Cutting Week 3: Pull Day
Warm-Up
Hip circles and goblet squats.
One-Arm Swings
40kg: 3x10
Kettlebell Row
40kg: 5x5
28kg: 1x10
Kettlebell SLDL
40kg: 2x30
Band Pull-Aparts
Blue Band: 4x25
Bodyweight: 94.9kg
Good session.
Cutting Week 3: Push Day
Warm-Up
Goblet squats and hip circles.
Reverse Lunge
10kg: 10
28kg: 10
40kg: 2x10
Bodyweight: 95.2kg
Early morning session, felt pretty rough lol. I ran out of time after my second set of 40kg lunges but my legs feel like they were hit pretty hard.
Continued…
Goblet Squats
28kg: 10x5 - every minute on the minute
Crunches (max in 2min)
BW: 62 (PR)
I didn’t achieve a huge amount this morning, so I did a bit more this evening. My hips have been really tight today so I did a decent amount of static stretching and that completely resolved the problem. I guess I should keep a note of what I do when I stretch so I don’t forget: I find it works best when I do the 90-90 stretch for glutes, kneeling quad stretch, lunging hip flexor stretch and standing hamstring stretch and hold each for at least a full minute. Seems to work for me.
The EMOM goblet squats felt really good as both a conditioning and mobility exercise. At 5 reps it wasn’t challenging, but I think building up to 10x10 could work really well as a sort of conditioning/hypertrophy/warm-up exercise all rolled into one.
The last couple of days I’ve been struggling a bit more with my diet - I find myself more and more tempted by chocolate etc, but not because I’m craving carbs as such - I think it’s more of a psychological thing tbh. For the most part I’ve not succumbed, and where I have I’ve balanced it out so overall my calorie intake has remained about the same. Today I weighed 95.2kg fasted but I actually think I look leaner than I previously have at this weight. So overall this cutting phase has been a great success so far.
Cutting Week 3: Pull Day
Warm-Up
Goblet squats and hip circles.
One-Arm Swings
40kg: 3x10
Kettlebell Rows
28kg: 5x10
Bodyweight: 95.4kg
Good session, disappointing bodyweight. I have been feeling especially hungry today - I think if I hold my nerve for the next few days my appetite should settle back down.
Week 3 Summary
Week 1 Average Weight: 96.3kg
Week 2 Average Weight: 95.2kg
Week 3 Average Weight: 95.0kg
Not nearly as big a drop as the first one, but I’ll take it. I think the key here is not to stress too much and just let the process take over. I won’t intervene unless things go dramatically wrong. Weight gain was always very step-wise, so I imagine weight loss might be too.
Training this week has been good: 2 pull sessions and 2 push sessions, all with adequate overall volume. No sign of any drop-off in strength or energy.
10,000 Swings
I’ve come to the conclusion that I should really start doing conditioning as it is will move me a lot closer to my goals of being a badass and looking good lol. I think my best bet will be to re-do Dan John’s 10,000 swing routine as it works well with my equipment and schedule. I think my strength movements should be the goblet squat, row and windmill. I think I’ll be fine dropping the one-arm swing for a while, despite my love for it. This time I’ll be conservative with the strength movements and really focus on the conditioning aspect. I think last time I focused on strength and my times didn’t really improve. 5 weeks of this will make 8 total weeks of cutting. Hopefully after that I’ll be close to my leanness goals. I might follow it with a short stint of lower carbs or I might move straight into reverse dieting, depending on where I am. I’d love to hear what you guys think of this plan? My only slight reservation is dropping the heavy swings but I don’t think it makes sense to do them supersetted with such a high volume of regular swings.
Mobility Day
Goblet Squats
28kg: 10x5; 1x10
Every minute, on the minute. My hips felt brand new after this.
This weekend I’ve been visiting my family and eating more carbs than I should, but when I got back this evening I weighed 95.3kg not fasted - my lightest weight yet - so hopefully this bodes well for the coming week. As I said above I’ll be doing Dan John’s 10,000 swing routine starting from tomorrow but I won’t do the full 4-5 weeks as I’m going on holiday in 3 weeks. So I’ll just do it until I leave. I’ll take the kettlebells with me on holiday but I don’t really want to be doing such an intensive routine while I’m away, I’ll probably just do some odd 5x5/5x10 sessions here and there. I’m not too fussed about not reaching the end of the routine as I’ve done the full thing before, but to get the most out of it this time I’ll try to train 5x/week instead of 4x/week.
I bought elbow and knee sleeves which arrived today, annoyingly the knee sleeves were very tight and ripped while putting them on (but I’m trying to just take that as a compliment as they were XL).
Love the 10k Swing Challenge and will be tackling it again in a few months from now. The idea of throwing the windmill in with this challenge is very interesting and look forward to seeing how you progress. If I were to add one thing to your setup for the challenge would be to incorporate push-ups into the challenge to get the extra movement of getting up and down off the floor. Set the reps for push-ups at whatever range is comfortable for you. Dan John mentioned in one of his fat loss articles about how doing swings and push-ups is a great fat loss / conditioning tool because of the extra movement of getting off of the floor. Once you finish the challenge your strength will come back a lot quicker to go along with the increased work capacity.
Thanks for the ideas jblues! I re-read that Dan John article on push-ups and swings and it has given me some ideas. I think instead of doing the 10,000 swing routine I might do a combination of 40kg stuff (maybe complexes?) and fat burning work from that article.
For example: warm up (goblet squats EMOM); 40kg complex (row-swing-clean-lunge); finisher (swings/push-ups). Not having the time to do it properly has put me off the 10,000 swings idea, and I’d like to try something new.
The last two days I’ve felt really weak and unwell, so I haven’t been training. Yesterday I weighed 95.0kg and today I weighed 94.6kg. Hopefully I’ll be ready to train again tomorrow, as it’s been a while since my last session.
Cutting Week 4: Easy Day
Kettlebell Row
20kg: 20x5
One-Arm Swing
20kg: 10x10
Bodyweight: 94.6kg
After sleeping for most of the day I felt up to doing a light session. I want to do a monster session on Christmas day before I pig out, and I thought 100 reps of 40kg rows and 100 reps of 40kg swings would be pretty good. So today I decided to begin to build up to that by doing it with just 20kg, and tomorrow I’ll use 28kg. Then after Christmas I’ll start doing metabolic work.
Cutting Week 4: Medium Day
Day 2 of my Christmas challenge!
Goblet Squats
28kg: 5x5
Kettlebell Row
28kg: 20x5
Every minute on the minute.
One-Arm Swing
28kg: 10x10
Every second minute.
Total Volume: 11,900kg
Bodyweight: 94.5kg 
This session felt good, despite not feeling very well. I’ll do the exact same session with the 40kg tomorrow, although I’m definitely going to have to do the swings before the rows and lather on the liquid chalk. Very sweaty hands!
Cutting Week 4: Challenge Day!
Goblet Squats
40kg: 5x5
One-Arm Swings
40kg: 9x10
Kettlebell Row
40kg: 10x5
Bodyweight: 94.9kg
Lol so today I completely failed at my challenge. Horrible things happened to my hands during the swings, and despite putting on straps after the first five sets they still felt outrageous. I tried to do the 10th set twice but never got past 3 reps. I soaked my hands in ice water for a while and wrapped a shirt round the handle for the rows. The first 5 sets were fine, but I had to use a lot of momentum to get through sets 6-10 and there would have been no point pushing it further.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Merry Christmas to you too.
I’ve been out of town so I just caught up on your log. Sounds like things are working out, and it’s good to see your comments on how it’s just a process, and just letting it do its thing. Nice work.
Thanks LoRez, hope you’re having a great one!
Yeah that’s definitely been a really positive change in approach for me. I’m terrible with goals, anyone reading this log will have seen that lol, and just allowing the process to work seems much better to me. The plan is simply to train consistently and eat well, and hopefully everything will fall into place.
Cutting Week 4: Complex Day
Warm-Up
Hip circles and goblet squats
Row-Swing-Clean-Lunge
40kg: 5x3/3/3/3
Bodyweight: 94.9kg
The complex today felt really great - I did the rows with my supporting hand resting on my leg, rather than a bench, and I did the lunges with the kettlebell racked on the working side, which felt a lot better. I definitely think I should adopt this as my new basic training routine - it fits really well with my bodyfat and conditioning goals and most importantly it was fun. Just doing 3 reps was pretty tiring, so I’ll stick with 3 and gradually build up.
Cutting Week 4 Summary
Week 1 Average Weight: 96.3kg
Week 2 Average Weight: 95.2kg
Week 3 Average Weight: 95.0kg
Week 4 Average Weight: 94.7kg
The weight is still dropping so I really can’t complain. Like I said last time - I’m only going to intervene if I really hit a wall for a couple of consecutive weeks. As it is, I’m just going to let it work.
Training this week had less direction than usual, but I don’t think it matters because I got adequate volume on my main lifts. A good week overall!
Cutting Week 5: Complex Day
Warm-Up
Hip circles and goblet squats
Row-Swing-Clean-Lunge
40kg: 5x3/3/3/3
Bodyweight: 94.4kg
This session was alright, although I still have my cold and didn’t feel very energetic. I got Marty Gallagher’s Purposeful Primitive for my birthday and I’m really enjoying it.
Cutting Week 5: 365-Rep Challenge
Warm-Up
Goblet Squats
Two-Handed Swing/Push-Up Superset
40kg/BW: 18x10 ( 5)
Bodyweight: 94.8kg
I did the challenge Chris Colucci suggested in a thread. This one was infinitely easier than my Christmas challenge. The two-handed swings felt good.
I filmed the session but won’t upload it because it was ridiculously boring. I was really disappointed with how I looked in the video - an awful lot softer than I hoped but also a lot smaller. Bit of an ego hit :/.
Cutting Week 5: Complex Day
Warm-Up
Hip circles and goblet squats
Row-Swing-Clean-Lunge
40kg: 3x3/3/3/3
Two-Handed Swing
28kg: 1x50
Bodyweight: 94.5kg
My 365-rep session really fried my upper lats, which I was surprised about (and my pecs - which was less surprising). I think that it is easier to engage the lats with the two-handed swing, and that is why they are so sore, and so I think it would definitely be worthwhile regularly using both two-handed and one-handed swings. Today I felt a little worse for wear so just did 3 rounds of the complex and finished off with a high rep swing set to get the blood flowing to my lats.
2015 Goals
This year I’m not going to set any strength goals, because none jump to mind and I feel like this year strength should not be a priority. I just want to get steadily better with the 40kg kettlebell, and, at least for the first few months, I plan on training mostly with complexes. I like the row-swing-clean-lunge complex and gradually building up the reps and sets would be good - I’m currently doing 5x3, but building up to 10x5 would be great. My primary goal for 2015 is bodyfat related, but I can’t put an exact number on what I want. Gradually cutting down to around 90kg sounds sensible, and then whatever weight I’m happy with I want to make sure I hold for the entire year to really let myself get used to it. Fitness is also something I want to work on, but I think it would be best to do that via a sport. Certainly not an inspiring New Year goals post, but realistic!
Cutting Week 5: Upper Body Day
Warm-Up
Hip circles and goblet squats
Kettlebell Row
10kg: 2x30
28kg: 2x10
40kg: 2x5
Kettlebell Press
10kg: 3x20
Front Raise
10kg: 3x10
Bodyweight: 95.0kg 
I just felt like doing some upper body work today and it felt good. Really don’t have much direction with my training at the moment, I need to work something out.