Kettlebell History Goes Back

Much Further Than Russia

By Nick English - November 22, 2016

The problem with kettlebell history is that surprisingly few people care.

“Let’s say you’re a baseball fan. You play recreationally, you know who
Babe Ruth is, you know the different stadiums. But in physical fitness
culture, people almost never know anything about the history! Maybe
they know who Sandow is, but that’s it.”

That’s Victoria Felkar, a sociocultural sports historian who’s completing

a PhD at the University of British Columbia on historical perceptions of
the muscular body. (Her master’s thesis was on the rise of prison
weightlifting. Cool job, right?) She also has a side project that seeks to
answer the question that keeps her up at night: why did the kettlebell
suddenly explode in popularity in 21st century America?
If you’re a fan of kettlebells, you probably have a two-word answer:
Pavel, duh. Pavel Tsatsouline is widely credited as the first man to
popularize kettlebells in the United States after the former Soviet Special
Forces trainer migrated from Belarus in the late 90s.

That’s wrong. That’s all wrong. And in her quest to uncover the secret
history of the kettlebell, Felkar, along with some of her colleagues, has
journeyed to archives all over the world and traveled back in time (uh,
metaphorically) to old-timey Scotland, Russia, China, Germany, and
America itself – about a hundred years before Pavel even landed on its
shores.

So, what’s up with kettlebells?

A haltere, one of the kettlebell’s ancestors.

Image by Portum, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
A What?

The first roadblock to answering Felkar’s question is that kettlebells are

little more than a weight with a handle on top. That is, intuitively, a
pretty useful strength tool, which means that a lot of societies, from
Shaolin monks in China to Highland Game athletes in Scotland, have
produced some variation on the model, sometimes under names like
“ring-handled weight” and “stone padlock.”

Even today, there are competition kettlebells, mainstream kettlebells,

monkey-faced Onnit kettlebells, and more variations that some purists
would never call a kettlebell.

“Suggestions have been made that in Western civilization, objects

resembling kettlebells were used as far back as classical Greece,” she
writes in her currently unpublished paper on the topic:

ACCORDING TO (HISTORIAN AND

POWERLIFTER) JAN TODD,¹ ² BY THE
FIFTH CENTURY B.C. THE ANCIENT
GREEKS HAD DEVELOPED THREE
DIFFERENT WEIGHTED IMPLEMENTS,
INCLUDING AN OBJECT CALLED THE
‘HALTERE.’ ALTHOUGH TODD NOTES
THAT THERE WAS VAST VARIATION IN
THEIR APPEARANCE AND
COMPOSITION, SOME OF THE
DESCRIBED MOVEMENTS OF THIS
‘SWINGABLE’ WEIGHT ARE AKIN TO
TODAY’S KETTLEBELL.
“The kettlebell’s a vastly unknown and unappreciated weightlifting
object,” Felkar tells BarBend. “It’s a tool, it’s an apparatus, it can be used
in competition and in performance. You have the blending of not only
various locations using the bell around the world, but then you also have
modifications on it.”

From Russia, With Love

Usually, its modern popularity gets traced to Russia, where it’s called
the giro or girya. That term first appeared in Russian dictionaries in 1704
and originates from the Persian word gerani, meaning “difficult.” It’s also
been traced to the ancient Slavic word gur, which means “bubble.” ³ ⁴

The story goes that Russian farmers used kettlebells as counterweights

to measure out grain at the market. As bored farmers learned the
weights could be heaved and tossed in feats of strength and
endurance, giros began enjoying a central role in farming festivals.

Some time around the turn of the nineteenth century, a Russian doctor
called Vladislav Krayevsky realized that the kettlebell deserved a place in
sports medicine. Krayevsky (also called von Krayeski, Kraevskogo, and
Krajewski) happened to be the personal physician of the Russian czar,
who popularized kettlebell training in the Russian army which eventually
elevated it to a national sport.⁵ ⁶

But that’s not the whole story. As historians unearth more and
more documents, some of which can be found in archives like those
at The Stark Center in Austin and The Open Source Physical Culture
Library, it has become clear that kettlebells had a presence in more
places than Russia.

“There are photographs of strongwomen and men prior to the 1900s

who used kettlebells in feats like the bent arm press and extended
lateral isometric holds,” Felkar explains, pointing to an old image of
strongwoman Elise Serafin Luftmann as an example.
And importantly, many of these old images came out of Germany, which
has a largely unrecognized history of using the tool. There’s even some
evidence that it was the first place, or one of the first places, where the
kettlebell was used as a part of physical fitness culture and strongman
routines. The kettlebell isn’t purely Russian after all.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was known as “Turnsvater Jahn,” meaning “father

of gymnastics.”
“There are tons of German training manuals and diaries and stuff like
that from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that feature the
kettlebell, though often under different names,” says Felkar. “Take the
Turners System of Gymnastics, created by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. He
was the German physical educator who kind of created this gymnastics
system that really is the hallmark of the physical education programs
that we have in America today. And there are early photographs of his
disciples using kettlebells.”

Since much of the Turners System is akin to the exercise programs used
in CrossFit, Felkar jokes that these photographs of Greg Glassman’s
ancestral father pioneering kettlebell training are “a CrossFitter’s wet
dream.”

Of course it’s possible, even likely, that other countries were using
weights like kettlebells at this time. But Germany, with its rich history of
physical culturists and bodybuilding, is the place that has the historical
documentation. (Felkar can name at least nine journals, diaries, and
articles from this time that describe it.)5 789

The late 19th century was also the dawn of globalization in terms of
international travel and cultural influence. There’s a good chance that it
was at an 1898 gathering of strongmen in Vienna where Dr. Krayevsky
became more familiar with the kettlebell as a strength and conditioning
tool, after he met with the innovative German trainer, Theodore
Siebert.9 12(Heavy kettlebell swings were staples in his programs.) The
czar’s physician may have then brought the idea back to his homeland,
where he wrote his first book on the topic just two years later. (Felkar
notes that while she likes this theory, it needs more research.)

It was also at this time that circus strongmen journeyed to and

sometimes settled in America, opening gyms and giving the United
States their first taste of kettlebell training. Then sometime between the
1940s and 1950s, without any explanation, it disappeared from
American gyms without a trace. No one can figure out why.
 Russian stamp featuring the kettlebell biathlon

The Dawn of Kettlebells as a Sport

Theories as to the kettlebell’s disappearance range from war-born

distaste for Russian artifacts to an expansive feud between two rival
fitness moguls. (For history buffs, we’re talking about Joe Weider and
Bob Hoffman – almost every gym had to pick a side, and neither of their
training systems included kettlebells.) Of course, there’s also a chance
the craze simply died out, like chest expanders or aerobics.

But in Mother Russia, the kettlebell craze was alive and well in the mid-
20th century. The czar’s taste for giros had long since spread from the
Russian army to the nation at large, and it was here kettlebells became
not just a conditioning tool, but a sport. It was the biggest thing to
happen to kettlebells since the first swing.

German sociologist Norbert Elias more or less defined the point at which
activity becomes sport, contending that sports are modern cultural
creations, determined by urban space, configured as commercial
spectacle, and subject to formal regulations and sanctioned by public
instititutions.

Kettlebell swinging and juggling was a popular “folk exercise” among

Russian farming communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, but it wasn’t until 1948 that it became an official sport.

That was the year that Russia, then the Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic, declined to attend the Summer Olympics in London, declared
kettlebell lifting as their national sport, and held the the All-Soviet Union
Competition of Strongman in Moscow. Kettlebell contestants performed
in two events: the “long jerk,” which is a clean and jerk with two bells,
and the “biathlon,” which is a set of jerks with two bells followed by a
set of snatches.

Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, sports schools appeared throughout
the Soviet Union and it became known as the “working man’s sport,”
due to its inexpensive equipment and minimal space requirements. In
1981, The Official Kettlebell Commission was formed, which advocated
(but didn’t enforce) mandatory kettlebell training for all workers. This,
they said, would bring about a fitter population with higher productivity
and a cheaper healthcare bill. 13 14 But different Soviet states tended to
have different rules, weights, dimensions, and training styles. It wasn’t
until 1985 that the sport was modernized and formalized across the
entire Soviet Union.

“That was when the sport was shortened to ten minutes per exercise for
as many reps as possible,” says Steve Cotter, founder of
the International Kettlebell and Fitness Federation. “In the biathlon,
you’d get one set of jerks and one set of snatches, and once you picked
up the bell you absolutely could not put it down. But
contestants were able to rest up to an hour between the two sets.”

Kettlebells for Fitness: A Different Bellgame

At this point, kettlebells were a fully-fledged sport in the old USSR, but
implementing them for fitness – not for performance, but for wellness,
rehabilitation, a healthier heart, and so on – has an entirely different
motivation and practice.

“When we say kettlebells for fitness, we mean people are using them to
get in shape but not necessarily competing in a kettlebell sport,” says
Cotter. “In the sport you’re doing many, many reps, one to two hundred
without stopping. Fitness has a different energy system and a different
mindset.”

Cotter and others credit the spread of kettlebells as a sport to Valery

Fedorenko, a world champion from Kyrgyzstan who migrated to America,
taught the sport, and founded the World Kettlebell Club in 2006.

But then there’s the question of Felkar’s research paper: why did
Americans start using kettlebells as a tool for fitness? Why did gyms
start carrying kettlebells after decades without them?

Usually, the credit goes to the Belarusian Pavel Tsatsouline, a former

trainer of Soviet Special Forces soldiers. Pavel is now the chairman
of StrongFirst, Inc. and a subject matter expert to the US Marine Corps,
the US Secret Service, and the US Navy SEALs.

“The origin of kettlebells for fitness was about the year 2001, that was
when Pavel started (the certification course) the Russian Kettlebell
Challenge,” says Cotter. “The marketing used with that is what first
started this kettlebell fitness phenomenon that we’re still experiencing
today.”
Felkar more or less agrees that Pavel’s marketing was extremely
influential in spreading kettlebells as a fitness tool. She likens him to
Eugen Sandow: he wasn’t the first guy to excel at bodybuilding, but he
was a marketing genius who lay a lot of the groundwork for today’s
world.

But as an academic, she’s not completely satisfied that Pavel is patient

zero for the 21stcentury’s kettlebell epidemic. She points out that scores
of ex-Soviet kettlebell athletes fled to America and opened gyms after
the Berlin wall fell. There are more libraries for her to visit, archives to
examine, stories to tell. She’ll call us when she unearths enough data to
answer her thesis question more definitively.

The future of the history of kettlebells is in her hands.

Wrapping Up

“The kettlebell has a long and complex history that ultimately parallels
the embodied practices of weightlifting itself. You have multiple origins,
names, figures, and ways to lift the object itself,” she says. “War, global
politics, globalization, the multicultural climate of North America. There
are so many factors that have influenced the rise of not only physical
culture, but weightlifting, all the way down to the kettlebell itself.”

It can’t even be said that the tool is from Russia, or Germany, because
there’s nothing absolute about weightlifting. The kettlebell is at the
center of an inconceivably vast network of international and intercultural
influences and practices. It’s a riddle with a handle.

“There are so many variables involved,” she concludes. “And because it’s
so complicated and messy, the average joe blogger doesn’t want to get
their hands wet.”

But there are things we do know: the kettlebell came to America long
before Pavel Tsatsouline, and its modern sport may have originated in
Germany, not Russia. That flies in the face of a lot of conventional
wisdom about the kettlebell. But hey, at least you got your hands wet.

Featured image courtesy @Strongfirst.

Bibliography

1. Jan Todd. “From Milo to Milo: A History of Barbells, Dumbells, and

Indian Clubs“. Iron Games History 3 (6) 1995: 4-16.

2. Jan Todd. “Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful. Purposive

Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800-1875”. Mercer University
Press, Macon, Georgia, 1998.

3. International Union of Kettlebell Lifting (IUKL). “The History of

Kettlebell Lifting: From history of origin and development of kettlebell
sport”. International Union of Kettlebell Lifting.

4. Andrew Volgograd. “History of Kettlebell Lifting” (translated

document), http://girevoj.narod.ru/histori.html. History prepared from
the Russian text “Girevoy Sport” by V. Polyakov and VI Voropaev, 1988.

5. Jurgen Giessing & Jan Todd. “The Origins of German Bodybuilding:

1790-1970,” Iron Game History 9, no. 2. 2005: 8-16.

6. International Union of Kettlebell Lifting (IUKL). “The History of

Kettlebell Lifting: From history of origin and development of kettlebell
sport“. International Union of Kettlebell Lifting.

7. David P. Willoughby. “The Super-Athletes: a Record of the Limits of

Human Strength, Speed, and Stamina.” 1970. South Brunswick : A.S.
Barnes.

8. Kimberly Ayn Beckwith & Jan Todd. “Requiem for a strongman:

Reassessing the career of Professor Louis Attila,” Iron Game History 7,
no. 2 -3 (2002): 43.
9. Bernd Wedemeyer (Translated by David Chapman). “The Father of
Athletics, Theodor Siebert (1866-1961): A Life Amongst Bodybuilding,
Life Reform and Esoterica”, Iron Game History 6, no. 3. 2000: 5.