heavy days just cap it at 5, since you won’t get that far anyways! Either way, the moderate and heavy days are pretty brutal, as moderate days typically only use 10-20s rest periods, and heavy days use 5-10s rest periods. Medium days use a heavier bell for slower reps, where as heavy days use a LIGHTER bell for faster (and more) reps. Kind of counterintuitive. Clean and Press ladders start at 3×3 (3 rungs x 3 repeats), and progress to 5×5’s at the end. This should be challenging!
Warmups - 8 minutes:
Wall Squats x40
Halos with 53lb bell x20
Pumps x40
Workout - 12 minutes continuous - 53lb bell used - 340 total reps:
One-arm swings x60
1 minute active rest
One-arm swings x60
1 minute active rest
One-arm swings x60
1 minute active rest
One-arm swings x60
80 second active rest
One-arm swings x50
Double-arm swings x50
Cooldown
Duration: 20 minutes