Eastend Kettlebell Podcast Final

The author of the Eastside Kettlebell blog discusses the importance of rotating exercises and deloading to prevent boredom and overuse injuries while developing muscle balance. They recommend changing the variation of each lift in every workout cycle and rotating stances and grip positions. Deloading, reducing weight for a week, is also necessary to continue making progress. Following these strategies, along with proper nutrition, sleep, and stress management, will lead to consistent gains and enjoyment in training. I'm Safa Nalicic, author of the blog Eastside Kettlebell, where I talk about how to train in a simple way to build muscle. In said blog, I've introduced many concepts, including exercise rotation as well as deloading, but didn't necessarily go into too much detail of how to do either, which is what this podcast is for, to describe how to rotate exercises as well as how to deload to make continuous gains indefinitely. The reason we want to rotate exercises is because we want to prevent boredom as well as eliminate overuse, injuries, while also developing balance in our musculature. As I described workout cycles in Eastside Kettlebell, for every cycle, do a new variation of each lift. So for your first cycle, you do a narrow stance squat with a barbell, do medium stance squats for your second, wide stance for your third, then for your fourth cycle, do a narrow squat with a safety bar, medium safety bar squats for your fifth, wide stance safety bar squats for your sixth, then go back to narrow with a regular barbell. Same for your pressing and deadlift. Simply rotate in stances as well as grip position. For accessory work like curls, for your first cycle, do incline curls and barbell curls for your second, easy bar for your third, so on and so forth. While this will greatly prevent training boredom as well as eliminate overuse injuries, while also developing balance in our musculature, unfortunately there will come a time where you will not only not progress anymore, but you may even get slightly weaker. This is when a deload will actually be needed, which is essentially what it sounds like. You reduce the weight you use for a week and then get back to training as planned before. There are many ways to do this, but a simple way is whatever numbers you base your most recent training cycle on, take half of that weight and do it for five sets of five reps. Usually you want to deload every two training cycles, so if we use the one training cycle length as described in East End Kettlebell, two training cycles will be 12 weeks. The week after that, do your deload, i.e. every 13 weeks, and repeat that four times, which 13 times 4 is 52, that's approximately how long a year is. If you just train a little bit harder every single time, as laid out in East End Kettlebell, the blog, which is easily accessible, while also rotating in exercises as well as deloading, eating well, sleeping well, not stressing out too much, which is very hard today. You will not only progress indefinitely, but actually enjoy the process while also complying, which is the main thing we want to do, because compliance is everything and consistency is everything. So I hope this made sense and that it cleared up any possible confusion. Until then, I wish you all happy training.