My Favorite Excerpts and Quotes from Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings by Don Fitch

I am embarking on a renewed journey based on Don Fitch's 2013 book Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings: Just 12 Minutes a Day to Lose Weight, Prevent Sitting Disease, Hone Your Body and Tone Your Booty! and here are some amazing quotes and excerpts that you need to check out so that you, too, become a devotee of the world of the 90-second kettlebell swings every 60-minutes lifestyle!  Here you go! Enjoy!

A recent Danish study that investigated using kettlebell swings to reduce back pain, started desk workers who suffered work related back pain with 17.5 pound (8 kg.) kettlebells for women and 26.5 pound (12 kg.) for men. Your prime purchase goal for a kettlebell is one that enables your 90-second, 54-swing sessions. The 54 swing target is a goal that you approach slowly. Many people will find a 20 pound (8kg.) weight satisfactory for their 54 swings. As you are building up your time swinging from 30 seconds, to 60 seconds, to 90 seconds(about 18, 36 and 54 swings), your repetitions are more important than the weight. Work your way up to more weight and to more ... This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Although the kettlebell swing is great for firming and shaping the arms, they don’t do the main work of lifting the kettlebell. The arms are relaxed, straight or slightly bent during the swings. Lift the kettlebell with a pop through your hips, not your arms. Your arms, forearms and hands will get plenty of exercise just guiding the weight, especially as it drops. ...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Although training intensity can be reduced with lighter weights, especially at first, for full strength and endurance benefits you should eventually be swinging a fairly heavy weight for your minute and a half mini-workouts.

Alzheimer’s disease and other memory and depressive disorders may well have sitting components. Certainly depression is associated with lack of physical exercise. Aerobic and muscular exercise, such as provided by kettlebell training, has been shown effective in treating depression, and to some extent, Alzheimer ’s d...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

As with all weight training, breathing is very important in kettlebell swings. This is covered more later, but basically the rule is to exhale on the lift phase, that is, as the weight being boosted an...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

As you begin swinging kettlebells and work your way up in weights, your first goal is to avoid injury. You may start out with negligible weight, even no weight, especially if you suffer a back or other condition that hinders the swing motion. If you have access to multiple weights, the first weight you might want to pick up may be 10 pounds. This is light enough to prevent any injuries that might result from swinging heavier weights right away. Using the guidelines from the next chapter, undertake some swings 12 for your first set. If the 12 repetitions...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

By keeping your spine straight (with its lumbar curve) you help the body focus all of its power on swinging up the kettlebell. By avoiding hunching, you protect yourself from injury. During the swing, your upper body hinges forward, as you squat only slightly. It ...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Doing one 12 minute session, then sitting all day would be less effective in combating sitting metabolic disorders. Short sessions are better than other ways, too. A heavier kettlebell can be managed when swinging for minute and a half, versus 12 minutes. A 12 minute, 432 swing session would require a lighter weight than a 90 second exercise. Muscle growth would be less robust wi...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Except in some specific training you might wish to do, your twelve minutes of daily kettlebell swings are not done at once. As a matter of fact, eight hourly sessions, each just 90 seconds long, are your best pattern for preventing metabolic diseases. Two other excellent patterns are one-minute of kettlebell swings each hour, 12 times a day or two-minutes of swings 6 times a day.

For the young and healthy, kettlebell swings offer a quick and easy way to gain peak physical form and conditioning. Perhaps more than any other single exercise, kettlebell swings build both endurance and strength. For people at mid-life kettlebells swings help keep off fat, build functional muscle and prevent sitting disease. Seniors have in the kettlebell swing the means to maintain vitality, prevent loss of mobility and fight wasting away from loss of muscle and bone by building new muscle and bone. Don’t act your age; keep yourself young and strong with kettlebell swings. People carrying too much fat often have too little muscle. The kettlebell swings help with both aspects, quickly dropping fat while rapidly building calorie burning muscle tissue.

For your 12 minute daily swings, you might well end up with one weight, but you may likely want to own a variety of kettlebells for various exercises. A kettlebell’s weight becomes easier to handle and less challenging as you swing it more and you commonly want to move up weights, so determining a favorite weight is an adjustment process. Still, i...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Getting up out of our work chair, say once an hour, to do 90 seconds of kettlebell swings may well serve as the perfect preventive behavior to the onslaught of metabolic sitting disorders. Don’t let your chair and car seat disable you; fight back with kettlebell swings!

Healthy exercise effects take place as you swing the kettlebell: • Your heart rate suddenly jumps up into training range. • Your blood flows quickly and completely, flushing and feeding cells in the farthest parts of your body. • Your lymph system, now powered by the huge pumping motions of the weighted swings, leaps in to action, optimizing lymph transport in your body. • The amount of calories you are burning suddenly jumps ten-fold. • Disease risky genes are turned off; health promoting genes are turned on. • Your muscles are used strenuously and build quickly. These new muscles respond to insulin, intake and use glucose, as well as strengthening you and just plain looking good. • Your bones, skeleton, cartilage and connective tissue immediately benefit from the precision workloads your swings impose. • Your posterior chain is strengthened (and well formed) by this most perfect exercise for toning your backside. This provides protection against lower back pain. • Your ability to think clearly is boosted by the flush of oxygenated blood to your brain and to every cell of your body.

In addition to getting up out of your chair each hour to do kettlebell swings, you may want to incorporate a couple of other stretches for your posture. One common posture goal is to raise the chest, which directly counteracts rounded shoulders and forward head. Commonly, excess sitting shortens and tightens muscles and connective tissue in the chest. These areas need stretching to allow the chest to rise and shoulder to un-round.

In some ways, kettlebells are astounding. Because of their utter simplicity, they become the most convenient form of exercise equipment possible, amazingly quick and useful. I can be sitting in my desk chair one moment, then on my feet picking up my 40 pound kettlebell the next. In another two seconds I am swinging the kettlebell and just 90 seconds (and 54 swings) later I am finished. I sit back down, huffing and puffing, energized and refreshed.

In terms of preventing the sitting diseases, getting up out of the chair many times daily to do the exercise is one of the key benefits. Whichever your choice of 12, 8 or 6 session...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Instead of counting your swings, you can use your mobile device’s clock timer function. I tell my Android device, “set timer for 90 seconds.” When the timer appears I say “start” and it counts down. I know that 90 seconds later I will have done 54 kettlebell swings. When the time is up, I can tell it, “set ti...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Kettlebell swing sessions, spaced throughout the day provide a nearly perfect “antidote” to the sitting diseases. Think about it, performing kettlebell swings is nearly the opposite activity as sitting! You can switch from sitting to swinging the kettlebell in five seconds.

Kettlebell swings are a nearly perfect way to use your skeleton; it is totally involved in your task of swinging the weight up out in front of you. Not just bones, but tendons, other connective tissue, and of course, muscles, are challenged and strengthened.

Kettlebell swings attack metabolic syndrome head on. First, they build muscle and reduce fat, both keys to the disorder. Fat build up, especially in the abdominal area, can be halted and reversed with kettlebell swings (and the other recommendations in this book). The muscles the swings produce hel...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Of course, if you are overweight, you would not aim for 20% of your body weight. You could choose a weight based on your body weight goals. Actually, if overweight, you can get by with far lighter kettlebells because you are lifting additional body weight as you do the swings. Find a weight that allows you to work up to 54 swings. Even using a light weight...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

On the other hand, quickly bringing your heart rate up, repeatedly, as in the case of interval training, also provides cardiovascular benefits. Just as interval sprints are superior to plain jogging in providing cardiovascular conditioning, it may well be the one minute, or 90 second, or two minu...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

One good way to accomplish these sessions is to have your watch give an hourly beep or buzz. As one session per hour is nearly ideal, this reminder works out really well. It is...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

One of the maladies of excess sitting is poor posture. Another is back pain. Especially while working at a computer, sitting tends to drag one down into bad posture, slumped, with rounded shoulders and head forward with a vulture neck. Such posture is not pretty and it causes back pain. To best accommodate gravity, the spine should be pretty much vertical with the head over the shoulders, not way out front. When you are slumped with forward head parts of the back are weakened, others are overstrained. Pressures on nerves and connective tissues are uneven and exaggerated. Back pain results.

One of the scarier sitting diseases is osteoporosis, thinning of the bones. Our bones are ceaselessly breaking down and rebuilding. But they need some challenge to rebuild. If all one’s time is spent with skeleton and body supported by a chair, our bones don’t get the activity and load they need to become strong. Like anything else, the rule with our skeleton is “use it or lose it.”

Some people beginning kettlebell swings may start with no weight. Just doing the swings with your hands holding an imaginary weight is a great way to start and develop good form. The box squat where you squat back and down over a 20 inch box is another zero-weight exercise that helps strengthen muscles and prepare you for kettlebell swings. Swinging no weight or very light weight offers virtually everyone the opportunity to gain the benefits of kettlebell swings. Overweight individuals or those who have not exercised for a period are wise to get a feel for the swings with no weight. Alternatively, a kettlebell of five pounds (2.3 kg) offers new users the feel and form of the weight and handles to grip.

Some trainers advocate 2 minute swing sessions, claiming that the 120 seconds of continuous exercise is better for the cardiovascular system as it keeps the heart rate up longer in the training zone. A big advantage of 2 minute swing sessions...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Swinging the kettlebell tones the core and the muscles of the posterior chain, such as hamstrings and glutes. The swing replicates natural work movements of which we used to do a lot more, such as shoveling. The basic lifting motion is part of everyday need, such as lifting a child or hefting a bag of groceries.

The basic core kettlebell swings at the heart of your new fit and fierce life require some planning and execution. Healthy as they are and quick as they build muscle and fitness, kettlebell swings require effort. The benefits don’t c...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

The entire swing takes less than two seconds; my natural rhythm is 36 swings per minute, about 1.6 seconds per swing. This pace delivers 72 swings in two minutes. 54 swings in ...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

The exercise is also ballistic, which comes from the Greek, to throw. In the kettlebell swing you do indeed then throw the weight upward, (while holding on to and guiding it), meaning you have to generate force quickly, challenging your rapid-growing fast twitch muscles.

The great news is that this perfect exercise is open to nearly everyone, of all ages and physical conditions. The motion is natural and replicates (and assists in) many daily activities. The intensity of the exercise is directly controllable by how heavy a weight is swung, and for how many swings.

The important thing is to get up out of the chair frequently and engage in the vigorous activity nearly exactly opposite of sitting. That would be the kettlebell swing. Chapter 6 will help schedule and complete your kettlebell swing sessions to best fit your schedule and provide maximum protection from sitting diseases.

The kettlebell swing involves holding the kettlebell overhand with both hands, swinging it behind and back through the legs in a hiking football motion, and then swinging up and out in front, powered by a snap of the hips. The swing momentum slows and stops with the kettlebell up at shoulder l...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

The kettlebell swing seems a simple movement, and it is. But getting your technique down perfectly while adjusting to different, heavier weights in a progression takes some time. Even before swinging the kettlebell warm up with som...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

The two handed kettlebell swing is the foundation of all kettlebell exercises. It is very dynamic, involving swinging a heavy weight in a five foot arc, quickly repeated. The quick and continuous movement is very different in look and feel than most strength training. It offers an extremely quick way to be gaining, in just a few seconds, heart healthy cardiovascular exercise along with a body shaping muscular workout.

This book asks quite a lot of you in your quest to be fit and fierce. Twelve minutes of exercise, though astoundingly short in terms of the benefits they provide, is still not trivial. You are swinging a heavy weight for dozens, even hundreds of times a day. There had better be a pretty good reason why. There is! The kettlebell swing, with its mix of cardiovascular effort and fat-burning, muscle-building, strength-training may well be the best single exercise! Your kettlebell swings reward you, per swing, and per minute: • You look better! Fat loss, muscle tuning, body shaping, booty toning and posture improvement benefit your appearance, just as they improve your endurance, strength and health. • Your body is reshaped rapidly and muscles strengthened by your swings. Flab on your arms is replaced by functional muscle. Flabby thighs become sleek. • Your training makes you smarter. Well, at least helps you think better. Your swings flood your brain with fresh, oxygenated blood and top it off with a dose of testosterone. • Your general physical abilities improve markedly. You are better able to move, to carry things, to pick up kids, to play sports, to make love, to respond to emergencies with strength and endurance. • Your swings help your posture, allowing you to stand tall. The posterior chain, so well worked with kettlebell swings, includes the key posture muscles. • Your training makes your butt look smaller! Actually your butt becomes shapelier, as the gluteal muscles in the buttocks are key lifters of the kettlebell. You strengthen and shape you entire posterior chain. This focused exercise lifts, firms, tightens and highlights these assets. Each swing makes your butt look better! • The kettlebell swing may be the most effective single exercise for your heart. Swinging the weight rapidly brings your heart into the training zone.

This concept can seem a little daunting when doing your first swings. These first swings can feel tiring, as I described my first 25 swings with a 30 pound weight. This is not unlike the first minutes of a jog, where sometimes the transition from resting state to vigorous exercise seems punishing. Within minutes of beginning jogging, though, your body adjusts to the new workload and any unpleasantness is reduced. The same occurs with ket...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

This single exercise, when repeated enough, provides huge benefits in fat loss, muscle gain and cardiovascular conditioning. Perhaps more than any other exercise, the kettlebell swing helps you slim down, pack on muscle and give your heart a healthy workout. This is why an entire book is devoted to it and to helping you do the swings that will revolutionize your fitness, strength and endurance.

To accomplish eight 90-second kettlebell swing sessions, you need to start early. Ideally, you will have done 4 sessions by noon and 4 more during the rest of the afternoon and evening. Remember, getting up and doing your swings is the price yo...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Twelve minutes of kettlebell swings daily is a fairly high goal. Weekly, you may wish to take a day or two off and do no swings. Swinging kettlebells for 12 minutes on 5 days a week still gives you an hour of exercise and delivers a monthly total of nearly 10,000 swings. Spacing your days off with 3 on, one off, 2 on would give you a rhythm such as Monday, Tue...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

When 30 pounds becomes too light for you, you can then buy individual weights at 35, 40, even 50 or 60 pounds (16kg., 18kg., 23kg., 27kg.). Heavier weights are even better for building muscle and creating strength. Don’t let a few hundr...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

You should acquire and own at least two kettlebells. They are not cheap, but they still may be the very cheapest and fastest exercise equipment. In terms of a lifelong strength and endurance aid, your kettlebell purchase may be among the best values in your life. Several forms of kettlebells are now available. Probably the best remain the black cast iron bells resembling a cannon ball. Other forms now include various colors, put on with a plastic coating. This coating may degrade with age. Not much degrades a black cast iron bell except rust. Make certain the kettlebell handle is well designed. For a two arm swing, both your hands grip the kettlebell. The handle should be sufficiently long that your hands are comfortable. I hook three fingers of each hand through the handle, with my little finger to the outside. You may try out a number of different weights in kettlebells and graduate to higher weights as your strength builds. They may be purchased in sets with various weights, such as 20, 25 and 30 pounds (9, 11.3, 13.6 kg).

Your kettlebell exercises strengthen your bones and fight osteoporosis. • Kettlebell swings are great for the back and can help overcome back pain and immobility. • Kettlebell swings are the fastest exercise. You can go from sitting to full exertion in seconds and be all done in little over a minute. • With your daily workouts, you will be fierce. And why not? You are slimmer, harder, taller, smarter, fitter, and your booty be bad! The twelve minutes are not done at once. As a matter of fact, eight sessions, each 90 seconds long may be optimal for exertion and spacing for maximizing metabolic risk protection. Eight sessions has you exercising frequently throughout the day, in quick, easy sessions. Well, quick at least. Your twelve minutes is roughly the cardiovascular equivalent of running an eight minute mile pace for a mile and a half in 12 minutes. A moderate daily aerobic workout is a key component of nearly any health regimen. It is very good for your heart health to raise your heart rate and respiration with cardiovascular exercise on a daily basis. In many ways, the first minute and a half of running a long distance is the most difficult part of a run, as the body shifts from rest to intense exercise. In this same way, the 90 second kettlebell swings are quite intense, as your body adjusts from no-load to heavy exertion immediately. Kettlebell swings represent a type of interval training, a short burst of intense exercise. Twelve minutes a day of kettlebell swings build muscle. Muscles, generally, are a good thing, helping us be athletic, protecting us from injury, burning lots of calories and basically looking good. Twelve minutes per day is a very short time to build muscle, compared say, to a construction worker doing demanding physical labor all day. The construction worker will be well muscled, but not necessarily better than yourself, because you are harnessing the weight training effect with your kettlebell swings. You can build significant muscle size and strength with just these few minutes each day, while not having to spend the entire day in hard labor.

Your mobile device also offers apps that chime once an hour (or as set up.) You will find your ability to actually accomplish the swings greatly boosted by having these frequent reminders. It can quickly become a point of pride to do your 90 second kettlebell swing session when you hear the hourly chime. Ignored chimes tend t...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

Your twelve minutes of daily kettlebell swings could theoretically be done in one 12 minute stretch. Doing so might provide the most cardiovascular benefits, as the session would move your heart rate up into the training zone nearly immediately, and keep it there for some minutes. These long minutes with your heart in th...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

In conclusion, Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings by Don Fitch is more than just a guide to fitness—it’s a call to action for anyone looking to reclaim their health and vitality in a world dominated by sitting and inactivity. With its emphasis on short, high-impact workouts, this book proves that even the busiest schedules can accommodate the transformative power of kettlebell swings. Whether you’re new to exercise or a seasoned athlete, Don Fitch’s practical advice and compelling insights make kettlebell swings an essential part of any fitness routine. So grab a kettlebell, set a timer, and swing your way to a fitter, stronger, and healthier you!