Emily Friedel lives in Melbourne, Australia. She works for a company that sells kettlebells in Australia, which is good because she has access to all the kettlebells she needs and she can train at work!
Emily started lifting kettlebells about 3 years ago. Like most people in Australia she started out doing "hard style" because that's all people knew about.
In November 2007 Steve Cotter came to Australia and Emily went to his workshop. That was where she found out about Girevoy sport. She had never really trained for a sport before, and she liked training with kettlebells, so Emily decided to see if she could build up to doing a 10 min set of snatches with the 16kg kettlebell.
So it was around two years ago she started training for GS (at the age of 26). Emily did her first 10 min set of snatches with the 16kg in March 2008 - she thought she got 90 reps. It was very hard! She knew then, though, that training for the sport and having a goal was good for her. Emily also found that GS was kind to her body - she has some old injuries from car accidents and GS has helped fix these.
After that she decided she would be Australia's first Master of Sports and started to work very hard towards that goal. Around June 2009 Emily started to get online coaching from Catherine Imes (America's first Master of Sports). Under Catherine's expert guidance, she started training very seriously for GS - training twice a day and only training GS lifts. Her numbers improved very quickly with Catherine's help and she got Master of Sports rank (WKC) in long cycle in November 2009.
Getting coached online is obviously very different to getting coaching in person. It is much harder when someone isn't standing there checking your technique and seeing how you perform. But for people like Emily in countries where there are no GS coaches it's the only option and Catherine is very good at coaching from a distance. She is in contact via email with her every week, sometimes every day, and Emily video sets for her to watch as much as she can.
Emily Friedel likes Girevoy Sport because it is a very healthy sport. She feels very strong but there is little impact on the joints. GS also trains the whole body in a balanced way, you don't really need any other exercise. She also likes the fact that pretty much anyone can do GS. Emily has never been very good at sport (she is very bad at running!), and even though she started at an older age, she can still get good results just with training consistently. The people who do GS are great too, and she has made lots of friends since she started participating in it.
So far her best results are:
One arm jerks 24kg 90 reps 10 minutes
One arm jerks 20kg 140 reps 10 minutes
Snatches 20kg 104 reps 8 minutes
One arm long cycle 20kg 121 reps 10 minutes
As you can see snatches are her worst lift! She is working very hard on them at the moment to improve.
This year Emily would like to get Master of Sports World Class (WKC) in biathlon. She needs 140 jerks and 140 snatches with the 20kg kettlebell. After that she would like to start working with the 24kg so one day she can compete with the professional Russian and Latvian women.
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