11/05/2025
Full Article, How Kettlebells Forever Transformed The Modern Fitness Landscape
Dave Whitley interviews John Du Cane on Dragon Door’s recreation of a classic tool for advanced strength and conditioning… https://dragondoor.com/blogs/kettlebell-training/how-kettlebells-forever-transformed-the-modern-fitness-landscape
Dave Whitley:
Welcome back to a long overdue episode of Advancing Man Project. Today I have a very, very special guest that I'm really excited to talk with and that's John Du Cane, the founder and CEO of Dragon Door Publications.
If you're not familiar with Dragon Door or John Du Cane, it's because you're just not familiar with kettlebells really.
John has his roots in martial arts, Tai Chi, and Qigong. He's been practicing that for decades. And in the early 2000s, he partnered up with Pavel Tsatsouline, to design and manufacture the first kettlebells that were available in the United States.
This grew into the RKC certification which I attended in 2003, which is really surreal for me to say because that's been 22 years since I started working with kettlebells. And the RKC continues to be going strong.
Dragon Door has evolved over the years and I'll let John tell us more about the specifics of that to include things that have to do with body weight training, calisthenics, and isometrics.
John, I appreciate you taking time to be on here. It is an honor to have you on.
John Du Cane:
Thank you, Dave. And it's really great to connect with you again after all this time and history together.
Dave:
And I don't say this lightly. But anyone who is in the United States today, right now in, that sees a kettlebell or an image of a kettlebell or picks up a kettlebell or has anything to do with a kettlebell, we can trace it back directly to the work that you did early on with the RKC and manufacturing the kettlebell and getting it out to the public.
I don't think the importance of your role in that could be overstated. So, thank you very much.
Before Dragon became what it is now, what was the original vision that you had for it?
John:
So, backing up even more, I've had a natural enthusiasm, certainly since my twenties, a natural propensity to share my passions for. I love the word enthusiasm, by the way. It means filled with the divine. So, I think it's a very cool kind of spiritual word to use in connection with sharing what you love.
And my great passions in my twenties had to do with physical cultivation, martial arts and meditation. I went to an ashram in India where I was introduced to Qigong and Tai Chi and I fell in love with everything to do with Tai Chi and Qigong. So, I immediately became a proselytizer for the health benefits.
I have always been a spiritual aspirant and everything that I've done to do with movement and strength training and martial arts and nutrition finally has a kind of a spiritual bent to it — a desire to become enlightened or become certainly more spiritually aligned.
So that was the route that led me eventually to agree to found a publishing company with my Tai Chi teacher of the time in Minnesota. He'd had a small company previously that had gone down. He published a couple of books based on a lineage through a gentleman called Master TT Liang who I actually had already heard about. Liang was a renowned figure in the Tai Chi world. He was one of the first great Yang stylists to promote Tai Chi in this country.
So, rather impetuously I jumped in and we came out with a book called Cultivating the Chi, which was based on the Yang family's Qigong secrets. The book was a success. We then published Imagination Becomes Reality — such a great name! — based on TT’s Yang Tai Chi system.
Dave:
I love that! I did not know that you had a book that had that title. I have been exposed to Neville Goddard’s work. If you Google Neville Goddard quotes “imagination becomes reality” is one of the first things that'll pop up. I have a quote over here that says “every stage of man's progress is made by the conscious exercise of imagination matching the inner speech to fulfilled desire.” So, yes I love it.
John:
Yes, me too!. That was like a central message in my Tai Chi lineage. The original vision there was based on the Daoist esoteric principles of cultivating your entire being physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You treat yourself as an ongoing work of art to be cultivated and refined. So that was the original vision for Dragon Door.
Now, when I started Dragon Door I had no background in business. I had no background in marketing or writing ad copy — but I had my passion and my enthusiasm.
Fortunately I had some great marketing mentors which led me to developing a physical catalog. Those were the days, when we had paper… and I started to build up a catalog of esoteric resources for Qigong, herbs and all sorts of Chinese internal martial arts.
And it was tough! I mean trying to market highly esoteric material like that is very, very difficult, but it I really persevered and built up this respected direct response-based catalog.
Then came the massive shift for Dragon Door. I was teaching Qigong at a place locally in Minneapolis called the Open U. And this charismatic young Russian suddenly showed up on the scene named Pavel Tsatsouline, offering his own classes there.
I've always seen Pavel as a master marketer in his own right. He does not like people to realize that, but he was a very brilliant marketer. He understood positioning very well. He was very brand conscious and he was a great actor and entertainer. And I saw that right away.
I went to his flexibility workshop. There were ballerinas, grizzled old vets, bodybuilders, martial artists, every imaginable kind of person. And he was getting them immediate results.
Pavel had this whole schtick right from the beginning — even T-shirts that said Body by Stalin. Which was kind of outrageous. He was already into the Evil Russian idea. And, great credit to him. I learned to run with all that and amplify it in my own way. It was like a strong marriage, a partnership rather like say, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards getting together, where we hit it off creatively.
I approached Pavel at the end of his flexibility workshop and asked him if he’d like to be published. He was very diffident about it and said yes that would be great and we came out with the first book Beyond Stretching. People immediately became very interested,
Pavel had obviously much more of an enthusiasm for heavy duty strength training. I had always been into strength training, but not on the level that Pavel had been. Essentially, when he came over from Russia, I think when I met him, he had been probably about two years as a strength and conditioning trainer for Spetznaz, and that was it.
So, he was very young and he was actually secretive about his age in those days. He didn't want anyone to know how young he was because naturally people wouldn't really take someone in his mid-twenties that seriously. But his natural brilliance carried the day, obviously.
Pavel took my Qigong classes and liked them very much. And one of the things that I introduced him to was high-tension isometric training in Qigong, otherwise known as iron shirt.
There was a an iron shirt qigong system that he was very struck with that combined power breathing and high-tension holds. It was by Shou Yu Liang who I'd been studying with and promoting. Shou Yu Liang had been brought up in communist China and survived through some very hard times.
He'd never touched a weight in his life, but he'd been doing iron shirt qigong since the age of five with his grandfather. When he finally got to college and he was in the weight room he just kind of casually picked up a massive amount of weight and put it over his head. The local coach saw that, was astounded. He said, "So, you've been training weights for a long time?" He said, "No, I've never touched a weight in my life."
I told that story to Pavel and he lit up. One of Pavel's great abilities was to absorb a training insight that reaffirmed what he already knew and it would trigger him to really work on something innovative, which would take it to another level.
And the big, big initial impetus which did lead to I think part of the success of the kettlebell system was the understanding of how important it is to properly generate tension for strength and Pavel really understood that deeply. And out came Power To The People!
So the next step towards the successful development of kettlebells was this influential book title, which just used basically two exercises typical of power lifting where the real emphasis was on how to really make yourself stronger not just by lifting a lot but what's behind it. We were starting to build a significant following as a result of our what we were up to.
Then in 1998, Pavel said , “John when I was with Spetznaz I trained with these things called kettlebells. Do you think we could do anything with them in America?”
And I said “sure let's look at that.”
Iron Mind had an adjustable kettlebell. That was it. There were no books, no videos, no workshops, no systems, nothing.
Pavel had just got some kettlebells from a Russian hockey player and they were the old style which were hollow inside. You put additional weight inside. We decided to manufacture them. We located a foundry in St. Paul, Minnesota and a small local shop that understood how to create the templates for these kettlebells.
And we thought, let's get away from the hollow kettlebells. Let's come out with a new design where they're solid. So we were the first people ever as far as I know in the world to come out with this kettlebell design. Our 16kg kettlebell did not exist in Russia in that format. We also designed unique 24kg and 32kg bells.
A huge, huge part of our success, I believe — which I am very proud of — was the creation of a certification system for kettlebell instructors.
Before I started the Tai Chi publishing company, I was the director of the certification board for chemical dependency counselors. Now, the chemical dependency counselors were almost all recovering addicts and many were not exactly credible folk a lot of the time. They're recently out of prison or whatever. They had been addicted to drugs for a long time. So, part of the certification system’s idea was how do we give ourselves credibility? Appear professional?
Basically a certification system allows you to anoint yourself as the authority. You say, "Come to us, we'll test you and we will bless you, my child." The certified person will now be a...read complete interview: https://dragondoor.com/blogs/kettlebell-training/how-kettlebells-forever-transformed-the-modern-fitness-landscape
Dave Whitley interviews John Du Cane on Dragon Door’s recreation of a classic tool for advanced strength and conditioning… Dave Whitley: Welcome back to a long overdue episode of Advancing Man Project. Today I have a very, very special guest that I'm really excited to talk with and that's John D...
