The Bell: Cast Iron That Won't Pretend

Russian farmers handling these objects every market day discovered that they were also exercise equipment. Swinging a girya overhead in a village square became a feat of strength in seasonal festivals. A man who could press one was a girevik, a kettlebell man. The weight that confirmed the merchant's honesty was now confirming the lifter's. By the late nineteenth century, Vladislav Krayevsky, a physician credited with founding the St. Petersburg Amateur Weightlifting Society in 1885, was writing systematically about the girya as a tool of physical development. His 1900 book, "The Development of Physical Strength with Kettlebells and without Kettlebells," moved the object out of the village square and into a clinical literature.