Scott Sonnon: Born to Fail - Made to Succeed

The Best Kettlebell Exercise for Groundfighters

“The Best” articles always stir up a hornet’s nest, especially in the crazy politics of kettlebell lifting. I’m personally acquainted with the founders of all of the major kettlebell organizations, and having I’ve worked in an advisory capacity for the primary players, my main interest lies with the health and success of my athletes. Kettlebell lifting should be about athletes not brands.

Variety is king because multiple sports compete. Although there is a valid argument that kettlebell competition would be better for general conditioning to go “deeper” rather than “broader” when it comes to sports performance that’s only true for off-season and for the beginning phase of preparation. If you want to develop a bigger gas tank, then performing a 5-7 week cycle including kettlebell lifting competition in clean and jerks (I don’t recommend snatches for many reasons - read The Best Kettlebell Exercise for Fighters) will definitely accomplish the task. This is feasible if you include specific compensatory recovery from the kettlebell lifting itself, if you schedule the sessions appropriately distanced from your high-intensity sparring/rolling, and if you STOP after you’ve completed the cycle.

Some young athletes and coaches see results during general conditioning and because of their inexperience think that if they continue general conditioning that they’ll continue to have ongoing results. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, unfortunately: diminishing returns, performance decrease and eventual injury occur 99% of the time. You cannot be slave to two masters. If you want to excel, and you are not among the genetic lottery lucky 0.5%, then you need to periodize your training to peak your performance.

Where general conditioning can require depth, specific training demands breadth! As a fighter, your coach should be developing the range and depth of your skills without coming too “close to the nerve” of the skill. As my colleague the late Dr. Mel Siff - author of Soviet sports science magnum opus SUPERTRAINING - wrote, you should “stimulate but not simulate” the sport skill.

When you arrive at sport specific training, coaching is more like a laboratory than a library. We scrutinize each movement, dissect it, file off the edges and/or substitute a stronger version, and recombine the components for a new, greater whole skill. A good coach should not only have a library of traditional tools to pull from but also be a personal innovator capable of adjusting, tweaking, tinkering and sometimes out-right fabricating completely new exercises to address the component of the skill needing development. Since every athlete is absolutely unique even if the skills are constant, each athlete has peculiar issues which demand a coach who thinks outside the box of conventional paradigms.

Kettlebell lifting zealots have become polarized in their training methodologies, and as a result, their adherents miss the actual issue: There are different categories of KB lifting.

1. Fitness
2. Juggling 
3. Feats of Strength
4. Amateur
5. Professional

Feats of strength and juggling exercises because of their library of exercises can be just if not more helpful for the sport-specific phase due to stimulating the range and depth of motion of the skills and slightly outside the scope of them to create a “safety valve” for when movements deviate from the expected like they always do in the chaos of fighting sport.

With that in mind, the best kettlebell exercise for ground-fighters is the “Quarter Get-up.” Now, I learned this exercise from my colleague who introduced it to America, Steve Maxwell, BJJ Masters World Champion. Steve took this exercise from old-time strongman stunts and started using a kettlebell to perform it. Here’s a photo sequence of Steve performing a traditional get-up.

Compared to the heavyweight and awkward balance of a barbell Get-up, the relatively light-weight kettlebell allows me to change the emphasis from a feat of slow strength, to speed for sports performance in fighting.

First: the Traditional Get-Up

Here’s a video of Jason Brown of combat-sports-conditioning.com - an incredible young coach and athlete - performing the traditional kettlebell get-up with perfect form.

My variations on the Get-up involves several different mechanics than the ones Steve taught, because I use it exclusively for sports specific training. In particular, I use the highly mobile ”Shin Roll” from the Grappler’s Toolbox; rather than the traditional get-up which is much less mobile due to suspending the unbalanced heavyweight of a barbell. I’ll explain this in the video since it would be too difficult in text alone.

Additionally, I use components of the full movement in order to stimulate ranges of motion critical to ground-fighting. One of my preferred exercises which I use (co-developed by Sports Performance Specialist and Certified AKC Kettlebell Coach, Mike Locke - Director of the Bellingham Athletic Club) is what we call the “Quarter Get-up“.

Finally: the Quarter Get-Up to Shin Roll Tutorial

1. Begin by loading the bell on your shoulder while lying on your back. Turn the handle at an angle with the hip of the handle closer to your belly turned in at a 45 degree angle. You’ll know that you’ve loaded it correctly when there’s no space between the handle and your wrist. 
2. Unlike the traditional get-up which begins with a locked elbow perpendicular to the floor, the Quarter Get-up involves the ballistic drive off the Earth and the inertia of that motion to ride up to the far fore-arm.  
3. Align your wrist so that your wrist is perfectly flat as if you’re throwing a strike. Never let your wrist flex. You’ll get a forearm workout perhaps but lose 95% of the benefits of the exercise. I prefer the more sophisticated kettlebell placement over the conventional “gorilla grip” used by powerlifters. I’m not that interested in isolating the wrist and forearm which get plenty of attention in the full body exercise version.
4. Exhale and contract the corset of muscle around your core as you punch the kettlebell as fast skyward as possible. Speed takes precedence for sport-specific development, so if you must slowly grind it out, the kettlebell is too heavy. Train slow = move slow. You don’t want to strike slow, do you?
5. Prevent your elbow from flaring out to the side by flexing your lat as you contract your pec. Your shoulder, elbow, wrist and fist should all be in one line - parallel to your centerline. Flex your lat as if preparing for a round kick to the ribs, but without distorting the straight centerline of your spine. This will allow you to use your posterior chain to blast the bell upward.
6. If you align your grip correctly, and keep your wrist-elbow-shoulder line straight the “bell-fall” where the ball of the kettlebell hangs is on the back your forearm, with the nape of your elbow (your “elbow pit”) facing your head. Don’t let your elbow-pits rotate toward each other facing your solar plexus. You won’t get the arm lock you need for MMA and you’ll probably start to feel elbow tendonitis.
7. Pack your shoulders down tightly on your rib cage. If you feel your delts up by your ears, you’re cutting off your strength by disconnecting your shoulder girdle from your back and core. Plus, unpacked shoulders will start to impinge the rotator cuff. Think of separating your collarbones and forcing your shoulders down toward your hips as tightly as possible before launching.
8. The 1/4GU is like a kettlebell floor-press (which itself is like a “bench” press on the floor), but is performed explosively upward to arm lock and slowly yielded back into place. You can’t explode if you hold your breath. Explosively exhale as if you’re striking or absorbing a kick. This will allow you to accelerate. Keep dropping down weight as you move through your circuits in order to maintain acceleration. Train fast = be fast. You want to be faster than your opponent, right?
9. Unlike a floor press, the Quarter Get-up is not a ipsilateral (same side) chest exercise, but rather is a contralateral (opposite side) core exercise. As you explode upwards on the press off of the shoulder and bicep, you shift you contract across your core like a diagonal abdominal crunch. We “sling” force across our torso when striking, kicking or throwing. Our conditioning exercises need to stimulate that bandolier of power. The 1/4GU does this perfectly.
10. With this inertia, you weight transfer over to the opposite side of your ribs, rolling down your upper arm and up onto your forearm. This must be an explosive exercise, not a slow, grinding strength one. Keep the weight light enough that you can drive your opposite shoulder of your lifting arm into the ground hard enough to temporarily cause slight “free-fall” on the bell. This moment of (relatively) weightlessness on the bell allows you to continue to shift from your back to your upper arm and your upper arm to your forearm.
11. Like a burly version of a side plank pose on your forearm, align your bottom elbow and shoulder, with your top shoulder and elbow (wrist, fist and bell) and look up at the bell. Lock this in. Locking the plane across your shoulder girdle without your pressing arm falling backward is precisely the attribute you want for your MMA groundfighting skills.
12. To lower yourself back to the ground, practice going joint by joint until you have the skill developed: keeping locked pressing arm, lower yourself from forearm to upper arm, to both shoulders flat, to yielding the bell back to your shoulder. Once you have that sequence developed it should happen more simultaneously, like a roll rather than like a robot. The video will demonstrate this better than text, but basically you’re trying to yield the bell back to your shoulder at the same time that you’re rolling from your bottom forearm to upper arm to shoulders flat.

How-to Train the Quarter Get-Up

I incorporate this exercise in circuit fashion under the time protocol matching the round length of the competition. I consider my Quarter Get-up to be a Sport-Specific conditioning tool, so although you can perform it for fitness benefits, I created it specifically for addressing the range and depth of ground-fighting skills that mixed martial arts and submission fighting athletes require.

See my circuit this coming Sunday with Alberto on UFC Training Day 17: Groundfighting Circuit v1.0 for details on how to apply it in circuit fashion for fighting performance in MMA. However, as a guideline, don’t perform the exercise for longer than 60 seconds with 20-40 seconds being an optimal starting point for power-endurance: the ability to explode again and again over time without losing speed or form. The Quarter Get-up isn’t a strength-endurance exercise, though obviously you can change the tempo and mechanics to make it so (but then, it’d be a different exercise really.) For longer than two minutes - entering the realm of strength-endurance - switch to The Best Kettlebell Exercise for Fighters.

The Benefits of the Quarter Get-Up to Groundfighters

• Improves Bridging Sweeps and Umpas: The 1/4GU teaches you to fire from flat-back to side hip-snap using the core and near-side foot, just like you would in a wrestler’s bridge or Jiujitsu umpa.
• Better Striking from the Back: The 1/4GU forces you to depress the opposite shoulder into the ground in order to drive the bell off the other shoulder. The posterior chain is soft tissue, and learning how to generate leverage power even when the back is flat is a key ingredient not just striking while on your back, but also in guard sweeps and mount escapes. This short range whip also strengthens your elbow strikes when mashed tightly.
• Arm-Bar Defense Strength: The 1/4GU strengthens the “arm line” so that your arm-bar defenses connect to the large muscles of your posterior chain. Many athletes defend against arm-bars merely with a bicep curl action. However, the pec-lat lock of the 1/4GU allows you to defend with your whole body long enough to reverse directions, step around over his head, or pass his lower-half leg.
• Keylock Defense Strength: The 1/4GU drive from and back to the chest, the specific positioning on the arms that I use in relationship to the shoulder, develop the strength necessary to keep your frame in tight so that he can’t brush your forearm out of your frame, and pin your wrist to the mat.
• Improves Guard Drive: The 1/4GU trains explosive connection between the arm drive and the core activation so that you don’t drive your opponent away with only the arms, but with the core as well, which is extremely useful in driving off an opponent who has mounted you and raining down the fists of justice. This allows you to explosively create distance between your chest and your opponent’s when you have him in guard so that you can set up your leg attacks, and free your hip mobility in open guard so that you can escape away if you choose. It also improves your strength of wrist control to drive his arm into his hips so you can set-up your triangle attacks much more expediently.
• Better Posturing Strength for Passes: The 1/4GU increases your posturing strength when you’re in your opponent’s guard and need to drive his hips down stiff-armed to break closed guard. Conventional exercises like tricep extensions only teach you how to extend in isolation, where the 1/4GU allows you to use your core strength and shoulder pack to access your posterior chain.
• Transitional Strength to Scramble Out: If you need to scramble to restand, the 1/4GU is more effective than a traditional “Turkish” get-up because it enables you to explode upwards, as opposed to the slow, grinding strength of the traditional feat of strength. No one should practice scrambling as a technique, but every fighter should have the conditioning to be able to do so when chaos happens. As I show in the video, the example using the Grappler’s Toolbox Shin Roll, you’ll not only be able to stand faster, but you’ll use less energy and maintain structure should your opponent close on you at any point on your way to standing.

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