The Turkish get up is not new. It has been a staple of wrestling and strongman training for more than a century, and kettlebell instructor Pavel Tsatsouline brought it back into mainstream American gym culture in the early 2000s through his books and the RKC certification program. What is happening this spring is a second wave of attention driven by a different set of people. Mobility focused personal trainers, physical therapists, and longevity influencers on Instagram and TikTok are all pushing the movement as a kind of all in one solution for the kinds of problems that show up in the body starting around age 35.
The movement itself is deceptively complicated. The practitioner lies flat on the back holding a kettlebell in one arm pressed straight overhead. From that position the lifter goes through a sequence of roughly seven distinct phases to arrive at a standing position with the weight still pressed overhead, and then reverses the entire sequence back to the floor. A full rep with a moderate weight takes between 30 and 45 seconds. It involves the hip flexors, the obliques, the rotator cuff, the glutes, the thoracic spine, and the core all working together, and it exposes every weakness and asymmetry in the body in a way that very few other movements do.
What the new wave of coaches like about the get up is that it does multiple things at once. It builds shoulder stability, it forces the core to resist rotation under load, it teaches single leg control, and it moves the hips through a full range of motion. For people who sit at a desk for eight hours a day and then try to work out three or four times a week, the movement addresses exactly the patterns that get worst. Dr. Kelly Starrett, who has spent twenty years coaching mobility work for athletes, told a podcast audience last month that if he could only prescribe one movement to a 40 year old office worker, the Turkish get up would be on the short list.
The social media push has come largely from creators who are not the typical gym influencer crowd. Physical therapists on Instagram have been breaking the movement down into its component parts for people who cannot yet do a full rep. Kettlebell sport athletes who have been doing get ups for years have been posting technique videos that have collectively pulled in hundreds of millions of views. A few high profile athletes have helped, with NBA forward Draymond Green posting a video last month of himself doing weighted get ups as part of his late season conditioning work, and UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski featuring the movement in his pre fight training camp.
Most commercial gyms still do not program the movement in group classes because it requires instruction and because the kettlebells or dumbbells involved are relatively expensive to stock in enough quantity. A few gym chains have started offering short workshops specifically on the get up, and some CrossFit affiliates have added a weekly get up session for members who want focused skill work. The Nashville based gym Barbell Studio launched a six week Turkish get up progression course in March that sold out within three days. The coach leading it said she had never seen a skills course fill that fast.
For most people starting out, the progression begins without any weight at all, just practicing the sequence from the floor to standing and back with the empty hand pressed overhead. From there, practitioners move to a shoe balanced on the fist, which sounds silly but is actually an excellent feedback tool because the shoe will fall the moment the lifter loses control of the shoulder. After the shoe comes a light kettlebell, and from there the weight climbs slowly. A realistic target for a healthy adult male after six months of practice is a get up with a 24 kilogram kettlebell, which is about 53 pounds. For women the typical six month target is 12 to 16 kilograms.
The research on the movement is limited but suggestive. A 2021 study out of the University of Waterloo compared Turkish get up practice to traditional core training and found better improvements in rotator cuff stability and thoracic mobility in the get up group. Another small study from 2023 showed meaningful improvements in single leg balance among adults over 50 after eight weeks of practice. There is not yet a large randomized controlled trial, and the movement is complex enough that compliance in a study population would be challenging.
For anyone curious to try it, the standard advice from coaches who teach the movement is simple. Start with no weight, watch a tutorial from a qualified instructor before attempting your first rep, and do not add load until you can complete the full sequence smoothly on both sides. Two or three practice sessions a week is plenty.