Today’s podcast guest is Clifton Harski. Cliff is a fitness educator and kettlebell expert with more than 20 years of experience in human performance. He’s taught hundreds of workshops and certifications around the world, specializing in kettlebell training, movement, mobility, and athletic performance.
On today’s show Clifton discusses athleticism through the lens of movement variety, adaptability, and lifelong physical practice. He explores his background in jumping and multi-sport play, developing athletic kids without premature specialization, and why training should create opportunities to express athleticism. Clifton also dives into kettlebell training for rhythm, relaxation, explosiveness, multi-directional strength and deceleration, along with programming ideas that bridge traditional strength work, movement skill, and real-world athletic performance.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and the Athletic Fusion Cohort
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Topics
0:00 – Still Dunking at 44
4:20 – Jumping With Pressure
9:58 – Raising Forever Active Kids
13:22 – Simple Coaching Language
20:43 – Martial Arts and Reactivity
24:09 – Broad Movement Exposure
30:01 – Practicing Movement Variety
40:11 – Creating Athletic Opportunities
54:57 – Why Lunges Matter
56:59 – Swings, Outputs, and Feedback
1:04:03 – Preparing for Long Jump
1:08:17 – Posting with Purpose
Clifton Harski Quotes
“They’re just trying to hang out with their parents. Like we don’t make them work out. It’s just like, can I work out with you? And the answer is, of course, always yes. And it’s a kid-led program.”
“I would hate to put that pressure on them instead of remembering that what they’re playing is a game. And if they can enjoy it, they’ll probably play with a little bit more ferocity.”
“This feels very premature to focus on anything at all other than a big, broad breadth of movement capacity and capabilities.”
“The ability to problem solve movement puzzles in real time to not get slapped in the face, not to get kicked in the ribs, I think is monumentally important.”
“Just learning that your body can do a lot of different stuff… we’ve adopted what we say with kids like give them a broader exposure because we know that sets up for a wider breadth of movement capacities… but then we give up on adults.”
“Move athletically is a term I like to use because it makes you think of like fluid, fast, smooth type of movement.”
“If I’m moving athletically, those are the things I want to see. Fluid, fast, smooth, rhythm, the back and forth between relaxation and explosiveness, stiffness and fluidity.”
“I jokingly say, you’re dancing with the bell, but in reality, you are dancing with the bell. I think a very athletic thing in life is tool manipulation.”
“The idea with the kettlebell being that it traditionally and how it’s used, it just forces you to have to relax, get tight, explode. And that sounds a lot like change of direction stuff on any field of play.”
“If it’s basketball, it needs to be various. So you have to practice various.”
“If you can just do snatch in one particular way and you have to change your footwork like a little bit and you go to pieces, well, then what the hell was the point?”
“We can now do it out of asymmetrical stances and in different directions.”
“It’s just getting stronger and more in-betweeny positions and it’s the in-betweeny positions where people get hurt.”
“Training athletically to me means creating the opportunities to express athleticism because we don’t have that opportunity in a lot of instances just due to life responsibilities.”
“If you could get better at the skill component and build broader skills that feels so much more like long-term involved that it’s a win if you can get there.”
“If I had to say a drill that should get its way into weight rooms for athletes, it would be the Bulgarian clean.”
“You need to be stiff in order to do it well. And I don’t think you need to be stiff when you’re actually going and doing athletic stuff.”
“The kettlebell just lets you be much more maneuverable within your trunk while keeping the load on the muscles that are your athletic muscles anyway.”
“It blows my mind when people say that lunging isn’t a big part of their program.”
“You just are strengthening at lengthening positions, and that sounds like a pretty good idea for general robustness.”
“There’s benefit in, like, not max power output when you train because if we think about sport again, in basketball are you doing max power output on every movement that you do? No.”
“With the kettlebell, it becomes, did you accomplish what you wanted to do? Did I get the bell high enough to snatch it overhead? Did I get high enough to do the clean? Because the feedback is, oh, didn’t move fast or high enough, you dropped the bell.”
“The cool thing about specific events is you can reverse engineer what you need really quickly or not really quickly but like more simply than saying, ‘I want to be good at everything.'”
“Acceleration, deceleration and then single leg jumps, I would do a lot of single leg jumps to targets, like gradually trying to get them out.”
About Clifton Harski
Clifton Harski is a fitness educator, coach, and kettlebell specialist with more than two decades of experience in human performance. He has taught 450+ workshops and certifications, educating thousands of coaches across kettlebell training, movement, mobility, and performance. Harski has served as COO of the Pain Free Performance Specialist Certification and helped develop and lead its Functional Kettlebell Training certification. His background also includes work with Animal Flow, MovNat, Kettlebell Athletics, and Fitwall, along with a degree in Kinesiology from San Diego State University.
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