Color Coordinated / Just Lift It
Do you know the reason why all the kettlebells in the gym are color coordinated? It might not be what you think.
When I first started coaching I worked primarily with middle school and high school athletes.
One of my most memorable groups was 8 girls from the varsity soccer team. They had offers or desires to play on at a division 1 school. They needed to get stronger.
At the time, it was the Wild West of kettlebells. You couldn’t buy a full set at Target, websites weren’t selling them, and if you could track down mail-in catalog with a kettlebell order form, you could get some shipped to you for even more of an outrageous price than today.
That meant we got all our kettlebells the old fashioned way. Finding gyms that went out of business, Craigslist, and our favorite, buying the demo kettlebells from a seminar off a truck, like a scene from Goodfellas.
That meant the gym’s kettlebell collection was mismatched, to say the least. They were all different sizes, diameters, colors. Most of them only had the weights on in kilograms, and if it had pounds you had to really look to figure it out.
One day I noticed the athletes were progressing on their goblet squats, but not their trapbar deadlifts and I couldn’t figure it out.
And then it became clear.
Since the kettlebells were a mismatched jumble, I would pass out the kettlebells for the day’s squats to make sure each athlete got the right weight. Since the weights were so mismatched, and hard to figure out exactly how much they weighed, they would just squat what was in front of them.
On the deadlifts, they were loading their own bars, and it’s very obvious how much steel plates weigh, with the white on a dark contrasting background. When they were faced with knowing the heavy weights, it made them nervous, even though they were exceptional athletes.
When I pieced this together, I did two things.
I headed to the hardware store and bought many cans of spray paint. I spent an afternoon color coordinating the kettlebells by weight.
In future sessions, I would just tell the athlete to grab the yellow or blue or green kettlebell for their squats, and it was never met with resistance, just like when I handed them out. I started loading the trapbars for the weekly deadlifts sessions, not telling them how much was not the bar until after a successful lift.
What resulted was an important lesson as a coach.
Sometimes the numbers can be intimidating and stop people in the tracks, they think “I’m not strong enough to lift that,” or “that’s way too much for me, I’ll get hurt.” So the color coordinated kettlebells stuck around, and now, with new clients who have very little experience in the gym, I tell them not to worry about the pounds, but to just think of it as the orange, or blue or yellow, or whatever color kettlebell.
The subtle mindset shift can unlock gains you didn’t even know you were capable of. So maybe, don’t worry about exactly how much it weighs, and just think of it as the purple kettlebell.
So that’s the reason the kettlebells, and everything else in the gym, is color coordinated. And, of course, to keep them organized.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
