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A Russian ‘kettlebell’ or girya (Russ.) is a traditional Russian cast iron weight that looks like a cannonball with a handle.

As the 1986 Soviet Weightlifting Yearbook put it, “It is hard to find a sport that has deeper roots in the history of our people than kettlebell lifting.” So popular were kettlebells in Tsarist Russia that any strongman or weightlifter was referred to as a girevik, or ‘a kettlebell man’. “Not a single sport develops our muscular strength and bodies as well as kettlebell athletics,” wrote Ludvig Chaplinskiy in Russian magazine Hercules in 1913.

In the Soviet times weightlifting legends such as Vlasov, Zhabotinskiy, and Alexeyev and, started their Olympic careers with old-fashioned kettlebells. Yuri Vlasov who defeated mighty Paul ‘the Wonder of Nature’ Anderson once interrupted an interview he was giving to a Western journalist and proceeded to press a pair of kettlebells ten times. “A wonderful exercise,” commented the world champion weightlifter. “...It is hard to find an exercise better suited for developing strength and flexibility simultaneously.”

The Russian Special Forces personnel owe much of their wiry strength, explosive agility, and never-quitting stamina to kettlebells. Soldier, Be Strong!, the official Soviet armed forces strength training manual pronounced kettlebell drills to be “one of the most effective means of strength development” representing “a new era in the development of human strength-potential”.

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