Garage Gym Chronicles: 11/30/2024 Training Log. A Kettlebell Leg Workout
- 30minutephysique
- Dec 1, 2024
- 2 min read
Garage Gym Chronicles: 11/30/2024 Training Log. Kettlebell Leg Session
It was a great day for watching football, lifting kettlebells, and training in the backyard.
3 kettlebells and a Bulgarian stand are all I needed.
Pretty much blasted the legs and glutes beyond belief, despite the simplicity of this workout. Brutal session. I loved it.
And don't worry – I clean my gutters and rake on Sundays. And, seeing as all the trees around my house seem to finally be bare, today should, hopefully, mark the final day of raking and gutter cleaning for the year. Fingers crossed.
Ex 1: Bulgarian split squats-3x8/8
Ex 2: single leg RDL-14/14, 12/12
Ex 3: single arm kettlebell front squat-10/10, 10/10, 6/6
Ex 4: staggered kettlebell swings-12/12, 10/10, 10/10
Ex 5: 2 kettlebell toe raises-2x20
Total Time = 50 minutes
This was a great leg session that featured just 3 kettlebells – 2x28kg/62lb and 1x24kg/53lb.
I supersetted the single arm front squats and staggered swings. These are 2 PHENOMENAL exercises. One of the most phenomenal aspects about each is that each set actually requires 2 sets, so you're tricking yourself into doing twice as much volume. Therefore, while I record it as 3 sets, it's actually 6 sets per exercise.
Funny stuff – gaslighting yourself for gains, that is.
Those single arm squats and staggered swings also require a lot of core stability and coordination, giving your abs and your brain a nice bonus pump.
If you're not doing single leg RDLs, you should look to begin incorporating them into your program as soon as you have the hinge pattern mastered bilaterally (2 legs). Start out with regular RDLs, then flirt with staggered stance (aka B Stance) RDLs, and then swiftly marry yourself to the single leg variation. It's excellent for health, injury resistance, injury rehab, and hypertrophy.
Single leg RDLs have been a key exercise responsible for helping me maintain quality, pain free movement after hip labrum tears and hip impingement terrorized my everyday life – not to mention my training – during the last few years of my 20s. Unilateral leg training has played the biggest factor of eliminating my pain (the hip tears will never go away, but as long as I'm pain free, FAI and labrum tears can't affect me). Now, at 33, my hips feel the best they've felt since I began lifting weights.
Do your lunges, do your split squats, do your swings, and for the love of all that is merciful, do your single leg RDLs.
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