Death by kettlebell

Sweet Lord. You know the oft-used old cliche of 'aching in muscles you never knew you had'? I could almost just leave the posting there, and it would sum up all that I am thinking.

But...you know me - never one to stop talking when I probably should do!

I did the 45 minute IRON CORE workout (plus a 10-minute warmup) and so far, am not feeling the benefits. My core is not what you could call iron. In fact, all I am currently feeling is resentment towards that little black ball with a handle (that I jokingly referred to yesterday as "look[ing] like a handbag"). Oh, to have those days back, when I could joke about the kettlebell. We are no longer on speaking terms.

So you can better understand my aching and not dismiss it as me being a whiny girl, I'm going to try and show you some of the exercises I partook in with that evil little 8kg of pain.







CLEAN (that's not me by the way)

MILITARY PRESS (you execute this once you've 'cleaned' the 'bell into the position in the last picture of Handsome and his blue 'bell up there)

TWO-ARMED SWING






ONE-ARMED ROWS (hope you're enjoying the fact that this little guy's animated)

SQUATTING while holding the kettlebell by the 'horns' (see I told you it was evil)

RENEGADE LUNGES - despite extensive searching on both Google images and Flickr, I've not managed to come up with a picture, but you basically hold the 'bell in the same way as for the squats while you 'lunge' by stepping to one side while ducking down (as if ducking under a pole) and then stepping back again.

To summarise: who knew a girl could sweat that much?? If that's a measure of how much 'good' I have done myself, then crikey Moses, I am the fittest person in the world! I'm off to have a very long lie-down in a darkened room now.

PS Since initially writing that post, I have completed the workout a further five times, and as you can tell, I'm not yet dead, and was possibly being a little bit drama queen-esque... However, it still does hurt every time I walk, bend, roll over in bed, sneeze, breathe, after each session. A lot. Maybe there is a hierarchy of stages to go through before you reach the ultimate Iron Core goal... right now I think I'm at the iron filings stage. Onwards and upwards, eh?

PPS I apologise profusely for the stupidly large gaps between kettlebell exercise demonstrations; I have been fiddling with the pictures and captions for nearly an hour and a half but I'm clearly not geeky enough to get things to display in the right places (e.g. two-armed swing was supposed to be in the middle, underneath the two pictures). I don't think any amount of further fiddling is going to sort it out, so I'm giving up!

PPS Following on from the PPS, as it's now very close to nap-time in Honkers, I'm extremely annoyed with the whole Blogger piece of technology and just don't have the energy to upload the other two posts I had in store for you. I promise I shall put those on first thing tomorrow, tout suite! Goodnight...