Medicine Ball

A year ago, the article, “A Deeper Look into Medicine Ball Training,” made waves in the strength and conditioning community, and was even translated into Chinese. While it asked some very profound questions and gave great recommendations, it was hardly a training guide for coaches and athletes. Now that the history and rationale are complete, the next step is to really harness the true value of what medicine ball training can do. In this article, teaching, training, and testing are covered in great detail, along with some arguments for what should be left to other modalities.

Even in 2017, very little research on medicine ball training exists, and this void enables a lot of junk articles to proliferate on the internet and at conferences. I have seen beautiful athleticism with medicine balls, and I have seen near abuse of the body with the tool, and this article will shed some light on the reason that medicine ball training must either be done right or not done at all.

This five-step plan will help coaches and therapists drive adaptation and challenge the body better than in the past. Most of the information is very logical and based on reason, but some of the information is very progressive because of the sports science investigation performed over the last few months. Due to the lack of research and the prospect of new and more enlightening science, I was forced to dig deeper on my own.

Step 1: Throw Away 90% of Your Medicine Ball Exercises

Medicine ball training is about purpose and transfer, not just doing it because other coaches include it in their training. Nearly all of the training I see with medicine balls is busy work or junk in fitness, but in sports performance it’s not much better. Earlier, I explained that many exercises with medicine balls are complementary and serve as bridging tools between sports skill and gross strength training. Medicine balls can help an athlete, but are a far second to general progressive strength training and specific sports skills.

Medicine balls are controlled violence with a dose of careful training. Click To Tweet

Exercise pruning is not a painful process, but a liberation from what is just included because it “looks like it may work” to only that which works well. The exercises in your inventory must pass four simple rules, but feel free to keep the exercises in “storage” if needed. The four tests for what should be kept are:

1. Does the exercise actually include a throwing or ballistic component?
2. Could the exercise be done with another tool or piece of equipment more effectively or safely?
3. Is the overload unique to the inclusion of the medicine ball so other options would not be appropriate?
4. Can a partner enhance or create value in the movement pattern or exercise option?

These questions leave at home a lot of the exercises seen in videos and magazines with regard to athletic development. A medicine ball is exactly what its name implies—a ball for throwing—and the medicine is about addressing a specific need.

Every exercise doesn’t need to pass all four rules at once, but nearly every medicine ball exercise will pass multiple criteria. Medicine balls are controlled violence with a dose of careful training. What’s not included in the list above is a clear rationale or purpose behind the exercise, which is termed “transfer effect” in some circles. Some exercises have some general benefit that can be rationalized or argued intelligently, but some seem to stick around because the primal centers of the brain enjoy doing them or watching them. A case in point: The medicine ball slam seems to be popular, but so far, the explanations of its value have been a stretch. In my world, they would not make the cut, but similar motions or body patterns would.

There are times that medicine balls may be used when other options seem, at first glance, just as reasonable, and these are when safety matters. While a medicine ball is a weighted object, having it fall on an athlete is still less risky than a weight plate or dumbbell. I have seen many athletes break a toe, get a laceration, or receive a serious head injury from using something from the weight room instead of just using a ball to enhance loading or teaching.

I have 10 exercises I use regularly, five I use sparingly, and three to five that I use rarely. I am sure that you can comb through the internet and find 100 legitimate exercises that seem valuable, but most of the time they are only medicine ball options because a ball appears to spice things up versus coaching athletes up.

Step 2: Classify Exercises Based on Their Primary Benefit

The next step is looking at exercises based on how they help the body improve athleticism overall. Cedric and Eammon did a fantastic job outlining how they classify the exercises in this article on medicine ball training, and I recommend reading it. After studying their points and progressions, I suggest creating your own taxonomy and classifications based on your training system.

Keeping things straightforward, medicine ball training is mainly a general conditioning and specific strengthening option, or it’s a power expression opportunity. In my inventory, the medicine ball routines are for torso strength and added conditioning, outside of total body throws, of course. Most of the exercises performed tax multiple systems and overlap different classifications, as no pure exercises exist, just those that emphasize an area, more or less.

Routines that are high-repetition and continuous are considered work capacity and will develop pillar or core strength. While the research isn’t supportive of core exercises as being a solution to injury rates, having a weak torso area isn’t a good idea either. No magic muscles exist, just some seem to develop easier than others, and due to the dynamic nature of medicine balls, it’s a good idea to train them in ways that challenge the body to express the dual needs to stabilize and mobilize joints and muscle systems.

The throws are usually expressions of one part coordination and another part neuromuscular power. The primary reason why coaches, including myself, are enamored with the aestheticism of medicine ball throws is that strength and power, without the required highly coordinated actions of the nervous system, doesn’t transfer. Medicine ball throws that have high exit velocities require a sequence of events that encourage a “cultivating of the athletic brain garden” of sorts. The medicine ball throws for power, whether for distance or height in any direction and style, are very total body, unlike the Bosco tests. While I include both jump tests and throws for velocity, the medicine ball movements are more total body and seem to encourage a better unfolding of the lumbar extension pattern for early acceleration than the countermovement jump. For this reason, the use of medicine ball throws is timeless for coaches and will never go out of fashion.

Medicine balls are restorative, as they challenge the body without exacerbating overuse syndromes. Click To Tweet

Torso development with medicine balls is bit of a cliché, with coaches picturing the stereotypical slow grinding sit-ups in a boxing training montage. The reality is that good medicine ball training is total body, and the core acts as a transmission to the legs and upper extremities. Multiple planes and a wide range of muscle groups are challenged with medicine balls, usually when the athlete is forced to decelerate a distal catch with a high radial chop or rotation, before throwing the ball back. Most coaches think medicine balls are about rotation or anti-extension options, but treat them like the modern suspension of a race car, as they are not about dissipating forces but recycling energy.

Extensive or even intensive circuit-style training sessions are excellent primers for later high-intensity work, but they are not aerobic capacity workouts. While some sessions have elicited up to 20 mmols of lactate, demonstrating high changes in the pH of the blood, they are not going to help an endurance athlete kick at the end of a 10K or even a soccer player finish a game hard. Medicine ball circuits and general training are clever ways to distribute workloads generally, and challenge the enzymatic processes of the body without excessive mechanical strain to at-risk joint systems. Medicine balls are restorative, as they challenge the body without exacerbating overuse syndromes.

Step 3: Teach Medicine Ball Movements from the Ground Up

While medicine balls are sometimes coined “midsection balls” because they overload the trunk, they really harness ground reaction forces from the legs when standing or kneeling and must be coached that way. The primary issue with medicine balls is that holding them or manipulating them can positively or negatively distract an athlete. An athlete who lacks natural athleticism may not be able to fully leverage the benefits of the modality if they are focusing on the ball aspect of the equipment. The catch, outside of a safe and orthopedically sound action, should be nothing more than a means to an end for the entire body.

The term and concept, “kinetic chain,” is used in biomechanics to explain how forces move through the body, usually from the ground up. Knowing how the body precisely loads the exchange of the medicine ball, either through the legs—generated from torso actions—or just by the upper body, is the name of the game. Recently, John Garrish, a strength coach in Boca Raton, gave a presentation on the importance of knowing how the body sets up or loads the medicine ball throw at a regional conference. Coaches should place most of their coaching efforts on the loading action rather than just observing the end throwing action and tossing out a cue.

Footwork is a very broad and vague term, but most of the errors seen in throwing laterally or from a run-up stem from a poor step pattern. How the weight of the body—mainly the center of mass—shifts and transfers the ball is the reason some athletes have great leg strength and great throwing ability. Many athletes are structurally blessed somewhere, but good anatomy without good coordination usually means a great weight room talent, but a poor athlete on the field or court.

https://player.vimeo.com/external/219016972.hd.mp4?s=66bedb2fbdad1e4ab825b77fc0b5754b72750319&profile_id=119
Video 1. The summation of forces is the soul of great medicine ball training technique. Look to the legs and pelvis to promote better mechanics and more efficient movement with throws and other exercises.

Due to the speed of the ball, correcting or instructing medicine balls can be challenging, as the athlete’s power can mask movement errors. Assisted with lab or research-grade motion capture and EMG, I have seen that most gifted coaches will let an issue slip without knowing. The common mistake is allowing excessive rotational flexion of the lumbar spine when a ball is passed beyond the athlete’s control, and that can be a problem down the road. Training the lower back is not a bad decision, but medicine balls with high reps and after intense training sessions expose athletes to risk.

Step 4: Train with Medicine Balls Ballistically and Progress Slowly

Medicine balls are either maximal effort, total body extension exercises or elastic and rigid bracing activities. No matter what is performed, a near maximal throw is likely necessary to generate or transfer energy sufficient to challenge the body. Outputs must be beyond honest effort but not enter the blind rage threshold that just encourages sloppy mechanics. Many training elements will aid in teaching, without requiring the excessive use of cueing. When training in large groups, the range of athlete learners is higher, making the opportunity for individualized instruction impossible. By providing clear tasks, movement strategies are usually efficient and natural ways to self-organize.

Medicine ball outputs must be beyond honest effort but not enter the blind rage threshold that just encourages sloppy mechanics.

One of the most common discussion points is optimal ball load when the coaches don’t have instrumentation to tease out velocity zones. Most medicine balls range from 1-6 kilograms, and some exercises must never increase the load while some will increase slowly. An athlete, even a beginner who is more likely to improve quickly, may stay on the same weight for a year or more. The problem with loads that are too heavy is that they encourage compensations to achieve success instead of doing the opposite—removing barriers to unleash power at high velocities.

In my inventory I have shot puts, rotational throws, underhand scoops, chest throws, overhand throws, and behind-the-back throws. Some of these exercises have variations, such as the back tosses from overhead, but most of them are standing, seated, or kneeling. As I mentioned before, most of what I do consistently is only movements throughout the year, and all of them include a projection of the ball.

Athletes can do throws by themselves against a wall or trampoline, but some movements, like the total body throws, can be done in the air and allow the ball to bounce nearby. Partner work is always conditioning unless a bounce or two is used between the pass, as the risks are clear with any type of throw to another person. Early season work with partners is excellent for team building, as the athlete must rely on their partner for accurate, quality passes to improve the rhythmic quality of the sessions. As the season progresses, most of the work is going to be maximal effort for distance or height.

Heavier balls don’t necessarily mean better, as the goal of medicine ball training is high velocity and to exploit the summation of forces from the legs to the fingertips. At times, a heavier ball can slow down a movement and overload differently, while not interfering with the goals of the exercises and, in fact, recruit muscle groups in a fresh way. For the most part, I prefer loading lighter for full extension of the body, and keeping things heavier for trunk work, provided the legs are involved and driving the movement.

Ball diameter can improve trunk contribution as the ball carriage is closer to the center of mass, relying less on the arms for contribution, especially with shot puts and rotational work. Smaller and lighter balls are great for run-up throws, similar to soccer throws and the javelin event. Overhead throws are the most deceptive of all exercises, as the amount of torque on the shoulder and the potential spinal strain are real. Athletes should keep throw counts low and use handballs and other ball types to learn before adding any weight at all. Additionally, the length of the acceleration and type of blocking action (abrupt or stumble) must all be factored in.

I have only had one athlete get hurt with medicine ball training that I can remember, and it was his upper thoracic area that seized up for some reason. I believe the cause of this was that it was too early to do explosive work or it was one of those freak injuries, like an athlete twisting their ankle in the shower or sleeping on their shoulder funny.

Step 5: Test Medicine Ball Capacity Smarter

When the teaching priorities are satisfied, the next need is to see improvement or transfer to sport by testing medicine ball throws. Testing medicine ball output is easy, but like I mentioned earlier, the context of how the power was created is what separates observational guessing from consistent results.

Testing does sometimes create issues with time management, since the process takes longer and some movements are more difficult to measure. One way to help improve testing is to make training the same movement strategy as the tests being performed. While it may sound obvious to test the movements that you train, the real issue is how strict the movement is in testing. Some athletes will either game the movement by trying a different strategy to increase output or simply try harder and have the same challenge of keeping technique repeatable.

Some companies have provided various accelerometer products to get a measure of peak velocity of the ball or arm, but the need to see how the body created those forces is, again, the story behind the number. The priority of testing is that it’s reliable, and it requires a repeatable movement and process that can be done over and over without faults or possible errors. Focusing on the result or peak output usually results in athletes increasing range of motion, excessive use of body English that has no sign of body control, and a possible adoption of a movement strategy that encourages joint actions that compromise the body.

Video does improve the reliability of testing, but only when the loading motion is analyzed and thresholds of what is acceptable and not acceptable are clear and tight. A strong cut point of what is not passing technique-wise must be nothing new to the athlete, and the training must take into account later testing. Athletes often gradually shape their movement strategies during training, so only when they have stabilized technique does testing make sense.

The use of targeting, whether for horizontal throws against a wall or for distance on a field, safeguards against much of the possible movement inconsistency. Having a narrow sector for total body throws and a small wall target raises the standard of performance while outputs from measurements can be added. In general, accountability for aiming the throw creates a governor to wild tosses and, in the long run, improves athlete power better from increases of coordination.

Through simple uses of a stopwatch and heart rate monitor for circuit-style training, you can see how various routines elicit physiological responses. Many circuits are done for time, and density work can be extremely taxing beyond the session and bleed into the next day. I have made the mistake of doing reps for time, and it usually became a slow migration to minimizing the entire body recruitment to more partial reps in order to decrease duration totals.

Parting Thoughts on Medicine Ball Training

The use of medicine balls in training has reached a bit of a ceiling with evolution today, but coaches are likely to start a renaissance with the education and technology available. Each exercise and permutation of movements should be carefully dissected and refined over time. Athletes can benefit, waste time and energy, or get injured from medicine ball training, so the odds are not in the favor of coaches who don’t do their homework. Invest in both education of training and experimentation with teaching and programming and see what works for you.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

English | 中国语文

If it weren’t for medicine ball training in high school, I would have gone to college to become an architect. Although, I was never a great athlete, I credit any success I had to medicine ball training.

I believe the medicine ball is one of the most potent tools to develop athletes, but it’s also the worst regarding available science and application. Because the tool is a ball, anyone can simply add it to a workout without thought and structure. This has not changed since I started training with my first Nemo ball in 1992.

In this article, I’ll show what I’ve learned since asking some honest questions. I may create some emotional responses, anger a few coaches, and question beliefs, but I will also present the truth. Many assumptions and much dogma have interfered with ball training’s evolution, and I hope this article becomes a catalyst to athletic development.

Medicine balls are one of the most potent tools to develop athletes. Click To Tweet

Bad Medicine: What Nearly Everyone is Doing Wrong

At the heart and soul of medicine ball training is the creation of what I call connected power. Balls are arguably the best training tool to connect the weight room with the coordination areas of the nervous system, from our fingertips to our brains. I dislike making up or christening terminology, but without naming the concept we often can’t move forward to a working definition.

The fact that the average fitness enthusiast can go to the sporting goods store and buy a ball and perform medicine ball crunches shows the current lack of respect for the tool. A similar attitude exists in coaching circles because the ball’s load isn’t dangerous and it’s usually softer than a kettlebell. Instead of powerful training tools, medicine balls are often used simply as toys for athletes.

No one specific error is the cause of poor training, but the lack of comprehensive understanding and application of the modality is ruining its potential benefits. After decades of diluting the equipment’s value, it’s time to return to the origins of the medicine ball and give it the recognition it deserves.

Built for Battle: From Weapons of War to Sports Training

Someone asked why I spend so much time looking at the past when a lot of good information is available now. My reason is that I don’t want to reinvent everything. I want to only innovate when necessary.

In the past, medicine ball education was a means to either winning a war or a medal. These purposes have been lost because of the commercialism of sports training. Other than an interest in sports training history, why do we care about what people did in the past? Simple. History provides a vast perspective and showcases creativity.

As noted by several leading experts in sprint training, the medicine ball is thousands of years old. A word of caution is needed with this statement. Just because the modality is ancient doesn’t mean it’s free of any baggage or training impurities. I don’t believe anything came of interest until the late 1800s when physical education became professional and when sports became more competitive. In the 1940s, a world war was occurring and training to win took on a new meaning.

What I learned from my long investigation into the history was disappointing; the novelty of medicine ball work has led us to focus on exercises over rationale. Even in current manuals and books, multi-throws and various core exercises don’t seem to need validation. We need to reboot what we believe medicine balls can do and start over.

The Modern Medicine Ball: Applications that Matter

The most important innovation in medicine ball training during the last few decades was the alteration of materials. Medicine balls changed from leather pouches to rubberized spheres, sparking more creativity and engineering. After reaching a peak with medicine balls during the functional training craze in the early 2000s, we experienced a dark age in sports science for more than a decade.

The frenzy over medicine balls has calmed, and we’re now in a phase of moderation. I’ve boiled down the ball’s benefits into three primary categories.

Teaching Tools

The use of medicine balls as instruments of motor skill development is timeless. Many fundamental motions can be taught with medicine balls. Coaches also use them to distract athletes from the “paralysis by analysis” trap so they are not too focused on their task. While some favor cueing via vocal commands to manipulate learning, I’ve found task directed options are far superior.

Training Tools

Medicine balls are loaded implements, but their appearance and feel can deceive coaches and athletes. While the weights are usually between 1-6 kg, medicine balls create loading demands that are underestimated and may create problems for some overhead athletes. Conversely, the weight limit provides a safety net for most exercises, and the lighter load reinforces ballistic action and skilled movement.

Testing Tools

Throwing performance can be measured with medicine balls, and distance is the metric of choice when evaluating power. Common tosses thrown by athletes are often evaluated by a measuring tape. After twenty years of throwing medicine balls, however, I believe testing is not that simple. Distance is convenient to get raw measures, but the lack of context can distort our perspective when analyzing distance alone.

Without a clear purpose in mind, medicine ball exercises can be perceived as busy work or play. Balls should be respected and programmed like any other part of training and not just causally included in workouts.

Does Medicine Ball Training Improve Athletic Power?

No one really knows if medicine ball training actually develops or expresses power. Most coaches want to see measurable changes in power from the trunk or legs. But the research is scant on medicine balls compared to traditional weight training. Although evidence of the ball’s influence on training is murky, the same can be said of many modalities.

Medicine ball training accelerates and enhances other modalities. Click To Tweet

Several experts in sports science believe that medicine ball training has very little impact on absolute power. I agree. Adaptation craves overload. This means a quality must be nearly foreign to the body to trigger biological changes. It’s my opinion that medicine ball training isn’t a primary stimulus for advanced athletes, but likely accelerates and enhances other modalities.

Looking at biological stimulus, medicine balls are too light to provide mechanical overload to most sporting actions and are too heavy to create neuromuscular adaptations. In addition to the load, the motion is not specific enough to improve sports skill and is too general to give a break to the actions needing enhancement.

Medicine ball training reveals athletic development, it doesn’t actually develop athletic performance. So why use this option and why is it popular? The most plausible reason is that medicine ball training infuses coordination changes that are hard to measure. I’ve spent ten years trying to tease out how one actually improves from this training. Medicine balls fall into a “Bermuda triangle zone”; their use doesn’t make much sense on paper, but they are worth the effort.

Some promising research defends the position that medicine ball training creates adaptations. Whenever conflicting research arises, however, we need to look at the populations and the training protocols along with experimental design details to weigh the value of the outcomes.

I’ve read at least sixty papers on medicine ball studies in sports science literature and have reached the conclusion that most lack enough procedural details to find clear value. Also, even if a very crude study of medicine ball training were to isolate the modality from conventional weight training or sprint training, no coach worth their salt would program only this type of training throughout the training period. If a holistic program incorporating many modalities were studied, it would still be unlikely that any substantial conclusion could be drawn.

While no firm verdict is in, I believe medicine ball workouts are complementary to developing athletes, as are most options in sports performance training. This isn’t very enlightening or shocking. In my opinion, the flexible benefits of medicine ball training make it a wise staple in programs, and I believe the training is most likely a catalyst for development.

The Data and Technology of Medicine Ball Training

Several coaches have asked my opinion about the Ballistic Ball from Assess2Perform. I have used various iterations of the “ball with brains” as well as proxy products that measure limb velocities and estimate output. What should have been a simple act of measuring common exercises turned into a rabbit hole where I almost got lost. Still, after years of use combined with the evolution of product firmware and algorithms, I’ve found a simple throw is more complex than I’d like it to be. This was a bitter pill I had to swallow.

https://player.vimeo.com/external/167476212.hd.mp4?s=adf28bf7fdd78f2d1796e1d0b98ff5abec711435&profile_id=174
Video 1. An athlete performs overhead back throws for height with the Assess2Perform Ballistic Ball using drone footage. Note the athlete employs a pre-jump to engage in more elastic utilization.

The most repeated statement I hear from coaches concerns the value of measuring a ball’s output over the common practice of using distance. I’ve concluded the ball is perfect for testing multi-throw exercises and recommend coaches invest in one. Conventional “zombie balls” are still the primary solution for training because they’re the best tool for testing overhead throws.

I’ve created a simple chart of training and testing technology solutions. Testing solutions range from virtually nothing (just a ball) to something simple (tape measure) to a comprehensive lab option (including the ballistic ball). My intention is to demonstrate that sometimes no measurement is needed. Sometimes athletes just need to train and learn, while other times we need a sophisticated measuring device to truly know how well athletes are performing.

Measuring distance or height are not perfect ways to assess the output of throws. Any coach can measure simple distance, but that’s only half the story. The most important part of medicine ball assessment is how the throw’s output was created, not just the raw result afterward.

Countless times, I’ve seen athletes improve their throwing distance and get excited, only to learn they didn’t improve their force generation abilities, they just became better at the test. Test familiarization is not the only guilty party.

Sometimes, when doing throws behind them, athletes simply launch the ball at a better angle. They improve their score but perhaps threw with less speed and power. Sometimes explosive legs are negated by a slightly early arm action, losing the advantage of a summation of forces. Other times a small countermovement taints a squat throw and gives a false impression of improvement.

Lots of unnoticed factors and hidden problems can be with revealed when studying medicine ball training closely. Combining video (kinematic) with sensor enhanced medicine balls (kinetics) and body measurement tools have led to my belief that most research is not valid enough to reach concrete conclusions.

https://player.vimeo.com/external/167505497.hd.mp4?s=df7892e5d7bc650e3e66694e9fd95df9ce766756&profile_id=119
Video 2. Shown here Johan Wissman is performing an overhead shot throw for distance during a training camp in Formia Italy.

Coaches should not be frightened about the lack of data on medicine ball output, but they shouldn’t pontificate beliefs without serious investigative approaches to their training. What I find strange is the obsession with bar tracking technologies and the lax attitude toward the purpose of weight training, which is to improve throwing and running output. Ball output belongs at the table of performance training, right between bar and body speed.

Improving the Applied Sciences of Medicine Ball Training

Go to any website for sports training and you’ll probably find videos featuring athletes throwing balls stereotypically. Many coaches show the carcasses of broken balls as a badge of superior coaching or athletic ability. It’s more likely, however, that the balls are low quality.

I’ve examined common exercises to find what will help our athletes and how we can improve the tactical side of executing movements. I follow four principles of medicine ball training, and they are timeless.

Is Peak Ball Velocity the Metric of Choice?

Several coaches have asked me about the creative use of radar and similar technologies to measure ball speed. Radar guns are great but remember, like video technology, we must set up the equipment precisely, or the outputs can be misleading. More importantly, radar guns only capture peak velocity from early release without data to explain how the speed was created.

Video 3. Trailer from Fastball.

Fastball was a great documentary that showed why, in different eras, we had issues measuring the part of the throw called pitchers speed. The early use of radar technology seemed to measure Nolan Ryan teetering just above 100 mph at release when, in reality, he was much faster at about 108 mph. At that time, the speed at the plate was measured. It is important to understand how technology defines velocity within specific parameters.

Because the details of force generation resulting from technique (coordination) and raw force abilities (weight room) are subtle, we need to recognize how these forces are created. With this knowledge, coaches can discover if an athlete is innately good at throws and requires more conventional training or if the athlete is maximizing the weight room and simply needs ways to learn to produce force efficiently.

Generating good medicine ball throws does not create an expressway to winning the 100m or throwing 100 mph, but it does indicate if an athlete has coordination outside their sports skills and weight training. Add into the equation an athlete’s anthropometry and the size of the ball, and things get dicey.

For example, a tall athlete may attain great peak velocity but takes a long time to generate it. A very large 150-kilo athlete may throw the same distance as an athlete who is half the size. This makes all the scores relative because absolute scores matter for throws in track and field. A healthy approach to this is to make sure the data collected reveals the underlying story and not just the story’s end.

Use medicine balls sparingly

The most surprising commandment: only use medicine balls when needed. It’s amazing how many times the ball can be a training distraction and sabotage a training session. The ball represents an ergonomic spherical load and nothing more.

If an activity isn’t clearly enhanced by the ball, don’t use it. If the ball can be swapped out with another implement of similar load without loss, the ball was not programmed properly. I did this for years by combining traditional exercises with the ball, and I will never make that mistake again.

Balls are not sprinkles on an ice cream sundae; they must be a primary variable. Athletes will appreciate the universal appeal that makes training with medicine balls fun if they’re used parsimoniously. Only use the ball when it’s use is purposeful. Consider both the need and the entertainment value when weighing whether to use medicine balls in an athlete’s training.

Load the body precisely

The right load and the right amount of work must be juggled carefully, in addition to the choice of exercises. Casual weight selection reinforces lower technical proficiency and defeats the ball’s neurological benefits.

• Overhead forward throws: The shoulder and lumbar spine are prone to injury if the ball exceeds the 1-3 kg weight range. Keep vigilant in running up speeds because the extension stress is huge when an athlete decelerates.
• Rotational and twisting throws: Deceleration and eccentric torque occur with some side throws, and the way the hips and shoulders turn is a big detail. Twisting occurs when the shoulders start to disassociate from the hips, and the propulsive initiation of the legs account for a lot of the force generation. Take note of how the legs are used, as athletes can lock the hips in to emphasize the torso or use the core more passively with a leg drive and elastic response of the oblique system. The lighter loads help with relaxation, and the heavier (slower) loads increase concentric recruitment.
• Vertical and horizontal tosses: Heavier loads from 3-8 kg are possible for athletes, but the ball speed must never slow down to become sluggish. The athlete should be able to accelerate the medicine ball throughout the entire movement, but the latter range of motion may not contribute to exit velocity.

Finally, be cognizant of the total volume of work of both the balls and corresponding activities that could overload patterns and excessively fatigue local points. Determining excessive volume is not easy because of the lack of research on medicine ball programming in the literature.

Organize medicine ball training carefully

A common mistake I’ve seen occurs when people don’t look at the big picture: how medicine balls can develop athleticism and global body power. In the early 2000s, I had a very rude awaking while listening to Gary Winckler and seeing how he integrated throws into his sprinters’ workouts. Coach Winckler’s planning is a work of art, and the results are obvious. In a presentation I attended years later, he outlined how to complement training and contrast it with variables to enhance the stimuli of an entire program. Those presentations are now the framework of my entire medicine ball program, and I’ve distilled the most effective training options.

Measure or test repeatedly

Some general conditioning exercises are not worth measuring. With some exercises, it’s nice to see reference points. And some are gold measures to athletic performance in some circles. I believe most exercises in medicine ball training aren’t worth spending the time to test. But if one is going to measure, do it correctly.

We can get lost in the moment of teaching. Working with athletes is a rewarding process, but training is also about pushing the body by finding its limits and later surpassing them. A simple number won’t summarize an athlete’s worth, but from time to time a test keeps the entire process honest.

One point from my experience: any exercise done with the medicine ball needs a definition, a working explanation of the protocol, and a description of the movement expected from the measurement sample. Subtle aspects must be factored in. Examples are shifting the weight during a rotational throw from the rear leg, change in stance, and a recoiling action during loading. We must also factor in the testing environment.

The Future and Digging Deeper with Medicine Ball Training

I hope that the future brings dramatic improvements in the education and coaching of medicine ball training since today’s practices are not much better than those in the past. I hope the coaching community can start raising the expectations and the standards of good and acceptable methodology, what requires cessation of training, and a required educational review.

Medicine ball training for great athletes does not promote real athletic development, it simply shows off the talent one inherits, like peeling out with a sports car. When coaches claim observable or measurable improvements with medicine ball training, they are fooling themselves and their athletes. I made many mistakes for years with medicine ball training because little education information was available beyond exercise catalogs and perhaps teaching points. Now we are in a better place to move forward.

Special Thanks to Scott Damman from A2P for providing equipment for research. The photo image is from Derek Hansen.

Author’s Note: The article was commissioned two years ago and involved a long process of historical and scientific research as well as experimental investigation of medicine ball training. An estimated 250 hours was invested into this article and included the following:

• 80 hours spent researching training and coaching books and articles from leading experts in the field
• 120 hours reading the peer reviewed research pertinent to ballistic throws and medicine ball training
• 150 hours of training experiments with research-grade instrumentation and training tools

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF