KETTLEBELL UVS F BARBELL

Fitness expert and world-renowned PT Luke Worthington on the respective benefits of the two bits of kit for your strength and conditioning goals

Barbells have long held the rank of the ultimate piece of gym equipment. No matter what your fitness goal, there is a barbell exercise to help you achieve it. However, kettlebells are emerging as a serious contender to the barbell’s throne. Once the secret, hardcore training tool of the Soviet military, now – thanks to the advocacy of former Special Forces operative Pavel Tsatsouline – kettlebells are seen as an essential addition to almost every gym.

But is there really any reason to re-invent the wheel and use kettlebells in place of a barbell? To answer the question, ‘Which is better?’ we really need to be considering the deeper question, ‘For what?’...

Understand your goals

Broadly speaking, intentional exercise (workouts) with weights will have a purpose of building strength, improving body composition (hypertrophy), or increasing rate of force production (power). And while these goals are absolutely not mutually exclusive, it does tend to make sense to be prioritising one during any given period.

Shifting between training for force production and hypertrophy means a shift of some of the variables of working against resistance – specifically the duration of the working set. If our goal is to increase the cross-sectional area of a muscle, generally we look to have a longer duration of set (around 60 seconds), with as much focus on the eccentric (lowering) phase of movement as the concentric (lifting). This causes the greatest amount of metabolic damage, which – with the adequate hormonal and nutritional environment – will lead to the greatest potential for lean muscle growth.