Quick And Effective Kettlebell Workouts For Women

Good news for busy women who want to stay fit despite their hectic lifestyle: now you can achieve your health goals by exercising for just a few minutes a day using kettlebells. These ball-shaped weights have rapidly risen to become a fad in the world of fitness, especially among women.

Below are the different kettlebell workouts for women that you can try out. By doing these trainings, you obtain maximum results with just a very minimal risk of injury, unlike the use of other workout tools. Addressing both strength and cardio training, these workout routines with kettlebells can be done in just 20 minutes to achieve fat loss or muscle tone improvement.

Warm-up

For each of these exercises, position your feet about one foot apart.

1. For the back and abs - Hold the kettlebell with both hands and raise it overhead, maintaining an abs-tight, shoulders-down, and chest-forward position. Then, rotate your hips clockwise 8 times. These rotations should slightly propel the kettlebell overhead to make small circles, too. Repeat this for another 8 counts, then switch to a counter-clockwise rotation.

2. For shoulders and arms - Secondly, stand with knees slightly bent. Hold your kettlebell with your right hand and swing your right arm forward. Then, quickly reach out with your left arm to receive the kettlebell and swing your left arm to your back. Quickly reach back with your right hand to receive the kettlebell and swing the weight forward. Repeat this process for about 20 seconds.

Main Exercise

1. For hip, thigh, and butt - Position your feet about half a meter apart. Shift to a squat position and hold kettlebell with both hands. Swing kettlebell back toward the space between the legs, then swing back up in front of you while you stand from squat position. Repeat about 45 times, then do a single-arm swing for one minute each arm.

2. For butt, arms, and legs - Hold kettlebell with right hand. Step right foot forward and bend the knee at a right angle, to create a lunge position with your right leg. While in that position, pass kettlebell under your right thigh from your right hand to be received by the left hand. Shift back to standing position. Then, lunge forward with left leg this time (again creating a right angle with the knee) and pass kettlebell under the left thigh from the left hand to the right, then back to standing position. Repeat this 18 times per leg.

Cool-down

For your cool-down routine, you can opt to repeat the warm-up routine and do it slowly but without the kettlebell involved. Here are some other options if you prefer something else. If you prefer the normal cool-down routine, you can go for the classic shoulder stretch, hip stretch, and hamstring stretch.

According to kettlebell users, this routine burns pounds off the body within just weeks of doing the workouts religiously. Fat loss and muscle toning can even be ushered in faster by doing 20 minutes of cardio exercises (such as running, jogging, dancing, swimming) every other day. The kettlebell provides a great and productive exercise experience for those women who do not have time to go to the gym and lift weights. Fat-burning and body-toning can now be done within just the confines of the house or office.

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Bodybuilding training made Easy!

This free information will save you time and money in designing a bodybuilding weight lifting program for yourself. Some of you may be asking yourselves, "What's the difference between training for bodybuilding and training for anything else?" The answer to that is pretty simple, but very few people can put their finger on it. 

When you are training to increase muscle mass as your main goal, the difference is in how you lift the weight. More specifically, it is not enough to just move the weight through the range of motion, rather, you must flex the muscle throughout the movement. Additionally, it is important to maintain that tension for around 45 seconds. 

Let's use the bench press to illustrate my point. Most people lower the weight under control, and simply push the weight back up. To stimulate your muscles to grow as quickly as possible, you need to keep tension on them by flexing through the entire movement. Momentum is your enemy in bodybuilding! It is not good enough to do one repetition like this, you need to do it for 8 to 12 repetitions, or 45 seconds per set. 

While it is true that lifting heavy weights explosively will increase your muscle mass, and lifting with constant tension as I have described above will increase your strength, if you want to maximize the training effect, you need to train specifically for your goal. That is to say that if you want maximum muscle mass, you should train with constant tension. 

There is nothing wrong with strength, but if that is your main goal, you will want to maximize that by training specifically for it. You can learn all about training for strength on my Powerlifting andStrongman pages.

Now, back to training for maximum muscle mass. We want to maximize the volume of work that your muscles are 

doing in a set period of time. Generally speaking, your workout should last no more than 45 minutes for weight training. This is because your natural testosterone levels will drop after about 45 minutes of intense training. You definitely do not want your testosterone levels to drop if you want your muscles to grow. Now that we have discussed length of training, let's look and rest between sets.

We want to keep our rest between sets no shorter than 60 seconds and no longer than 3 minutes. Spend the majority of your workouts with rest periods of about 2 minutes between sets and you will be on the right track. The reasons for this are that you can squeeze 

more work into that 45 minute workout, and that using the lactic acid energy system (which is how your body handles intense work with rest periods like this) encourages more muscle growth than if you rested longer between sets.

Probably most importantly, you must focus your time and energy on basic, multi-joint exercises that work the most muscle at one time. By doing this, you will stimulate your entire body to grow. When training like this, you also need to limit the exercises that do not work large muscle groups (isolation exercises). If you work as hard as you should be on the basic exercises, you will need all the recovery ability you have, and isolation exercises will only detract from that with no added benefit.

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