About Us
It all started when a good friend of mine asked me to put together a strength & conditioning program for his martial arts school. Simple enough... but there were two big problems - he couldn't have people dropping weights on his mat (even a 5lb. dumbbell would cause a rip in the foam). AND, sandbags on the market did NOT perform like dumbbells and kettlebells (despite what some of them claimed).
I needed something that would be safe enough for those less experienced users but heavy enough to help the veteran lifter continue progressing. I wanted a tool that wouldn't require me to change the core movements in my programming to accommodate some expensive specialty equipment, nor did I want to let my buddy down, so I set out to find a solution... the result was a tool that solved much more than those two original problems. It ended up being a hit with everyone from my youth population, to my pregnant wife to the elite and Olympic athletes I trained.
I've used dumbbells's and kettlebells's for over 30 years - they are proven tools with movements that have become integral parts of improving peoples' strength, fitness and movement capacity... but there are some things about them that could be better. And, those are the things that brought the XP.Bell to life.
The big hurdle... how do we improve the tool, without changing the rules that are already proven to work? For me, this would be the essence of a hybrid bell. So, I wanted something that wouldn't require special modifications to movements, and we didn't have to call it "functional" just for the sake of justifying how differently you'd have to use it. We essentially wanted dumbbells and kettlebells and to be able to perform movements we love... but BETTER!
With the creation of the XP.Bell, I believe we have a tool that is purely interchangeable with your dumbbell and kettlebell movements - with several situations where our bell outperforms them. This is what we mean when we say:
Dumbbells + Kettlebells + Better = XP.Bell
Scott Fujii, Creator of XP.Bell