Fitness expert and world-renowned PT Luke Worthington on the respective benefits of the two bits of kit for your strength and conditioning goals
Barbells have long held the rank of the ultimate piece of gym equipment. No matter what your fitness goal, there is a barbell exercise to help you achieve it. However, kettlebells are emerging as a serious contender to the barbell’s throne. Once the secret, hardcore training tool of the Soviet military, now – thanks to the advocacy of former Special Forces operative Pavel Tsatsouline – kettlebells are seen as an essential addition to almost every gym.
But is there really any reason to re-invent the wheel and use kettlebells in place of a barbell? To answer the question, ‘Which is better?’ we really need to be considering the deeper question, ‘For what?’...
Understand your goals
Broadly speaking, intentional exercise (workouts) with weights will have a purpose of building strength, improving body composition (hypertrophy), or increasing rate of force production (power). And while these goals are absolutely not mutually exclusive, it does tend to make sense to be prioritising one during any given period.
Shifting between training for force production and hypertrophy means a shift of some of the variables of working against resistance – specifically the duration of the working set. If our goal is to increase the cross-sectional area of a muscle, generally we look to have a longer duration of set (around 60 seconds), with as much focus on the eccentric (lowering) phase of movement as the concentric (lifting). This causes the greatest amount of metabolic damage, which – with the adequate hormonal and nutritional environment – will lead to the greatest potential for lean muscle growth.
If we are looking to train for increasing absolute strength, then generally we have sets of shorter duration (less than 20 seconds), and the focus is very much on the intention of moving against the load with as much force as possible, activating the maximum number of motor units and contracting the most muscle fibres.
If we are looking to improve rate of force production, then we go a stage further and look to lift a weight for short sets, but lifting it explosively. In this instance, loads will be somewhat less than maximal, with the focus more being on the speed of the movement.
Kettlebells and barbells both allow us to work against resistance, they both allow us to manipulate the variable of load, both allow us to complete more volume and both allow us to manipulate the weight in an explosive fashion. However, when it comes to lifting weights fast (think cleans, snatches, push presses), there is a very different skill element required when using kettlebells vs barbell
