Nicholas A. Danes, PhD

An average new Dad's approach to training with kettlebells (and other tools) to develop General Physical Preparedness (GPP) at home

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This is a mirror of the post on /r/kettlebell: https://www.reddit.com/r/kettlebell/comments/1p5kwbm/an_average_new_dads_approach_to_training_with/

Why this post?

I often get asked in comments about how I program my workouts. In order to address these comments, I’ve decided to write this post and outline my process.

Goal

My hope with this post is to better understand why you should program your workouts a certain way, rather than just what. This is not to give you a program to follow but rather how to think about programming. It requires trial and error with workouts. You may have to adjust your workout during the session. If this doesn’t interest you, this post isn’t for you.

Training Background

Since I’m a bit pedantic, I’m going to first contextualize all this with a bit of my training background.

Beginnings (Early 2022 to October 2023)

Early 2022, I was the heaviest in my entire life, and had not done any serious exercise since I was in my early 20’s. Even then, there was no resistance training. I got fed up, and started figuring out ways to dial in my nutrition and exercise (we will focus on the exercise here).

It started with light dumbbells and bodyweight for the first few months, but eventually I stumbled upon kettlebells. They looked fun, took up little space, and were relatively affordable. I tried several different cheap kettlebells on Amazon, only to settle eventually on a pairs of 16 kg, 20 kg, and 24 kg cast irons by late December 2022.

My early exposure to the bells should be familiar to most who visit here: Dan John, Lebe Stark, and Mark Wildman were on my YouTube constantly. Learning the big 6 (clean, press, snatch, swing, TGU, squat) were my primary focus. Learning from Dan John, I tried to focus on his model of the 5 fundamental movement patterns:

  1. Push
  2. Pull
  3. Hinge
  4. Squat
  5. Carry

If you look my most of my posts throughout the first 9 months of 2023, you will see me doing workouts with almost all these movement patterns. It started with mostly kettlebells, but bodyweight and eventually clubs/maces came into the picture.

Despite making progress all the way from a Double 16 kg to Double 24 kg clean & press, my technique wasn’t great. I needed coaching.

Coaching Phase (October 2023 - June 2024)

Starting from October 2023, I hired my first online coach (not going to name names, but iykyk). His first month with me focused on learning where I was at with different exercises, what training goals were, what equipment I had, and how often I could train. Some of these goals included:

  1. 5 x Double 32 kg Clean & Press
  2. 5 x Double 32 kg Front Squat
  3. Sub 5 min 24 kg snatch test

Working with this coach was invaluable. Learning on your own is definitely possible, but hiring a good coach can accelerate that process, especially when you’re a beginner.

Fast forward over the next year and a half, we added sandbags, played with various cardio equipment , and chipped away at each of my listed goals. My technique kept sharpening with the bells, and PRs kept coming. It was awesome.

But then, in July 2025, my wife had our first child. Progress was achieved by going hard 5-6x week, with 1-2 hour sessions. I knew I couldn’t do this moving forward. I decided it was time to take my own path and apply what I learned from my coach.

Current Phase (June 2025 - Present)

A few weeks before my baby was born, I started experimenting with my own workouts, and are what you can see in my post history since June. I can now talk about my process below.

Training Goals

Before you can set up any programming, you need to ask yourself: what are your training goals? You often hear things like:

  1. I want to get stronger.
  2. I want to build more muscle.
  3. I want to develop “functional strength” (I hate this term, but this post is not about this lol)
  4. I want to develop more fitness
  5. Or all of the above.

If you’re number 5, you basically want to have good general physical preparedness. This means you want to be a more physically capable person with whatever you do outside the gym. That could be a recreational soccer league, playing with your kids/grandkids, or chasing gym PRs for its own sake. The main point is that there isn’t necessarily an underlying sport you have to prepare for, or worry about taking training time with your general goals.

If you have more specific goals, this post is not for you. I’ll just say it again: hire a coach. It’s well worth the time and money investment.

General Physical Preparedness (GPP) using kettlebells, and other weird tools

So here’s the part probably most of you care about. Going to give you some basic parameters to focus on, and you can dial in rep ranges and number of sets based on your training time allows.

Basic template

Below is an overview of my programming process. I’ve done my best to lay it out as checklist, with tips toward the end to organize workouts, as well as examples how I do it with my current lifestyle.

0. How often can you train? How long can you train per session?

For me with my baby, it’s about 20-45 min per session, but high frequency; I try to train everyday, but rest days happen as needed.

1. Pick an intensity that dictates rest periods and rep ranges. This can include:

I try to hit each of these at least once a week, but usually more since I’m such high frequency. You can also modulate which you want to focus on more based on your own goals.

2. Pick an upper and lower movement pattern minimum:

Some nuance above can include vertical vs horizontal pushing or pulling, but that can also be very individual.

Lately I’ve been focusing on a handful of movements and trying to do them every week. For example:

The exercise pool you choose will depend on what you enjoy and what tools you have!

3. Pick the implements for the movement patterns and intensities above using the equipment you have

For me, I will rotate between clubs/maces, bodyweight, sandbags, and kettlebells. As mentioned above, clubs/maces tend to be more upper body focused, while sandbag work tends to be more lower body focused; kettlebells I use for upper and lower in most cases.

Conditioning work can be its whole can of worms, but I would say reserve a day or two a week to run, ride a bike, etc. to build your aerobic capacity using lower-intensity steady state cardio. Then, use another day to train another energy system in the higher intensity ranges. If you’re unable to do these things above (which I can understand with a baby under 6 months), the kettlebell snatch can be used for some conditioning with good programming. Some good resources include:

I don’t care if particular lifts progress quickly, but they usually do over time. For example, with a pressing pattern, I could rotate any of the following exercises:

  1. Double Kettlebell Strict Press
  2. Double Kettlebell Push Press
  3. Sandbag Jerk
  4. Dips
  5. Deficit Pushups

All these are pressing patterns, so they all work toward building strength with those movement patterns. Sure it may not be as quick as running a program such as The Giant to build your overhead press, but you will see progress in your press. It also keeps things interesting and fresh, which is a plus!

4. Track your sessions and look for opportunities to PR. PRs create self motivation and you can find them if you create conditions to do so. This can include:

For rep PRs: Going for an AMRAP on one of your lifts on its last set is a good way create rep PR opportunities. Of course, you won’t always PR and that’s okay!

5. If you’re short on time to train, use a combination of super/giant sets, and EMOM-style (Every Min On The Min) intervals.

As a person who gets easily distracted, adding timers to my workouts, even for strength or hypertrophy work has been great. A good rule of thumb is to do every 2-4 min on the min for strength/hypertrophy work, or 30 sec to 2 min for more conditioning or strength endurance focused work.

You can further condense the time to train by combining EMOM-style timers doing super or giant sets. By doing this, you can cut the timer down and just rotate between exercises every round on your timer.

A good example is alternating between an upper and lower body movement. Let’s say I want to do presses and squats for my strength work in the 5-8 rep range. Straight sets would mean doing a set of presses, resting 2-4 min, and then going to my next set until I finish my planned work, moving on to the squats and repeating. Alternatively, you could use an every 2 min on the min timer, and do the following:

  1. Odd rounds: Press
  2. Even rounds: Front Squats

This would roughly give you about 2 min rest between exercises, but the local muscules involved in the previous round would get closer to 3 min of rest per round!

A note about auto regulation

You may noticed that there is no strict rotation between hard, medium or easy days. This is because life sometimes doesn’t prepare you for the workout you plan. Learning to adapt based on your feeling is key.

Generally speaking, I find hard days usually involve either short rest metabolical conditioning or heavier sub 6 rep max workouts. If I planned for one the next day and slept terribly, I will either cancel the workout or scale down the workout to a different intensity range.

Sample week of workouts

Here’s my workouts that I had over the past week to give you an idea of how this maps out in practice.

Monday

Notes: Conditioning / Strength Endurance focus due to short time to workout.

Tuesday

Notes: Too tired to train, good long walk!

Wednesday

Notes: Was well recovered from the previous day, so did a heavier metcon to start as a pseudo-warmup that also worked my pushing muscles to prepare for heavy pressing. Pressing was my upper body strength movement, while lunges were my lower body one.

Thursday

Notes: Back when I wasn’t on parental leave and watching my baby, I would treat this time to go on a run, usually a 30 min tempo. Since this wasn’t an option, I opted for light snatch intervals for a similar effect.

Friday

Notes: My baby was very chill after their nap, so I got to squeeze an extra 30 min to do mobility work while they hung out in their playpen. A little personal goal right now is to work toward 30 rounds EMOM of the Armor Building Complex with double 32 kg, so I try to get an EMOM workout with them at once a week. The mill / clockwork squat complex with the club was a nice way to warmup my shoulders and legs.

Saturday

Notes: Weekends let me train in the garage with my wife home, so I try to focus on things I can’t do in the house. This includes jumping and other power work, which are a great way to get a warm-up and train that in one go, and sandbag training, which my floors would not survive inside dropping them on the ground.

Sunday

Notes: More jumping and power work via banded swings to warm-up. Normally, I wanted to do pull-ups at my vertical upper body pulling movement, but my lats were just fried from the Saturday workout. A compromise was to just do dead hangs instead.

Summarizing the week

Looking over the week, I was able to hit the following training qualities:

Conclusion

A lot of this was rambling, but I hoped this helped with anyone trying to figure out how they want to do their workouts. Being consistent and training hard still are the most important variables you have to make improvements with your fitness, so always keep those first!

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