Go Lighter to Go Further
I talked with Corrisa Sivirot, a kettlebell coach and athlete out of British Columbia, and the biggest thing I took from that conversation is something almost nobody wants to hear when they start this sport. If you want to lift heavier bells, the answer is usually to go lighter first.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like a cop-out. It sounds like the thing a coach says to slow you down. When you are new and full of fire, the only number you care about is the size of the bell in your hand, and dropping down to a smaller one feels like going backward. Corrisa felt the exact same way. She told me she got into kettlebell sport stubborn, lifting heavy with hard-style technique, pushing weights her body had no business pushing, until her shoulder started screaming and she couldn't finish a set. So she switched lifts just so she could keep grinding the heavy bell. That is ego talking, and ego is expensive in this sport.
The "go down to 8kg" moment
Here is the part that stuck with me. Corrisa hired Denis Vasilev, a nine-time world champion, one of the best to ever do it. She came to him already grinding six and seven minutes of snatch with a 20kg bell at something like 12 reps per minute. Slow. Heavy. Suffering through it. And what did the world champion do? He took her DOWN to 8 kilos.
Eight. Then ten, then twelve, then fourteen. Cycling up through the weights, building the engine, before she ever earned her way back to the bell she wanted.
I laughed when she told me, because Denis did almost the exact same thing to me. I came to him wanting to push 24s. He put me on 16s. I am a big guy, 265 pounds, and I said something dumb like "16s? Really?" And he said yes, because you cannot finish ten minutes at 20 reps per minute yet, so we are not going to pretend you can. When a nine-time world champion tells you to put the big bell down, you put the big bell down. The proof is in the pudding.
Why lighter actually works
The reason this works is simple, and it is the whole game: you cannot build an engine on a weight that breaks you down every session.
When you train right at the edge of your capacity, you can't get many full ten-minute sets in. The weight chews you up. You hold on for dear life, your technique falls apart in the last two minutes, and you call it a workout. But you didn't actually practice the thing the sport demands, which is moving smoothly, breathing, and pacing for the full ten minutes. You just survived.
Drop the weight and everything opens up. Corrisa put it perfectly: with the lighter bells she could get in set after set after set of solid ten-minute work, pumping out clean reps, actually drilling pace instead of just clinging on. That volume is what built her foundation. The lighter bells weren't a detour around the work. They WERE the work. The strength to handle the big bell came later, sitting on top of an endurance base she spent months laying down.
This is the order that matters, and the coaches at the seminars that changed her lifting drilled it into her the same way: endurance first, then speed, then weight. Not weight first. NEVER weight first. If you can't make ten minutes on the competition bell, you make ten minutes on a bell that's one, two, even three sizes lighter, and you earn your way up. Strength is the last thing you chase, not the first.
The trap, and the way out
The trap is that more and heavier and faster FEELS like the path forward, when most of the time in this sport, less is more. If you keep failing your sets, the move is not to white-knuckle the same weight harder. The move is to take the weight down, build the capacity, and come back to it stronger than you left.
And you have to drop the ego to do it. Corrisa admitted she had to actively talk herself out of being angry about going light, and only looking back could she see what a massive difference it made. That's honest. Nobody enjoys it in the moment. But the lifters who let go of the number on the bell and trust the process are the ones who, two years later, are throwing around weights the people who refused to go light are still nowhere near.
So if you're stuck, here's the formula. Drop the weight. Build the engine for ten minutes. Earn the speed. Then add the load. Repeat. The bell you want is waiting for you on the other side of the bell you think is beneath you.
Listen to the full interview with Corrisa here.
If you've been grinding a bell that's beating you up and you're tired of failing sets, that's exactly the kind of thing we untangle together. Come train with us; we'll meet you where you are and build the engine from there. Nobody gets turned away over where they're starting.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan