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単語数: 1556語

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作成日: 2025/09/27 17:30

更新日: 2025/12/08 01:46

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Kettlebell Kata—Simple & Sinister as Mindfulness Practice
By Dunte Hector
StrongFirst Certified SFG Level I Instructor
Posted on September 25, 2025. No Comments.
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I’m a busy person who wants to get stronger. I know every StrongFirst student can relate.

While there is a lifetime of nuance to explore in strength training, I find strength to be one of the simplest and most time-efficient qualities to develop. Many programs exist to help you build physical qualities when you’re time-crunched, especially Power to the People (reborn in the SFL StrongFirst Barbell Instructor Certification), the Naked Warrior (reborn in the SFB StrongFirst Bodyweight Instructor Certification), and the Program Minimum (reborn as Kettlebell Simple & Sinister). These programs all deliver strength gains with small time commitments. Many of us have carved out the 30 minutes per day they require and found success.

Making time to develop patience, composure, and self-awareness—aka mindfulness—has been a much harder sell for me.

Meditation as Strength Kata, Strength Kata as Meditation

I struggle to meditate consistently, despite how much it benefits my stress management. Given the choice between meditating or a nap, between breathing practice or finishing a work task, I rarely devote that moment to meditation. When I studied Taekwondo as a youth and Wing Chun as an adult, I struggled to choose practicing my forms over extra conditioning in a similar way, despite how the deep work on forms built my balance, breath control, and confidence.

As I revisited Kettlebell Simple & Sinister last winter, this quote from Anko Itosu grabbed me more strongly than before: “If you train with the same intensity and spirit as though you are striking and blocking against an actual opponent, you will naturally develop the same attitude as on a battlefield.”

It relates to our spirit while practicing the art. If I should approach my kata just as I should approach battle, then the attention and precision of forms shouldn’t be different from sparring or conditioning. There should be no choice at all—because there is no separation between mind and body training. This may feel obvious to those of you who have practiced the art with more intention than I had, but I finally saw a few months ago how this goes beyond martial arts.

My daily strength practice should be no different than my forms…and I perceive the meditation practice I frequently neglect to be the analog to a strength form, as that’s where I should cultivate my breathing skill, my interoception, and my ability to hold focus. All taken together, what if I *used* my strength practice as meditation time?

This koan is more than philosophy—my months of training to recertify as a StrongFirst Certified SFG Instructor and the months of practice since successfully doing so represented the perfect opportunity to merge two arts that I benefit from into a single practice, both to save time and to enhance my experience with each. Here is how I believe you can do the same with any minimalist strength program.

My Attempt to Save Time in Training

When I advanced beyond the Simple standard and my main weight increased to 40kg, I found that practicing all three of my essential skills (goblet squat, swing, get-up) within 30 minutes each day was limited by my recovery ability. Not my ability to recover day to day, but the ability of my grip and my shoulders to recover between sets fast enough for me to work both swings and get-ups in satisfactory volume in the extremely limited training time I had.

I strongly believe in the benefits that goblet squats provided me. However, for the 20 or so sessions, I included them in the circuit before focusing on get-ups and swings—I changed the volume frequently. At 10×5, it was excessive and impeded my sport practice. At 5×5 (one set done after completing both arms of get-ups and swings), it wasn’t so much mindful as an indulgence, since I love squats. Eventually, I went back to 3×5 in advance of swings and get-ups, which was, unsurprisingly, the most repeatable structure.

(A brief aside for aspiring instructors: if you are preparing for your first SFG experience, you need more technical training than exclusively performing swings, get-ups, and goblet squats. Work with a certified instructor to build the most appropriate plan for your needs. Though I have experience with the six fundamental movements and met the standards at my recertification, I only devoted one training session each week to all other SFG techniques and it was obvious I would have benefited from more focused practice in the final weeks of prep.)

Applying the programming principle of variety, I changed the exercise sequence to begin with get-ups, alternating 1 get-up with a set of 10 swings for 10 total sets (except when I hit my time cap). This gave me plenty of local recovery and allowed me to work both movements without worrying much about rest time. Because of the frequent changes between exercises, it also created four recurring moments for mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness Moment 1: Setting Up for the Get-up

Perform an unloaded get-down to your kettlebell, either attempting to execute the most fluid and seamless movement possible or deliberately pausing in each position to experience your alignment. During most practices, I chose the former and moved as slowly to the floor as I could without stopping. Seeking fluidity and deliberately pausing both reveal your relative strengths in the get-up and demand your full attention.

The unloaded get-up
Mindfulness Moment 2: Performing the Get-up

Even without any additional intention, a get-up under a heavy kettlebell is excellent mindfulness practice. You cannot carry work stress at the same time as you carry a heavy weight. But I brought the same goal of fluidity to my heavy get-up as I did the unweighted half-rep. That intention demanded I be aware at intervals of my support hand and both my feet, my loaded elbow and wrist positions, and my breathing.

After returning the kettlebell safely to the floor, you will rise and then prepare to swing. I typically move to the seiza [kneeling] position for three breaths to settle my heart rate before swings.

Breathing in seiza
However, after any get-up that felt halting or rushed, I would perform an unloaded get-up. Spending a few extra seconds practicing my get-up without load allowed me to explore the tension near a joint or the loss of balance that I observed.

Mindfulness Moment 3: Setting Up for Swings

To paraphrase Fabio Zonin, StrongFirst Certified Master Instructor: treat your setup for swings as the first rep. Once on my feet, I would take three more breaths in the swing-ready position. I used the first three breaths to settle my heart rate. I used the second three breaths to visualize a perfect dead-stop swing with a 48kg kettlebell, even when my training only involved the 40kg or 44kg. Visualizing a dead-stop swing with a heavy bell helps me initiate each set of swings more consistently by focusing my attention on technical points such as whole foot balance, hip hinge depth, and hiking the kettlebell powerfully yet patiently.

How to approach and perform the setup for the kettlebell swing
Mindfulness Moment 4: Performing the Swings

Focus intently on the technical cues of a powerful swing, but give extra attention to the timing and fullness of your breathing. In my swings, I found I could attend to my hinge position and my sharp inhale; I could attend to cramping my glutes and my explosive exhale. I could count while the bell floated. There was no room for other details in my brain if I was to keep up power with a heavy kettlebell.

The Way Is Through Integration

When I changed the order of exercises in my S&S practice, I was astonished by how centered I felt after each session. I no longer felt rushed in practice, so I took the rest I needed between sets. I got stronger—I am proud to say I set press and get-up PRs during the cert and have matched them at home since then, in addition to significant progress toward completing the Sinister challenge—yet never trained a single session longer than 30 minutes.

In the course of practicing this way over 65 sessions, I have built more awareness of my breathing rate, my posture, and my state of stress. That awareness stays with me for much of each day now.

Before this period, I made time for training because it was a means to gain strength. Now, I more fully experience my time in training each day and it gives me both strength and greater peace.

If you choose minimalist training programs because you are a busy person who wants to get stronger, it’s possible that other parts of your development—emotional, mental, spiritual—get pushed aside on your most hectic days. You may be getting conditioning while neglecting your forms.

Rather than accept this one-sided development, look for the space within your training sessions, whether it is in rest periods, in the transitions between movements, or within the movements themselves. Choose to fully exist in that space, whether it is for a single beat or for several breaths. Permit your strength practice to also be your mindfulness practice.

You may find that your training gives you much more than physical strength when you do so.

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