Part TWO- “….unlocking the Path to 1000 swings……”

“….unlocking the Path to 1000 swings……”  it just….echoed…..

“I never would have attempted it had you not been pushing me by pushing yourself.” That is what I sent to the Mongoose in a text. I meant it. I have heard it said that a truly great accomplishment of a teacher is to have your student surpass you.  When you factor in the roughly 100lb difference in body weight to the fact that he was doing as much or MORE total volume than me, I understood what that meant.  I offered up a new idea, to push it a little farther.

“Let’s do 1000…… and see if we can complete it in an hour.”

We played with the idea a little and settled on doing  1006 reps each on the afternoon of  New Year’s Eve, to send out the old year.  All right, let’s do this.

A few days later, on December 20, I extended the time. “721 in 45 min. Come At Me.”and received this text  relpy from Mongoose: ”632 in 30. I feel fantastic. 450 in 20min. I am the Iceman.”  I don’t know what that means exactly, but I know the frame of mind from which it comes, so I just file it under the category of “Rambling after being owned by the Mongoose in the category of beastly swings.” I take solace in know that as I have been owned, so has the rest of the world.

New Year’s Eve afternoon, at Nashville Kettlebell.

Mongoose showed up at 3:00 and you know a man is serious when he brings his own kettlebell to a kettlebell gym.

Beast Iron- Check

Chalk- Check

Amon Amaarth soundtrack- Check

Post-workout NYE feast planned-Check

Flip the crazy switch and go boom boom BOOM….

Mongoose led the way in numbers by 10-15 reps until about the 50 minute mark where I caught up.

We both got around 550-570 at the 30 minute mark.

For the final 6 reps we crossed the line together at 57 minutes.

The I realized that a math error gave my 1011 reps, not 1006. Matt quickly knocked out 5 more, making us even. We saw that we had about 35 seconds to go in the hour, so we did a final set of 10.

1021 swings each in 59:55. 108,226lbs of work. That was our workout that day. If  you say our workout  is your warmup, you are a liar.

Some key observations along the way

From Mongoose:

“Get  150 in 7 minutes.  That is a ridiculous pace, but it puts you out front early and gets some quality reps in quickly so you feel good about resting.”

“Get to  450 as fast as possible.”

“A good grip builder is 60 reps in 2 minutes, rest a minute and repeat. Keeping that pace gets you to 600 in around 28:00. Focus on bursts of 5-10 reps with very short 5-15 sec rests.”

“ANYBODY can do this, if they want it. I’d tell them ‘Y’all just don’t swing enough.’  ” (his reply when I told him that he was doing something very few other people and NO ONE at his bodyweight  is doing)

From me:

I did well with longer sets, because my grip endurance is a strong point.

I did 5×25 in the first 4:30, then a bunch of sets of 20 after that. As grip fatigue becomes more prevalent, drop to sets of 8-10.

The biggest lesson so far: In a 100 rep snatch test the worst part is from about rep 75 until rep 90, 10:00 SST style snatch test it is from about 7:30 until 9:00. In Beast Swings for 30 min, it’s the 24-27 minute mark and in an hour it’s around the 45 minute mark. Psychologically, there is something about the 75-90% completed place that is where quitting lives.  Mentally, you know you have a very long way and a lot of suck to go, yet you have come too far to stop. This pattern shows up in lot of places, not just swings. Study on this…

Swings rock. Heavy Swings rock more.  What about high volume heavy swings.?  And lo, Mongoose and Tamer looked upon the swing and saw that it did indeed rock.

Happy New Year. Use this knowledge to go forth and kick much ass…..

PS- Jan 11 2013, Kristin McBryde, the Diva of Hardstyle and Mogoose babymama  joined Club 600 in the 32kg ladies division with 620 in 30 minutes.  Who is next?