Are Your Muscles Swell? or Swollen?
Lately I’ve been wondering why so often, the heaviest available kettlebell in most stores is 20-25 pounds–which is fine for women, but for guys, not so much. And this has been the case, not only at the big discount superstores, but in several of the sporting goods stores as well, which also carry kettlebells in none but the same unmanly sizes as everybody else, across the aisle from racks of dumbbells weighing up to 100 pounds, or 300-pound Olympic barbell sets.
But now I think I know the awful truth. Right there on the packaging for a 20-pound Gold’s Gym kettlebell at Wal-Mart was a picture of some guy using it for bicep curls!
That’s not what they’re for!
You wanna do curls? Save your money, use a dumbbell. You wanna save time–and make a worthy investment in real strength? Get yourself a kettlebell–and not in those pink Barbie barbell sizes, either.
It seems the whole concept of low reps with heavier than average poundages (35 pounds?–Horrors!) so flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of “bodybuilding” that has predominated in America over the past quarter-or-half-century, that it has felt the need to minimize the kettlebell to fit their own tiny, outmoded paradigm of high reps with absurdly minimal weights, and isolation of muscle groups. The result has been a phenomenon called “sarcoplasmic hypertrophy”. It’s the result of working a muscle to failure–actually, with the aim of tearing the muscle fibers; which produces the same effect you’d get when you whack your shin and it raises a large, hard bump on it. Like that injured limb, the overworked muscle fills with a clear gelatinous substance called sarcoplasm, which makes the muscle look big and bulgy. This technique is also called “muscle-spinning”. And like pumping up a leaky balloon, it ain’t strong, and it don’t last.
Sig Klein once wrote of meeting a popular bodybuilder of his day. He asked to see the man’s arms, which were legendary for their size and shape . The man was reluctant to do so, explaining that he’d been traveling a couple days and hadn’t and hadn’t gotten the chance to work out. Klein decided that if a couple days off training could result in such a drastic decline in this guy’s muscle tone, he didn’t want to see his old arms, after all.
A modern-day extreme of this technique is Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer, who avers that no woman should lift more than three pounds! So here’s Gwyneth flapping her arms around with a three-pound dumbbell in each hand (wait a minute: that’s _six_ pounds!), two hours a session, six days a week. The result is the waifish figure she knew back in the days before babies, when she didn’t have to do anything to achieve that look. So although she’s back to the size she was before, she’s developed no muscle. This is what Josh Hillis would call, “skinny-fat” (the doctors are calling it “normal weight obesity”: muscles that are not muscles; muscles that are not strong).
You can mold a statue of Hercules with Crisco, but it’d still be fat!
The remedy to big, soft, useless muscle tissue is building dense muscle fibers without damaging them, by incorporating as many muscles as possible in moving a heavy weight with low reps. It’s called myofibrillar hypertrophy–dense, compact muscle fibers–the workouts are hard and fast, and the muscle looks good on men or women, and it’s the real deal. And it’s changing the way people think about “working out”.
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