Sunday 12 February 2017

Kettlercise Ignite - 2 Weeks Later

   I've been using Kettlercise's 'Ignite' for two weeks now, and in that time I've used all three of the workouts twice each. As I'd expected, the 30 minutes includes a warm up and cool down, but the workout itself is a solid 20 minutes and you truly underestimate how much work you can get done in so short a time. Kettlercise has never given you a moment's pause between moves in any of their other DVDs and this is no different, and while that's exhausting, it's effective, and after 20 minutes of work, my goodness, you feel it.
   I'd forgotten how effective kettlebells are, in fact. My new year's resolution this year is to stop overdoing it, to stop adding on extra work after an intense workout, because the workouts I generally use - like this and Jillian Michaels - are designed to be effective on their own, along with sensible eating. Adding on extra exercise has led to me feeling run down and exhausted all the time, and, I eventually realised, a loss of results because my body can't keep up with what I'm making it do. As such, I'd forgotten it's the intensity of the activity that counts, not the total time spent on it, so I was relatively sure I'd end up breaking my resolution on this.
   Not so. 20 minutes of kettlebells is insane if done right, and Kettlercise know what they're doing.


   What surprised me beyond how deep a kettlebell workout gets into your body - you seriously feel it everywhere the next day - was how varied the three workouts are. The first, After Burn, uses complexes - a string of several kettlebell moves repeated in a complex sequence (the clue is in the name) - and while there are only a few of them, it remains immensely hard work and challenges your nervous system by trying to keep the pace and maintain the pattern. I'd thought that, because there weren't many complexes, that it wouldn't feel very different from the other two, but I was wrong. Detonator is more traditional, but it's a whole other kind of hard work with its focus and control, and Melt Down has these horrible little 1-minute cardio blasters in between several minutes of kettlebell moves.
   All three workouts, though focused entirely around the kettlebell and get into every part of your body, feel different from one another. It doesn't feel like 'a kettlebell workout three days a week,' but rather 'three workouts a week with kettlebells'. And that is a really, really good thing, because kettlebells are an exhausting piece of kit, so to get such different use out of them keeps them from getting stale so quickly.


   It's hard work, so much so that it's almost not enjoyable, but though February is a 4-workout-week month, I might give Ignite 5 weeks instead, working into the first week of March. It's definitely worth it - I'm convinced I'm already seeing results. So I'll either update again on the 26th, or on the 5th! Whenever I've finished. So be sure to come back for my long-term impressions, then the week after for the full, detailed DVD review.



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