There’s always been a great deal of concern for martial artists when it comes to kettlebells, or any other form of intense weight training for that matter. The conventional wisdom was that training hard for strength with either heavy weights or kettlebells would tighten the muscles and limit the range of motion and flexibility, two elements of dire importance to the martial artists. While there is some truth to this, we’ll take a look at just how an intelligent kettlebell routine can not only smash this concern, but dramatically improve the performance that many martial artists can come up with.

Conventional weight training and even extreme kettlebells training can and will produce the aforementioned nightmare scenario for some people practicing the martial arts, if your program is heavy on the body building aspects and lacks martial arts specific exercises. We’ll get into those in a moment. The point is that if you train like a lifter, you’ll perform like one, with a sluggish response and poor explosiveness. If, on the other hand, you craft a kettlebell routine that is not only sport specific, but emphasizing strength, explosiveness, flexibility and endurance you’ll find that you’ll not only gain strength, but more speed and power. Power = strength X speed, so your kettlebell workouts should be geared to cover several areas.

The main areas you’ll want to make sure and cover in your training include strength and endurance, martial arts specificity, economy of motion, and mental and physical toughness. Let’s take a quick look at each of them.

Strength and endurance is an obvious choice to make an integral component of your kettlebell training. There is a great need in the martial arts to be able to have strength and endurance in spades, available to you at any given point in a match. There are times when performing many different combinations that being less tired than your opponent will give you the edge. The anaerobic training that a well rounded, martial arts specific training program can bring is a definite aid to the sport. Exercises such as snatches and cleans and jerks can go along way toward this goal.

Economy of motion is an important part in almost any martial art, the thinking being that you want to use the path of least resistance. Why dispense more energy than you have to when you can dispose of an opponent with a fraction of your strength and energy.

Mental and physical toughness come into play by the very nature of both kettlebell training and the martial arts themselves. There is a toughness required in the martial arts that is a requisite item. This is enhanced by kettlebell training through the extreme nature of the training, as well as the mental desire needed to even train with kettlebells. You have to be a pretty tough individual to deal with the pain a program like this offers, and this translates well to the martial arts.

The last category is that of martial arts specificity. This is vitally important to us as we want to make sure that any training we do with kettlebells for the martial arts are very sport specific. All of the exercises must be included with the thought of improving our performance in the martial arts, and not strength training for strength training’s sake. Spend no more than perhaps a quarter of your training time on strength building, no matter what the source. You want to spend the bulk of your time practicing the sport, not the training.

If you plan to incorporate kettlebell training into your arsenal, then make sure you take the ti