Podcast #1,048: The Swiss Army Knife of Fitness — How to Get Lean, Strong, and Flexible With Kettlebells Alone

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

What if there was one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use?

While that might sound too good to be true, my guest, Pat Flynn, would say you can find all those benefits in the old-school kettlebell. Pat, who’s the author of Strong ON!: 101 Minimalist Kettlebell Workouts to Blast Fat, Build Muscle, and Boost Flexibility―in 20 Minutes or Less, calls kettlebells the Swiss Army knife  of workout tools and the minimalist’s ultimate secret fitness weapon.

Today on the show, we unpack why Pat’s such an advocate for bells, but before we get there, we first take a dive into his background in philosophy and why beginning a workout program takes faith. We then talk about how to use kettlebells to get an all-around fit physique, including the three kettlebell weights that make for an ideal starter set, the two best exercises for building muscle, the pyramid-shaped program that can facilitate body recomposition, how to incorporate progressive overload into kettlebell training, which kettlebell exercise Coach Dan John considers “the fat-burning athlete builder,” the “300 Swings Challenge” that will help you take a Bruce Lee approach to fitness, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Become Strong Like Bull — The Kettlebell Workout
• AoM Article: How to Perform 4 Kettlebell Exercises — An Illustrated Guide
• AoM Podcast #295 — Kettlebells and the Psychology of Training
• AoM Article: Strength, Power, Conditioning — How to Master the Kettlebell Swing

Connect With Pat Flynn

• Strong ON! website
• Kettlebell Quickies YouTube Channel
• Pat on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. What if there’s one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest Pat Flynn would say, you can find all those benefits in the old school kettlebell. Pat, who’s the author of ‘Strong ON!: 101 Minimalist Kettlebell Workouts to Blast Fat, Build Muscle, and Boost Flexibility In 20 Minutes or Less’, calls kettlebells the Swiss Army Knife of workout tools and the minimalist ultimate secret fitness weapon. Today in the show, we unpack why Pat’s such an advocate for bells. But before we get there, we first take a dive into his background in philosophy and why beginning a workout program takes faith. We then talk about how to use kettlebells to get an all around fit physique, including the three kettlebell weights that make for an ideal starter set, the two best exercises for building muscle, the pyramid shape program that can facilitate body recomposition. How to incorporate progressive overloading kettlebell training, which kettlebell exercise coach Dan John considers the fat burning athlete builder. The 300 swings challenge that will help you take a Bruce Lee approach to fitness and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/kettlebell. All right. Pat Flynn, welcome to the show.

Pat Flynn: Brett, it is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you are an entrepreneur, you’re a philosopher. You got your master’s in philosophy. Hopefully we can talk about that. But you’re also probably most well known for your work in fitness. You’re a fitness coach expert. You’ve written a lot about kettlebells in particular. We’re gonna talk about that today and promoting sort of a general all around approach to fitness. But let’s start with your story a little bit. In your books that you’ve written, you talk about how your interest in fitness began with an embarrassing wet t-shirt contest in middle school. How did a wet t-shirt contest in middle school get you down the path to where you’re coaching people how to do kettlebells?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Thanks for helping me to relive this wonderful moment, Brett. I appreciate it. And [laughter] Yeah. So I had some typical middle school type of friends, right? We were in a little rock band. Nobody has heard of us. Trust me on that. And I was an overweight kid growing up. I was not athletic. I was your typical ’90s kid, right? So just a whole bunch of microwavable food and video games and all…

Brett McKay: Dunkaroos.

Pat Flynn: Stuff. Dunkaroo. Oh, man.

Brett McKay: Dunkaroos.

Pat Flynn: You do miss it though. You know, it’s like, it’s hard not to be nostalgic about that poison. But yeah, so I grew up on all that, had something of a weight problem. I was always kind of the chunky guy among our friends, and I never really liked it. It always bothered me. I had friends, so this isn’t like a super traumatic story or anything like that, but it was a problem. And it all sort of came to, yeah, a climax when we decided in the middle of band practice to just have a wet t-shirt contest among the guys, right? [laughter] And I scored a solid victory on that and it was super depressing. I was like, I have to do something about this. You know, I have a long line of obesity in my family, especially on mom’s side.

And it was pretty clear to me that if I didn’t stage an intervention, probably now, I was going to go down a path I particularly did not want to go on. And like most people who set out on a fitness journey, I was super confused. You know, my mom had all sorts of books on diet and exercise and they all said different things. So I spun in circles for probably about a year or two just trying to figure things out, having a little bit of success, but mostly frustration. Until eventually I stumbled into a martial arts studio, a Taekwondo studio. I didn’t wanna go to the weight room in my high school because that’s where a lot of my friends were. And I just didn’t feel like hearing the things that they would say [laughter] if they saw me walk in. So I tried martial arts out, fell absolutely in love with it, had a phenomenal coach who was really into physical culture.

And the value of a good coach can not be… It’s the most valuable thing in the world, right? Because if you get set on a good path early on by somebody who knows what they’re talking about and can hold you accountable, I mean, that changed my life. So that’s the story in a nutshell. Kettlebells came in a little bit later, more in college, but they were related to martial arts. In fact, my Taekwondo coach as I was competing in college, introduced me to kettlebells just as a way to increase my training efficiency. And yeah, it was love at first kettlebell swing.

Brett McKay: Did you do anything like experiment with CrossFit or bodybuilding or power lifting in between when you started with the Taekwondo and then moving to kettlebells?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I was doing your traditional bodybuilding sort of bro split for a while. I amazingly missed a lot of the CrossFit scene. ‘Cause when CrossFit was becoming very popular, that was when I was really getting into kettlebells. So there were elements and certain aspects of my training that certainly were influenced by what was going on in the CrossFit scene. But no, I never got fully wrapped up into that. I sort of went just from your traditional, let’s do a bro split with lots of traditional cardio and a treadmill, which is fine. I really don’t have anything like seriously against that. And it was pretty effective for me. But I was looking to increase efficiency and try to find something that as a busy college kid would be a bit more directly applicable to what I was interested in, which was competing in Taekwondo.

Brett McKay: So you’re not only a fitness coach, I mentioned this earlier, you have your master’s degree in philosophy. Is there a particular branch of philosophy that you’re interested in and have been studying?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So I’m actually, I’m doing the PhD right now. And where I focus is in philosophy of religion, which is a weird name for a branch of philosophy, ’cause it’s not a bunch of religious people doing philosophy. It’s really a form of systematic philosophy or what’s sometimes called worldview construction. So it’s philosophers who try to establish like big picture theories of everything. Like how do we make sense of the broad scale phenomena of the world? Things like causation and change and time and all that fun stuff. And is there a fundamental aspect to the world? So totally unrelated to fitness, at least initially. But one of the things that goes into my area of study is the question of the good life of ethics and meta ethics. And there are definitely some links to fitness there. So I occasionally have my worlds collide, but most of the time I’m kind of just, yeah, doing two separate things.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In your work, in the books you’ve written, you talk about Aristotle a lot. And then consequently Aquinas, ’cause Aquinas picked up on Aristotle and tried to make a connection between Greek philosophy and the religious life. Talk about it. Let’s talk about Aristotelianism ’cause I’m a big fan of a Aristotle. How has Aristotelianism ethics, you can even say maybe metaphysics, how has it influenced your approach to fitness?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. Great question. It’s a big one. We could spend a whole episode on it. You mentioned Aquinas. He’s actually a guy I specialize in. I focus on a lot of his metaphysical thought. And he, of course, as you said, Brett, is building on and developing an Aristotelian account of the world. Sort of a blend of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. But Aristotle specifically thinks about ethics along the following lines: He’s often called a virtue ethicist or a natural law theorist. So Aristotle thinks that there is such a thing as a human nature. And so you have a human nature, I have a human nature. And this nature is determined to a particular end. And we can either reach that particular end, and if we do, we are like a flourishing instance of human nature. Like we’re most excellent to use Bill and Ted language, or we can fail to reach that particular end.

And so what is human nature? Well, it’s something like rational animality. So we’re supposed to use our rationality to discern all the sorts of things that are really good for us. ‘Cause there’s lots of things that are really good for us that cause us to flourish as the kinds of things that we are. And of course, part of how this is done, is through the development or attainment of certain virtues. And virtues are really just perfections of our powers. And you have some kind of big virtues. They’re sometimes called cardinal virtues. Things like temperance, fortitude, justice. These are like the hinge virtues. Prudence is the other big one. And the way this relates to fitness is along… I think actually pretty obvious lines, right? I think it’s empirically obvious that it is good for us to pursue certain activities that cause us to be healthy to try and achieve that sort of ideal interplay of the organs and bodily systems.

So that’s just important for just general physical health. And Aristotle is big on that. He thinks that we’re matter, soul composite. So he thinks that we have an immaterial soul, but he’s still very much committed to us being material beings as well. So how he thinks about the good life very much concerns our physical embodiment, if you will. But exercise and diet can also be good ways just to practice certain virtues, right? And we can think of the two cardinal virtues of temperance and fortitude. So I mean, like, fortitude is the gym and temperance is diet. [laughter] It’s kind of as simple as that, right? Fortitude is doing the things that are tough because we know that they’re good for us. And having that sort of practical grit, that’s what fortitude is about, doing the hard things that are important and temperance is being able to resist certain things that we know we should resist at certain times because they’re not particularly good for us. They do not cause us to flourish. And of course, various forms of dietary control and fasting fall right into that very neatly. I mean, there’s a good reason that fasting has always been used as a sort of moral and spiritual discipline. It’s because it very much is a way to help to develop yourself along these sort of Aristotelian lines. If that makes sense.

Brett McKay: That makes perfect sense. So part of living a good life is as Aristotle said you have to have a physically healthy body. He talks about it explicitly in his Nicomachean ethics. And I like the idea that fitness can be a way to develop these virtues like you mentioned, in my experience, the most visceral thing that has taught me virtue, these excellence in like temperance, prudence, practical wisdom has been my weight trainings. You just… You experience it in your body. And I’ve noticed that whenever I try to convey this stuff to young people that I mentor, I’m always going to like weightlifting or sports analogies. ‘Cause for some reason, I just think it lands more when you make that body connection.

Pat Flynn: They click, it clicks especially for a lot of young men, I found, and I’ve certainly had a similar experience, Brett, like certain perennial truths just kind of like became obvious for me in the weight room, but also with respect to certain vices too. So you gotta be careful, for Aristotle, the virtue is the golden mean between two extremes of an excess and deficiency. And you can see people who get into fitness, but they sort of obsess over it and they develop certain vices because they don’t have it properly ordered in relation to the other goods of their life. And again, that’s sort of a failure of prudence. So while fitness can be a fantastic opportunity to acquire certain virtues, you have to be intentional about it. Of course, what kind of goes into the mix of a lot of moral decision making for Aristotle is not just outcomes, but intentions. What is the intention you bring behind it? So I always encourage people focus on that, make sure you’re going into this with the right sort of intention. Because if you go in with just various sort of narcissistic and ego comparative sorts of intentions, yeah, you might get stronger and more muscular, but you could be giving yourself some sort of greater mental and and spiritual problems down the line, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay: Yeah. For Aristotle and the virtue ethic tradition, the results or consequences are not only important, but the intentions behind the action that resulted in that consequence are also just as important.

Pat Flynn: Yep. 100%.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you’re someone who was baptized Catholic. You became atheist, then found your way back into the church, and now you’re getting your PhD in the philosophy of religion. So have you seen a connection between pursuing excellence and fitness, not only with philosophy, but also with faith?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So I’m sort of the cliche story of the guy that first got into philosophy and it brought me very far away from faith and religion. And then the further I went philosophically, especially asking questions about like, fundamentality, these questions that I’m interested in and are relevant to philosophy of religion, it brought me back and at least it brought me back to a philosophical understanding of God. And once you have that, it sort of opens you up to the possibility of greater religious and spiritual ideas, which I eventually investigated and it came to hold rather firmly. So yeah, I think faith is a form of trust. It’s a virtue. It’s actually a theological virtue. In the tradition, Aquinas talks about faith as a theological virtue, which is, for him a true virtue even higher than the cardinal virtues. What’s the connection to fitness?

Well, in most forms of Christianity anyways, they sort of baptize Aristotelianism. So they kind of like take Aristotle and they just move him a little bit further along and they’re essentially like Aristotle, you got a lot, right? But there’s just a few things that you’re missing. The ultimate end of the human being is not a natural end. It’s a supernatural end. And it is to know what is most true, truth itself, and to love what is most good, goodness itself. And ultimately they maintain that to be God, the God of classical theism specifically. Right? But God is, as Aquinas would talk about it, he has this kind of like very philosophical, somewhat spooky, but I think ultimately correct view of God, that God just is subsistent existence or pure being and pure goodness itself. That when we acquire certain virtues and we move along in the spiritual life, we’re actually participating in God.

We’re sort of increasing ourselves along these relevant dimensions where we become more perfect and we participate in the good. He’s got this sort of Neoplatonic aspect in his otherwise Aristotelian philosophy. And of course this is ultimately meant to orient us, orient our will to our supernatural end, which is the beatific vision. So traditional Christianity is Aristotelianism plus is the way I like to talk about it. So you can just… The faith can take everything that we already said about Aristotle and then integrate it into a larger perspective where our ultimate good is fundamentally relational. It’s relating to our creator in a particular way. But to have that right sort of relation, you need faith. It is a theological virtue that makes that possible. And also eventually you need to have perfection and moral perfection. So it integrates or links up in a much higher, I think more extravagant and I think ultimately more beautiful way too. But it’s certainly not contrary in any sense, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay: So, okay. It sounds like where Aristotelianism says be fit, be healthy to achieve human flourishing or excellence, your faith says to take that, to keep that, but then also point it to the divine, which is that big metaphysical perspective. But do we see faith in fitness on a more day-to-day basis? Like in the gym?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, just speaking personally, Brett, I mean, when I converted, when I became Christian, it totally changed my intentions of what am I working out for? I mean, look, I think I had all the wrong sorts of intentions starting out. I mean, originally, my fitness motivation was very negative. I just wanted to get away from being teased and made fun of. But then it became, like once I started getting results and I thought I started looking good, it became very narcissistic, right? It kinda became obsessive, ego comparative. So I don’t think I was doing it for particularly good reasons. A lot of the actions could stay the same. So this relates to what we were talking about before, but the reasons I am doing those actions, those started to fundamentally change.

So I started thinking about, okay, well how can fitness be used to strengthen the relationships I have with other people, to help other people, to be an inspiration to my kids, to make sure that I’m around for my kids, that I can teach them the virtues, that I can help them practice the faith in certain unique and important ways. So I’m not sure if this is totally answering your question, but the answer is, it changed everything, right? At least for me, it completely reoriented. Not all the things I do, I still did a lot of the same things, but the reasons for which I did them.

Brett McKay: Something I’ve seen, if we use like Paul’s definition of faith from the Hebrews, right? It’s like a substance of things hoped for, but not seen. Right?

Pat Flynn: But not seen, yeah.

Brett McKay: I think kind of playing it back to fitness, starting a fitness journey requires some faith, right? You might cognitively know like, oh, if I do these things, I will get in shape. But for a lot of people, they don’t believe it. I’ve seen people when they first start their fitness journey…

Pat Flynn: Yeah, great point.

Brett McKay: They’re just like, I don’t think this is gonna work. Like, I’m doing the thing and it’s not working the way I wanted. But for the people that it ends up working for, they have to like kind of have faith. They have to have faith in the process. Like faith is trust, right? They have to trust their coach. Like if you just keep doing the stuff, it’ll work out. Then you kinda have to use faith as sort of an animating force in your action until you see the fruits of it and then you just know.

Pat Flynn: And then you don’t need faith anymore. Right? That’s the idea in heaven. Like that virtue drops away ’cause you don’t need it. That’s a great example, Brett, I think it’s totally true, is that faith at the end of the day is an act of the will, right? Like, you’re not gonna have this certainty in many areas of life, but what do you have? Well, you have the grounds for reasonable affirmation, oftentimes just testimony. But look, we have to take a lot of testimony on faith and reasonably affirm it all the time. There’s so many things that we know or we think we know, only because other people have told us. Right? And presumably reliable people. So you mentioned the coach. That’s right. You might not believe it in a sense that you have complete certainty that this is gonna turn out the way that you want, but you make in a particular act of the will to commit yourself to this way of living. And you commit yourself to the process. And then over time, eventually, right. Hopefully, you don’t even need that faith anymore because you’ve seen the fruits, you’ve been through it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So let’s get into kettlebells specifically, in your new book, Strong ON! You make the case for how kettlebells can help you get strong, get lean, can even help you increase mobility all in just 20 minutes a day. So that’s some great copy there. But I think it’s true though, ’cause you yourself, you’ve seen the fruit spear out in your own physique. And something you’ve talked about for a long time, is that you argue for being a fitness generalist over a fitness specialist. And you know, when you’re a fitness generalist, you’re not trying to be the strongest in the world. You’re not trying to have a professional bodybuilder physique. You just wanna be physically skilled in a variety of areas. So you’re lean, you’re mobile, you’re strong, you’re flexible. So you’re prioritizing general all around health. So why are you such a big advocate for kettlebells and how do kettlebells fit into your generalist fitness philosophy?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I think the kettlebell is something like the Swiss Army Knife of functional fitness. And again, trying to set the right expectations. It’s not the best tool for every particular job, but it’s good to great at pretty much all the jobs, right? Like if you wanna build strength, awesome, kettlebells can do that. You wanna put on muscle, great, no problem. You can definitely do that with kettlebells. You wanna improve your mobility, flexibility, check. You want to improve your endurance and metabolic conditioning. I think they actually are probably a killer app for that. They’re definitely one of the best tools for that. So it’s really the sort of family man’s or family woman’s solution. I sometimes call them the minimalist ultimate secret fitness weapon. So for the generalist, I think they’re an easy and obvious choice, especially if you’re, I guess like me a little bit and you know, you kind of like just workout efficiency. You’ve got lots of things going on. I know you do too, Brett, so you might be a little bit time crunched. Can’t spend hours a day in the gym like you could back in college. I think they’re worth giving a solid look at for sure.

Brett McKay: And what’s nice too, they’re affordable, they don’t take up much space. Another nice benefit. They’re portable. You could take them with you on a road trip and keep continuing your training. You mentioned the limitations. They’re not great for everything. What do you think are the limitations of kettlebells?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. Like anything, every tool has certain limits. Some of these limits just concern exercise selection, right? So if we’re looking at the fundamental movements, they’re kind of limited with overhead pulling, no big deal, you know, throw in pull-ups, that’s a good way to kind of balance that out. You also don’t get a whole lot of work for the, you know, feet, ankles and calves. No big deal. Throw in some jump rope and running, you can fill that gap pretty easy. So like anything else, you know, they’re not absolutely perfect. I don’t think the kettlebell is the end all be all. I just think they’re really darn good, right? Especially if you’re into this whole generalist thing.

Brett McKay: And maybe we should… Like, for those who aren’t familiar with the kettlebell, I mean we’re assuming people know what a kettlebell is, but a kettlebell, it just looks like a cannonball with a handle on it.

Pat Flynn: Yes. Right. Yeah. It’s a cannonball with a handle. They became like really popular. I don’t know, Brett, like what, 15 years ago? Something like that. And Pavel, Tsatsouline, Dan John, who’s a great friend of mine who’s been on your show before, started bringing them into the mainstream. And you know, a lot of people thought, “Hey, this is probably just gonna be a fad. It’ll go away in a few years.” But it really hasn’t been. Now you walk into most gyms and they have pretty decent kettlebell collections. They are a very traditional form of weightlifting. The style and method of how they’re used of course has varied over time. But I think that they are just a tremendous tool for just putting good basic principles of strength and conditioning into practice for busy people.

Brett McKay: So for those who wanna give kettlebell training a try, what size kettlebells do you recommend people get to start off with?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, good question. I get this one a lot. So let’s assume that you maybe have some sort of general fitness background. You know, you don’t have to be a professional athlete or anything like that, but you’ve lifted weights before. Then for men, I generally recommend getting a set, if you can, of three different kettlebells. Something like a 16 kilogram, a 24 kilogram and a 32 kilogram, kettlebell people are weird. We still go by kilograms, right?

Brett McKay: Well, sometimes they use poods. Isn’t that one of the…

Pat Flynn: Yeah, poods, the old pood, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Brett McKay: The Russian, yeah.

Pat Flynn: So yeah, it’s just this weird traditional thing. But that’s a good set. If that seems a little bit too heavy, then just shift down, you know, to I would say like a 12 kilogram, a 16 kilogram and a 24 kilogram. And between those different weights, you’ll have sufficient intensity for upper body exercises, lower body exercises, like goblet squats and stuff like that. The explosive movements like swings, the grinds like military presses. So you’ll be able to sufficiently challenge yourself if you have that range. For women, same idea, just shifting again a little bit down, I find that something like a 6 or an 8 kilogram, you know, a 12 kilogram and a 16 or 20 kilogram is a good solid starting set.

Brett McKay: And you want sets of these different three sizes. Is that the idea?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So you could just have just those three. You could double up if you want. Because double kettlebell exercises are sort of that next step and they’re really effective, especially if you wanna get more serious with the kind of limit strength and hypertrophy training. I don’t demand it or require it starting out. And the cool thing with kettlebells is you can use… I mean, you can do this with any piece of equipment, right? But with kettlebells you can use two kettlebells of different sizes. You can have one size heavier kettlebell in your right arm for presses a bit lighter in your left, just switch sides every set. It works great.

Brett McKay: Oh, another one of the benefit of kettlebells that you were talking about as we were talking about it that came to my mind was kettlebell training’s fun. It’s different like because you’re swinging, it’s not like a barbell where you’re just going up and down. Kettlebells, you can kind of move in different planes.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Part of the reason I fell in love with it, it just felt like punk rock exercise, it’s very unconventional. I was into that sort of thing, you know, I was a teenager when I first found them, you know, it’s grungy. I started training with them in a real grungy martial arts gym. It just felt different. It was more dynamic. With kettlebells, I’m sure we’ll talk about this at some point. You can do complexes very seamlessly of just transitioning between different exercises. You know, taxing multiple muscle groups and energy systems simultaneously. Just felt like a cool way to train as a want-to-be martial artist. It felt like, yeah, this is the way I should be training. It was fun. It was engaging in a way that other forms of lifting, which I was perfectly happy to do, they just didn’t grip me in the same way.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve had those moments with my training where I get kind… I do the bro split. I’m doing like hypertrophy stuff…

Pat Flynn: Rock on.

Brett McKay: Curls, whatever. For the most part I enjoy it. But just periods I’m like, ah, geez, I don’t wanna do this today. And I’ll do a little kettlebell stuff ’cause it just feels nice. It feels fun. It freshens things up.

Pat Flynn: And they’re certainly compatible, right? Like you could do the bro split bodybuilding, you know, three, four days a week. And then if you just wanna keep up on your conditioning or add a little bit of MetCon, which certainly can serve a purpose, you could just throw in a few kettlebell complexes one to two days per week. So kettlebells don’t have to replace your current program for people who are interested. You could find a way that they could supplement or compliment what you’re already doing.

Brett McKay: For sure. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so we got our kettlebells, these little cannonballs with handles on them. What do we do with them? What are the basic kettlebell movements?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. So I cover six or seven in my book, something along those lines. And for the single kettlebell exercises, there are a few that I always recommend that people focus on first. Obviously, there’s the kettlebell swing. Many of your gentle listeners have probably seen this before. Dan John calls it the fat burning athlete builder. It’s an aggressive hip hinge. It’s a power movement. If people are unfamiliar with these exercises, just type my name and kettlebell into YouTube and you’ll find many tutorials on all of these. So the kettlebell swing is great. That’s your foundational kettlebell exercise. A good compliment to that is the goblet squat, also goes back to our friend Dan John. He actually invented the goblet squat as legend has it? Yeah. Awesome thing just to remind your hips how they’re supposed to work. Just good way to even just kind of teach people the fundamental mechanics of a squat.

We have for the upper body, military press, again, classic exercise, super effective. Then getting a little bit more advanced we have kettlebell cleans, which helps to get the kettlebell in what’s called the rack position, where you initiate and finish lots of other exercises like the military press. And the clean is cool because it helps teach you not just force production and reduction like the swing, but also force redirection. It’s an important athletic quality. And then we had the kettlebell snatch, which is similar to a clean except for the kettlebell now winds up overhead. So really a big stroke of an exercise, phenomenal for just total body conditioning and endurance and grip strength. And then the kinda weird exercise that people either really love or really hate when it comes to kettlebell training is the Turkish Get-Up and this essentially has seven steps to it, depending on how you analyze it. And it really is just getting up and off the ground while holding weight overhead. Really great for strength obviously, but stability and mobility as well, especially for the hips, knees, and shoulders.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the Turkish Get-Up. It works your brain. ‘Cause you have to think about it a lot. If you haven’t done it in a while, you think, okay, how do I have to move myself so this weight doesn’t crash down on my face and I can get up into a standing position. So I think it’s a good one for like fighting aging.

Pat Flynn: It is, and I think it’s a great conditioning tool too. A lot of people use it just to lift a bunch of weight because you’re using, you know, the stanchion of your skeleton. So it is a good strength move. But two things about the get-up. One is when people are learning it, I teach it in the book actually from reverse. Start standing, go to the ground and get back up. That’s a bit more intuitive way to learn the steps. You still gotta pay attention to the steps, but it’s a little less clumsy than starting from the ground. So that’s called the reverse get-up. I think that’s a good teaching tool. And then the cool thing about the get-up is, it’s also just a great warmup and mobility exercise. So as you’re learning the move, just do like five to 10 minutes of get-ups, you know, in the morning or before your workout with either zero weight or very lightweight just to get those steps down and feel really confident with them, it’ll serve as a great functional warmup for your workout and teach you the pattern that you know, pretty quickly, you can start to throw some serious weight around if you want to.

Brett McKay: So in the book you get very specific with programming, but just kind of high level, how do you program kettlebells to hit different goals? So maybe you wanna get stronger, say you wanna get bigger muscles hypertrophy or like you just wanna get better conditioning. How do you program with the kettlebell?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Awesome. Let’s take a few examples. So, I always like to tell people, I say this in the book, like, kettlebells aren’t like some magic tool that work fundamentally different than anything else. Like, the principles of strength or the principles of muscle or the principles of fat loss just are what those principles are. I just wanna show you how to implement those principles with kettlebells. So for example, if we wanna build muscle, this is a good one to start with. You know, there are certain principles that go into that equation, and one is a principle related to volume. So how much you sort of lift throughout the week. And generally if you wanna build muscle, you kind of need at least around 10 big sets per major muscle group or movement pattern per week. You know, and you can kind of divide that up how you want.

You might have, you know, one day it sets a three another day sets a three and another day sets a four, right? Something like that. So that’s one of the principles for building muscle, muscle takes for those who are trying to be minimalists, it’s important to understand that muscle takes the most amount of work. It’s just the most demanding in terms of time. And there’s no way around it. You can just be more or less efficient with your efforts. The other key for muscle is intensity. So it’s not just enough to lift a lot with respect to volume. You also need to be lifting pretty hard and heavy. So you want to be working, you know, close to technical failure for many if not all of those sets. And technical failure is not absolute failure. Absolute failure is where the weight doesn’t move anymore at all.

Technical failure is where you notice some sort of serious, obvious, qualitative decrease in your reps. So, you know, say you’re doing pushups and your shoulders start really flaring out or you lose the neutral spine and it just looks like things are falling apart. That’s the idea of technical failure. And it usually comes right before or is even simultaneous with absolute failure depending on the exercise. So you really wanna push that. And those are kind of the two principles for building muscle that aren’t nutrition. There’s nutrition principles as well. So with kettlebells, what does that look like? Well, there’s two exercises that are really great for hypertrophy training with kettlebells: One is the double kettlebell clean and press. So you’ll get a lower body hinge there, but for the upper body traps, shoulders and upper packs and triceps, this is a really good muscle builder.

Easy to get a good amount of… Not easy ’cause it’s a hard lift, right? But it’s well suited for a higher volume type of training. And the other one is a kettlebell front squat. Again, another very large compound exercise, high degree of neuromuscular facilitation, classic muscle builder. So you could be pretty minimalist in your approach with kettlebells where you could just kind of take just a few exercises. Those two maybe add some pull-ups or rows and some sort of hinge, whether it’s a single leg deadlift or even if you just wanted to throw in a barbell for fun, just a barbell deadlift. And then just try and hit the sorts of volume and intensity that we just talked about, Brett. And that would be one way that you can put the kettlebell to use for a particular goal. And I have a program, you know, like that, not just in my book, but also online. If people look up, it’s called the Prometheus Protocol. It uses double clean, impressive front squat to build muscle with kettlebells if people are interested in that.

Brett McKay: How about kettlebells for let’s say metabolic conditioning?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. So a lot of people use metabolic conditioning ’cause they’re interested in body recomposition. So they hear that metabolic conditioning or metabolic resistance training is really good for that. And that’s true, right? Because this tends to burn a lot of calories, it increases that metabolic afterburn or epoch exercise, post oxygen consumption. Helps you to kind of burn more calories automatically rather than just manually. The thing I advise with this is that, you know, treat metabolic conditioning like the bourbon to the sauce of a good training program, a little bit goes a long way. People can tend to really overdo this is, and I think that’s one of the lessons we’ve learned from CrossFit. Is that you can really push metabolic conditioning to an extent that it can become, it’s just horrible overkill, right? So if people are interested in body recomposition, I actually recommend a pyramid style program.

And by pyramid, I’m asking people to imagine like the old food pyramid, which has been, I guess resigned in disgrace. But it’s a good illustration for exercise where at the bottom of the pyramid you have a form of exercise that you do every day. And that’s something like brisk walking. So that obviously doesn’t require kettlebells at all, but it can also be a lot of mobility work, which you can do with kettlebells, you know, light Turkish Get-Ups, windmills. This is the form of exercise that should not be that demanding. You should be able to hold a conversation, you’re just moving at a relatively low level. It’s healthy, it’s good for your heart, burns calories, right? Try and do that every day, 30 to 60 minutes. In the middle of the pyramid, you have your basic strength and hypertrophy training, two to four days per week.

Nothing fancy here. Use Dan John’s formula. You know, pick five big lifts, do three sets of six to 12 reps and, you know, push the intensity. And for kettlebells you can use military presses, front squats, goblet squats, kettlebell swings, double cleans, single arm rows, tons to pick from there, which all are super useful. And then the metabolic conditioning, Brett, comes in at the top, it’s the top of the pyramid, the kind of dessert area. I like bourbon to the sauce of the program. And really, I think here, honestly just like one to two, maybe three days per week of 10 to 20-ish minute sessions because we’re doing just really high intensity kettlebell complexes.

And this is where we string together different exercises, you know, things like swings, cleans, snatches, push presses, lunges, perform them back to back with little to no rest in between. To again, keep the system working as a whole, you know, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, but switching through various muscle groups. So not anyone is reaching failure. And that’s what gives you that kind of awesome afterburn effect and improves your metabolic efficiency. So that’s a long answer, but I always like to situate metabolic conditioning within a wider program. I don’t usually have a program that it’s like, it’s just MetCon. I actually don’t think that’s the most efficient or effective way to go for most goals.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, MetCon is, you’re gonna use the kettlebell to get really out of breath and sweaty.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. It’s the love to hate type of exercise. Yeah, right. For sure.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So, you know, a key driver in getting stronger, increasing muscle mass is progressive overload, which is you increase reps or you increase intensity. You know, with barbell training it’s pretty easy to add intensity or add weight. So you can add five pounds to the bar, 10 pounds, 15.

Pat Flynn: Yep.

Brett McKay: Kettlebell, you just have the kettlebell. How do you make things harder with kettlebells when you don’t have that sort of incremental increase ability?

Pat Flynn: Smart. It’s tougher with kettlebells. You have to get more creative. But I think it’s a good exercise ’cause it forces you to think more about other variables and how to be creative. So you’re right, to get stronger, you need to use progressive overload. You need to push the intensity, you need to put certain demands on your body that essentially says, “Hey, you better get stronger or you’re gonna like snap in half.” And your body eventually responds to that. So there’s a couple like kind of tricks, right? So let’s just take the military press. This is a good example and a commonplace where people get stuck. So military press is where you just press one or two kettlebells overhead and say you’re like at a 24 kilogram, but the next size kettlebell is a 28 kilogram. That’s actually a pretty significant leap.

Especially if you feel like the 24 is already pretty heavy. So what can you do here? There’s a couple different strategies. One of course is just to find kettlebell sizes in between. And fortunately kettlebells are so popular these days, you can find smaller increments, but that requires a bit more financial investment. Some people might wanna make that or not, but that option is available. I don’t typically use it, but it’s there now, whereas it wasn’t there like 15 years ago. So that’s nice. What you can do of course, is throughout your programming is you can just wave the other variables, right? So, okay, maybe you’re pressing the 24 for eight reps, but you can’t press the 28 for eight reps, but maybe you can press it for three to five. Okay. Well, then you have one day in your programming where you’re just working with that 28 at the lower rep range to begin getting the type of stimulus that you need to eventually move it to the higher rep ranges.

So just working within other variables is a smart way to do that as well. In fact, for pressing, just to give people a more concrete plan, if you wanna get your pressing up, I recommend having three days per week. One day where you just go really, really heavy, like one to three reps, maybe five reps, the heaviest bell you can handle, you’re fighting for every one of those reps. It’s intense. Then you have another day of moderate intensity of volume. So you know, you’ll go one or two bell sizes down, maybe working between eight to 12 reps, many, many sets, right? And then you have a third day of speed and power. So this is where you might do push presses and jerks to work the other end of the force velocity spectrum. ‘Cause you can get stronger not just by lifting more weight, but by lifting the same weight with more speed.

And with that approach, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to make some pretty impressive leaps in your overall strength without needing those small increments, the micro loading. And you can really apply that to virtually any other lift as well. One more trick for the press is there’s exercise variations, right? So maybe you can’t strict press a certain bell, but what you could do if you wanna get to that next size heavier kettlebell is you could long push press it. And a long push press is where you take a deep squat with the kettlebell in the rack and then you slowly come out of the squat using just the least amount of momentum that you need to get the kettlebell overhead. So it serves as a sort of functional overload press. And then you slowly through the eccentric, the downward portion of the movement, lower the kettlebell down. And that stimulus, that overload stimulus will help you to get stronger to the point where you’ll eventually be able to strict press it. So those are a couple different strategies that I explore in my book and elsewhere of how you can get around this. Yeah. A little bit of an annoying issue of not being able to microload with kettlebells.

Brett McKay: Something you’re famous for is your 300 Swings Challenge. So it’s 300 swings… It’s every day for 30 days, right?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s right. It sounds kind of crazy, but it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What led you to develop this protocol?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, boy. So like 11 or 12 years ago, I used to write for a fitness site that has since gone somewhat, I think, out of business. And we were kind of brainstorming an idea for a fitness challenge. And I don’t know about you, Brett, but like way back when, when that movie 300 came out, I was like one of those kind of younger-ish dudes who was like, “Oh man, this guy’s looks so awesome.” And like anything 300 was like the thing. I mean, there’s like all sorts of 300 workouts that were going on and stuff like that. And most of them were just almost complete nonsense. So as I kind of like got older, I always thought there was something cool. It’s about like, yeah, a 300 challenge, right? People would like that sort of thing. So…

But how can we make it like useful and reasonable and difficult but also purposeful and to ensure that people aren’t gonna like get totally burnt out or injured. And that’s where he came up with the 300 swings per day kettlebell challenge. And the kettlebell swing as Dan John calls it the fat burning athlete builder. It’s such a bang for buck exercise. You know it builds your conditioning, it builds your power, it builds what people call kettle booty, your glutes, strengthens the low back, strengthens the hamstrings, burns a mountain of calories. There’s a reason people love the kettlebell swing. It’s just such an awesome exercise.

And it generally lends itself well to a higher frequency approach as long as you’re smarter about it. So I put together the 300 Swings Kettlebell Challenge to accomplish two things: One to help improve people’s general conditioning and power with kettlebell swings and also give them an opportunity to take a Bruce Lee approach to exercise. You know Bruce Lee is like, “Hey don’t throw a thousand kicks, throw one kick a thousand times.” And the idea there is you focus really with a ton of intention, there’s that word again, on all the nuances of a particular technique with every repetition in order to master it. And I think people would do well to approach exercise with that mindset where we’re not just trying to lift heavy load, but we’re trying to move with beauty, with elegance, with precision to have real bodily control. And I think the kettlebell swing is an awesome athletic movement that is worth just trying to make it look good and elegant. And when you have 300 reps a day to practice it, you can do that. All right. It’s a good amount of practice.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Pavel says strength is a skill. You have to practice the skill of strength.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it’s so true. It’s like anything else. It’s technique and how you organize your practice. But I always tell people, you know, look, if you’re starting out, you don’t necessarily wanna start with 300 swings every single day, you can stagger it, you know, build up the volume gradually. And also when I run these challenges and in the book, we’re not doing the swings exactly the same way every day. Sometimes we’re going very light. Sometimes we’re spreading the swings out throughout the day. We use ladders, we use EMOMs, we use different swing variations. So there’s some intentional variety. So it’s pretty intentional and I think pretty well thought out that it serves a useful purpose without just being like some crazy over the top fitness challenge.

Brett McKay: When you do the 300 swings challenge, is this like what you’re doing for your training that day? Or are you doing that in addition to your regular training?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it could be either. So I think it does function as a nice standalone and I have some options for people to just fill some gaps, you know, to put in some goblet squats and presses to make sure they’re not just training hinges. But I think it also is manageable enough that you can staple it to an already existing program. Of course, it always depends, like what is that program? How demanding is it? 300 swings a day isn’t particularly easy, but it’s reasonable enough that it can definitely be conjoined to an existing program.

Brett McKay: So we talked about how you can use kettlebells to get stronger, build muscle, increase your metabolic conditioning. You’ve mentioned you can use kettlebells to improve mobility like the Turkish Get-Up. Any other ways you can use a kettlebell to improve your mobility?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. The kettlebell windmill is great. That’s something I recommend people incorporate into their routine as soon as possible. And the windmill is nice ’cause with kettlebells, it’s not really a side bend, which you sometimes see in yoga. Really, what the windmill is, is a combination of hip hinging and thoracic rotation. And this is just a phenomenal exercise to sort of cure what ails modern America, right? So I mean we have the vulture posture and we’re constantly over a computer and we’re just in this slumped position all the time. So the windmill is just a really, really great way to open the hips, to loosen the posterior chain, the tight hamstrings, the shoulders and the upper back. So in terms of bang for buck mobility exercises, that’s way up there. People might also wanna check out kettlebell halos. And in fact, I think the goblet squat itself.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah.

Pat Flynn: It’s just such a good exercise for loosening the hips, knees, and ankles. And what you can do is you can just sit in the bottom of the goblet squat with a light kettlebell and use your elbows to pry your knees out side to side, find space in your hips and just spend time there. It’s super simple. You could just do it throughout the day just to break up those sticky hip joints, you know, from all those hours of sitting. So a few exercises really go a long way with kettlebells on that front.

Brett McKay: Another way I’ve used kettlebells for mobility is I’ll do this stretch. It’s for the hamstrings, where I’ll prop a foot up on a bench. And then I’ll have the kettlebell in my hands. And I’ll just kind of lower it down as far as I can go. Does that make sense? I’m I making sense here.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. You’re teaching me something new. This sounds really great. Continue, I wanna hear the rest of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then you’re kind of doing this deep… You feel it a lot in your hamstring and in your butt, your glute, of that leg that’s propped up. And I’ll just hold it down there. ‘Cause the weight kind of helps you go down a little bit further and further. And then you can pull it back up. And then… So that’s another one that I would use for it.

Pat Flynn: What you point out there, Brett, is something that I think is seriously under appreciated is that you can and should use weights for your mobility and flexibility training. Weighted exercises are really effective for improving mobility and flexibility, assuming that you’re judicious in how much weight you apply and you’re not going too crazy right out of the gate.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another thing I like about the kettlebell is that you can use it for specific training, but then you can also use it for movement snacks throughout the day. I have a kettlebell in one of the rooms in my house. And sometimes I’ll just walk by it and do a couple swings, nothing intense, but it’s kind of a movement snack, get the blood going, kind of invigorate myself. I’ll also do carries with it. So the other day I was… I did a… What’s it’s… A waiter carry. So I lifted up the kettlebell with one arm, fully extended like I’m a waiter carrying a tray. And I just kind of walked around my house like a weirdo.

Pat Flynn: But it’s your house. That’s what you’re allowed to do. Right, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it felt good. So yeah, carry exercises I think are another benefit of kettlebells.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, totally agree. And the idea of movement snacks is something that I’ve talked about for a while. I certainly didn’t invent them I’m just a fan of them like you are. And the idea is hey kettlebells are kind of cool insofar as you can just leave them, you know throughout your house and the challenge is like anytime you go by that kettlebell, do something with it. Maybe you pick it up and move it to the other room where you’re going, maybe the kettlebell follows you around your house all day long. In fact, that’s what they used to torture us with in the old school kettlebell sets. Throughout the whole weekend, you had to bring your kettlebell everywhere, to the bathroom if you went to the bathroom, you had to do it. So you could do that in the house. It’s a little weird, but let me tell you, it adds up, and whenever you get to a new room, you could do a set of swings or squats or mobility exercise. And the idea here is that, look, exercise and movement is cumulative. We can totally break free of the mindset that we have to do all of our exercise in this condensed period of time at a gym. No. It adds up, it’s all valuable. So little bits here and there go a long way for sure.

Brett McKay: The other benefit of kettlebells, we mentioned it earlier, you can take them on the road if you do a road trip. My wife and I have done that. But I’ve also seen, have you seen these on the market, sort of like bags that you can fill up with water if you’re at a hotel room, have you seen these?

Pat Flynn: No, I have not.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s something else. They are on the market now, you can buy these bags. They have handles on them, and somehow you fill them up with water, and if you fill them up all the way, it gives you a certain amount of weight.

Pat Flynn: And it functions as a kettlebell without having to…

Brett McKay: It functions as a kettlebell, yeah.

Pat Flynn: That’s really cool. I have to check that out.

Brett McKay: So you could fly with it.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So, yeah. It’s better than trying to convince them to let you take it as a carry-on, which I have tried before, unsuccessfully, so.

Brett McKay: Made you check that. One thing you talk about too, in all your work, is, oh, let’s say someone gets started, and it’s always easy to start something, but you always reach this point where you’re gonna hit a plateau and progress slows down or maybe it stalls. And that’s when people start losing faith, like we talked about earlier.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s right.

Brett McKay: Do you have any advice for people for where you stay motivated when that progress slows and they feel like, oh, this is not working anymore?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah, really good. So I actually have a few things to say about this. And I think this is really important, doesn’t get talked about enough. So first thing is, right expectations, always. And I always tell people that plateaus are part of the process, right? There is no process of self-improvement without plateaus. And success, especially if you’ve been at something for a while, it never just kind of slopes up in this beautiful ascent like you want, right? It’s more like a very uneven, weird looking flight of stairs, right? You just kind of make these kind of weird leaps at almost random times where it’s like you jump up and you have this huge leap of progress and then you kind of plateau for a while. Then you have a small leap and you plateau for a while. Then you have another medium leap and you plateau. And then it’s just this jagged thing. That’s just what it looks like in lifting. I can certainly tell people that’s what it’s like when it comes to being a musician. That’s certainly my life of playing guitar, right? Huge plateaus where I don’t think I’ll get past it. And then suddenly I wake up one day and I got the lick or something like that.

So one is expectations. Getting people to understand that plateaus are not setbacks, they are just part of the process. And it’s okay, you can chill. In terms for maintaining motivation, I think there’s two important things to talk about with respect to motivation, starting out and ongoing. You know, people say, how do I get motivated for something? And I think that’s not the best way to think about it because motivation, at least starting out for a lot of people, isn’t intrinsic enough. And so we can make a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. What people want is intrinsic motivation. This is the idea of self-reliance, where you’re just able to do the hard things day in and day out because you just have the grit, you have the fortitude, you have the habit, right? You’ve developed the habit. But very, very few people are intrinsically motivated starting out going into a discipline. So what do you do? What do you need there?

Well, you need extrinsic motivation. And this maps my own fitness journey. I was not super intrinsically motivated starting out. I would frequently give up when I started working out, I would quit the diets, I started like three days in until I went to that martial arts studio and found external structures to support me. I had coaches that held me accountable. I got skin in the game. I publicly pronounced my goals, right? I had people guiding me, encouraging me. And then what happens is with these external structures of support, coaches being the big one or just wider communities of people that will encourage you and hold you accountable, what happens is you then, after trusting in the process and seeing the results, and there’s good studies on this, Brett, it’s once people see the results after having already trusted that they then begin to develop intrinsic motivation. So the motivation comes after the discipline. It’s kind of this paradox, this chicken and the egg thing. And the way you solve it, is you just stop focusing on intrinsic motivation and look wherever you need for extrinsic motivation, having those structures in place to get started and to keep you going when things get tough until you’ve seen enough of the results that you then do develop that sort of self-reliance or inner drive that those external structures can eventually drop away.

Brett McKay: That’s awesome, I love it. Well, Pat, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, thank you so much. Well, the primary website is strongon.com, so just the name of the book. You can find me on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Kettlebell Quickies, a new YouTube channel of mine. I have a couple, but that’s the newest, and Kettlebell Quickies, is where I share just time crunched kettlebell workouts and training ideas for busy people who wanna be fitness generalists. And I’m on the usual social media places as well if you just kind of search around for, well, I don’t wanna just say Pat Flynn because there’s a couple other Pat Flynns out there and I’m only one of them. So if you type my name in with kettlebells, you’ll be able to find me.

Brett McKay: Awesome. Well, Pat Flynn, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, Brett. It’s been a joy.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Pat Flynn. He’s the author of the book Strong ON. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website strongon.com. That’s S-T-R-O-N-G-O-N.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/kettlebells, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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