Mark Ottobre shows how to swing a kettlebell correctly: load through your heels, lock your quads and hips at the top, and squat into the bottom. Done right, it reinforces hip hinge mechanics and builds stronger deadlifts and squats.
My name is Mark Ottobre. I am the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I've trained thousands of people to head-turning results— world champions, world leaders, Commonwealth Games gold medalists. In this video, we are going to be showing you how to do a kettlebell swing. We've got Lauren here. Before we jump into the demonstration, I want to talk a little bit about the kettlebell swing. The reason why I like it is because you can do literally hundreds of repetitions throughout the week that will enhance your ability to get through that hip hinge, locking out both your glutes and your knees. And often when people are in deadlift, people come up in that end position kind of lukewarm. I find the kettlebell swing— I've had really a lot of success with clients helping using this exercise and marrying it over to deadlift or a squat and really getting that hip hinge pattern locked in and nice and tight. So I'm going to show you the way I like to do it. I like to teach clients. Lauren's first going to show you the wrong way to do it. So Lauren, do the wrong way of a kettlebell swing. And the other thing before she starts is inherently you're going to use a lot of glutes on a kettlebell swing. And the reason why is just look at her setup, right? The, the load is in her center of mass, but she has to open up through her feet, which is going to use a lot of glute meat. If you want to enhance it through the glute even more, we can play with foot position by simply turning the heels out or making it more neutral. All right, Lauren, grab, grab the kettlebell and do the wrong way first to demonstrate for the folks. And in the wrong way, her head is going to be coming all the way down. She's still going through the hinge. But here, if we were to put a barbell on her back, you can see how quite disastrous this would be because the bar would be rolling forward and she'd be loading up her lower back, right? This is not how I want clients to be doing it because I'm going to use the kettlebell swing. I'm going to get the movement hardwired and then marry that into a deadlift and in also to the squat. So Lauren, do it the right way. My cues here is that she's going to load up her heels to begin with, load through the heels. Yep, load. And now what we're going to be doing, we're going to marry knee extension with hip extension. So as you can see, I wanted to lock her quads at the top and I want to lock her hips. Lock your quads, lock your hips. She's getting a lot of power just from doing those two things right now. If I want to get that bottom position even more, if I just simply put my hand in front of her face, you can see how she has to drop now. So she's really having to drop that position and only use her glutes on the way up. So you kind of see her as a vertical line where she's really having to pop through the hips as she comes up. Really load through the heels. Do 3 more. You see that position? Really squat into it, squat into it. 1, squat into it even more. 2, squat into it. 3. Good, good. Leave it there. That's fine. That's fine. Obviously, other variations here that you could do if you want to enhance the glutes even more is you could use 2 kettlebells where people are going to have to really open up in that position even more. You can use what Lauren was doing, double arm, or you can use single arm where you're just using one arm at a time. So there's a lot of variations you can use. It's a great exercise. Give it a try in your workout. If you've enjoyed this video, consider subscribing to our channel for more. If you've enjoyed this video, click here or here.
