The Bell Remembers: Announcing Best of Boles Bells
There is a moment in every kettlebell practice when the weight stops being an object and starts being a mirror. You grip it, you swing it, and somewhere between the backswing and the lockout, it shows you who you are that day. Not who you were yesterday, not who you plan to be tomorrow. Right now. Honest. Indifferent. Cast iron does not flatter.
That honesty is what started this website, and it is what fills the pages of our first anthology: Best of Boles Bells: Volume 1, Pressing Over 50, now available from David Boles Books in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF.
Years in the Making, One Volume in the Hand
BolesBells.com launched in March 2021 with a simple premise: there was no dedicated space for people over fifty who had discovered kettlebells and wanted something more than a beginner tutorial. There were forums for competitive lifters. There were programs for twenty-somethings chasing aesthetics. There was nothing for the person who picked up a 16kg bell at fifty-three, felt something shift in both body and mind, and wanted to understand what that shift meant.
This anthology collects the best of what we have written in that space over the past several years. The selection process was not about picking the most popular posts or the ones that performed well on search engines. It was about choosing the essays that still mattered when you read them a second time, the ones that had something to say beyond the immediate occasion of their writing. Some are practical. Some are philosophical. A few are confessional in ways that were uncomfortable to write and remain uncomfortable to revisit, which is precisely why they belong in this book.
What Sits Between the Covers
The anthology spans the full range of what BolesBells.com has always tried to do: treat kettlebell training as a complete practice, not merely an exercise routine. You will find history here, from the girya's origins in eighteenth-century Russian market towns to the codification of Girevoy Sport and the migration of bell culture into American gyms. You will find programming: 30-day challenges, 14-day nutritional resets, wilderness protocols built for people who train outside the walls of a commercial gym. You will find science, because claims about aging and longevity and grip strength deserve evidence, not anecdote.
And you will find the harder material. The essay on injuries that came from ignoring signals. The honest accounting of what happens when ego loads the bell heavier than the body can sustain. The meditation on why motivation is the wrong foundation for a practice, and why systems are the only architecture that survives the second week of February, when eighty percent of New Year's resolutions have already died quiet deaths in spare bedrooms and garage corners.
Why a Book, Why Now
A website is a river. Content flows through it, and even with archives and search functions, pieces drift downstream and settle into sediment. A book is a different kind of container. It imposes sequence, demands that the reader sit with one piece before moving to the next, and creates a physical or digital object that can live on a shelf or in a library. The anthology form gives these essays a second life, freed from the chronological accident of when they were published and arranged instead by the logic of what they have to teach.
Volume 1 carries the subtitle "Pressing Over 50" because the overhead press is the lift that most honestly reveals where you stand. Unlike the swing, which rewards aggression and timing, the press demands patience, structure, and the willingness to earn each kilogram slowly. It is the lift most analogous to aging well: you cannot rush it, you cannot cheat it, and the rewards come only to those who show up consistently and respect the process.
Available Now, Three Ways
The Kindle edition is $4.99. The paperback is $14.99 for those who, like us, believe some books belong in the hand. And because BolesBells.com has always been about access rather than gatekeeping, the full PDF is available for free download from the book page at BolesBooks.com.
Pick it up. Read it before your next training session, or after. Let the essays sit with you the way a heavy bell sits on the floor between sets: present, patient, waiting for you to decide what comes next.
The kettlebell does not care how old you are. Neither does this book. Both of them are simply here, offering the same proposition they have always offered: show up, do the work, and you will be stronger than you were before.
Ring them Boles Bells.
The Best of Boles Bells!
