What is Kettlebell Simple and Sinister and how effective is it?

What is the kettlebell simple and sinister workout?

Simple and Sinister involves 5 Turkish Get Ups each side, and 100 swings, 5-6 days each week. Your goal is to follow the (very) simple step loading sequence that Pavel puts into the book, in order to progress predictably up to some very heavy bells. It is absolutely that straight forward. If you keep showing up, do easy days when you need to and follow the plan, you’re going to be a significantly stronger and better put together human in a relatively short time. I don’t know who the quote is from, but someone has said that most people overestimate what they can do in a week and underestimate what they can achieve in a year. Simple and Sinister won’t make a big impact this week, but when you follow it for a year or even two, you’d best be prepared to be a lot leaner, stronger, and more powerful than you were when you started.

When you dive into the world of kettlebells on Instagram and Facebook (and the myriad of other social media phenomena out there - care for a Vine?) you’re going to run into a bunch of different things. You’ll see a bunch of movements. Some will be beautiful displays of power and grace, some will be displays of great confidence and equally impressive ineptitude, and some will be people doing their best and having a go. Alongside these things, there are promises to strip fat, to pack on the muscle, and to achieve great things in an incredibly short period of time. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time around a training environment it can become really hard to sift through and figure out that which is highly valuable from those that are a bit more dubious.

I first started using kettlebells over a decade a go, and the leading voice on how to use them then was a gentleman by the name of Pavel Tsatsouline (Pavel and his organisation, Strongfirst, are still the leading authority on the safe and effective use of kettlebells). Pavel was described by Westside Barbell legend, Louie Simmons, as having “reverse engineered” what the strongest do naturally. In other words, Pavel had made it possible for everyday folks to get really strong in a safe and fairly predictable fashion. His early works focused on minimalists programs that allowed people to do this with different implements: Power to the People focused upon how to use deadlifts and bent press to get really strong in about 20 minutes 5 days per week; Enter The Kettlebell (and the Russian Kettlebell Challenge) focused on how to do this with a kettlebell, and both included variations of what he called the program minimum (we’ll come back to this later), and finally, he had the Naked Warrior, which was a book about getting really strong as you go about your day with a specific program in it based around pistol squats (one-legged squats with your leg out in front) and one arm push-ups.

Why is Simple and Sinister so effective?

Simple and Sinister is effective because it reinvents and refines the program minimum in light of Pavel’s studies on elite performance in endurance, strength, and strength endurance (more in-depth information on this can be found in his Strong Endurance seminar and in his book, “The Quick and The Dead”). The idea behind the program minimum is that it is the minimum effective dose to get significant outcomes. That doesn’t mean that it is the optimal program for all outcomes, or even that it’s the optimal program for any strength outcome, however, if you’re looking for something that is easy, effective, and will cover a whole bunch of bases better than most of the programs you’ll run into, this is a good one.

The original program minimum (from The Russian Kettlebell Challenge) called for bent presses and snatches and is a fantastic program for people who have the mobility for it. Unfortunately, it was discovered that our modern population’s tendency to sit down a lot and to become restricted and stiff with poor shoulder and hip mobility was a significant limiter on the number of people who were able to successfully do the program.

This led to the second Program Minimum (found in Enter the Kettlebell). A program based on boxing coach Steve Baccari’s experiments with his fighters. The Program Minimum involved swings and Turkish get-ups. This simple program involved 5 Turkish get-ups each side, and 12 minutes of swings. This was a very successful program that had a whole bunch of people report outstanding results in a whole bunch of related and unrelated arenas. 

Finally, in recent years, Pavel’s research led to him refining the Program Minimum further into Simple and Sinister. The first edition of Simple and Sinister was good, but the second edition, is, in my opinion, so much better... The first edition provided the guts of what people were to do, but lacked the explicitly expressed frameworks for progression that the second one possesses, and asked people to read it multiple times and to understand it very clearly to appreciate the process. The second edition gives a step by step recipe that will create very strong, resilient, and well-conditioned humans. 

So why step away from the Program Minimum? Pavel devours reams of research, and simply put, on a cellular level, Simple and Sinister will have a much better long term impact on your longevity and explosiveness (healthier and more prolific mitochondria), and given that the cellular level dictates virtually everything else that we do, that’s a very good thing. Also, it feels way less unpleasant to do than the (ETK) Program Minimum was...

If you’ve begun the program or are looking for guidance on how to get started, come along to our next Kettlebell 101: Simple and Sinister course or reach out to QLD Kettlebells for more information on how to optimise your kettlebell workouts.