Exercise Balls

Power Up Your Workouts With Medicine Balls

You can improve your performance in almost any sport if you improve your ability to generate both strength and power simultaneously. Working out with a medicine ball is a great way to train your body for explosive movements. Although such movements are more important in particular sports, such as mixed martial arts or javelin throwing, medicine ball training will certainly improve your overall fitness, even if you only wrestle with your dog.

Medicine ball training builds core strength by engaging the muscles that support the body, and medicine ball workouts can be sports-specific for athletes in training. Depending on the sport, some types of medicine ball exercises can even be used as part of plyometric training program to develop explosive movements.

Medicine ball exercises can be customized to suit any age or ability level, and the workouts are appropriate for physical therapy, too. Clients can start with a small ball and progress to a heavier one as they progress with their therapy.

A Fitness Ball Can Be The Key To Perfect Posture

When you work out with a fitness ball (sometimes called a Swiss exercise ball), you are stimulating the muscles of the core—the deep pelvic, abdominal, and low back muscles—that are essential for good posture and balance. These muscles include your transverse abdominus muscles (TVAs), the internal and external obliques, and the erector spinae (the muscles that run along your spine). Proper posture evenly distributes your body weight to the joints and muscles, promoting good health and helping to prevent overuse or imbalance injuries. And strong core muscles help you run more efficiently, survive a long commute, and even sit at a desk all day.

Exercising using a Swiss ball is an excellent way to strengthen your midsection and improve your posture. When you do any type of exercises on a fitness ball, you engage the smaller stability muscles in addition to the primary and secondary muscles of the arms and legs.

Build A Better Bridge

Doing supine bridges with a FitBALL® Exercise Ball stimulates the stability muscles of the core, as well as the arm and leg muscles.

1. Sit on the exercise ball with your hands on your hips or with your arms crossed on your chest.
2. Walk forward, gradually rolling the ball out until it supports your head and shoulders, instead of your hips. As you roll out, allow the ball to support most of your weight.
3. Form a table top position with your hips, shoulders, and knees in a straight line and your feet flat on the floor, directly under your knees.
4. Keeping the ball in place, use your core muscles to lower and lift your hips, tightening muscles in your buttocks and backs of your thighs.
5. Repeat 8-15 times.

How To Have Happier Hamstrings

If you do hamstring curls on a machine or bench, your body stays relatively stable without much extra work. But using the FitBALL® Exercise Ball to do a hamstring fitness ball workout not only strengthens your hamstrings, it engages and strengthens your core muscles to help you keep your balance. You’ll burn more calories, too!

Here’s how to get your hamstrings on the ball:

1. Lie on your back with the exercise ball under your heels and your palms flat on the floor.
2. Lift your hips slightly and bend your knees to draw the ball toward your buttocks, without moving your hips.
3. Repeat 8-15 times.

Find Functional Fitness With a FitBALL® Exercise Ball

Functional strength is the ability of the nervous system and muscles to perform dynamic eccentric, isometric, and concentric muscle actions in all planes of motion. The point of functional training is to teach your body to be more efficient at carrying out the activities of daily living. Functional exercise has a neurological component that strength training on a machine lacks because the machine is supporting your body.

Here’s an example of an exercise that will boost your functional fitness: Walk-outs on the FitBALL® Exercise Ball. This move helps train your body to recruit different muscle groups to produce force concentrically, reduce force eccentrically and to stabilize the entire body in all three planes of motion.

1. Rest your belly on the ball and balance your hands and toes on the floor.
2. Walk your hands forward to a plank position, so the ball is under your ankles.
3. Walk your hands back to the starting position, trying to keep the ball under your body.
4. Repeat 6-8 times.

Why To Work Stability Into Your Workouts

Think of the way your body moves as a “kinetic chain.” The movement of your arms and legs actually begins with the spine, and that’s why a strong and stable core will help you in any sport.

Exercise ball workout programs with weights strengthen major and minor muscles at the same time. Many of the exercises involve rotation of the spine, which engages the erector spinae and the internal and external obliques.

If you weight-train regularly, adding a few core training exercises to the end of your workout routine twice a week will help tone your abdominal muscles and lower back muscles, so your kinetic chain (and thus your weight training) will be more efficient. A key difference between core fitness exercises and standard strength training is form vs. fatigue. When you are doing core exercises, you should end your set when you can no longer maintain good form. When you perform standard strength training exercises, you are often working to the point of muscle fatigue.

Have A Ball And Lift More Weight

Conditioning the deep core muscles can help you lift more weight with less risk of injury. Core exercises strengthen the secondary and stabilizer muscles (such as the lower back muscles) that allow the primary muscles used to perform at their optimum levels. For example, you’ll be able to lift more on squats and dead lifts if you have strong core muscles.

And with a strong core, your body will react faster and absorb stress and shock more effectively. With that in mind, try this fitness ball back extension as part of your weight training workout routine:

1. Kneel on the floor behind a ball with your hands behind your head, and lean forward so your torso rests on the ball.
2. Tuck your toes under and lift your upper chest off the ball, keeping your spine straight.
3. Hold for a few seconds, and then relax.
4. Repeat 10 times to start, and then increase the reps as desired.

Swiss Ball Twist Builds Fab Abs

The six sections of the rectus abdominis are not visible on most people, even those with low body fat, so it is more important to focus on strength than on whether you can see these sections.

But by focusing on core muscle training and exercises that burn fat, you will be able to improve the muscle definition in your abs.

The Swiss ball twist works the oblique muscles that extend down the sides of the rectus abdominis. Keep in mind that simple twisting crunches, either on the floor or on a stability ball, will strengthen these muscles, but the ball does it better. Here’s how:

1. Lie on a Swiss ball so the ball is centered under your shoulder blades.
2. Keep your knees bent, with your feet flat on the floor.
3. Cross your arms over your chest, or place your hands near your ears (but don’t pull on your neck).
4. Slowly twist your upper body to the left, and concentrate on moving your right shoulder up and diagonally across your body.
5. Lower back to the starting position.
6. Repeat for a count of 10, then switch and do 10 reps on the other side.

Double Your Fitness: Lift Weights On An Exercise Ball

The Swiss ball is a versatile piece of exercise equipment that can be used by individuals at all fitness levels. An exercise ball such as the FitBALL® Exercise Ball also adds the dimension of core strength training to your workouts.

Many upper body dumbbell exercises can be performed on a Swiss ball to add an extra degree of difficulty. The ball can either be used as a seat or bench. Just remember: when using a Swiss ball as a bench, be sure not to let your abdomen sag during exercises.

Combining dumbbells with a fitness ball is a useful strength and stability strategy for physical therapy patients as well as a core conditioning move for athletes.Try this basic exercise that combines weights with a fitness ball workout:

1. Sit up straight on a FitBALL® exercise ball with a small dumbbell in each hand. Choose a weight that’s slightly easy for you.
2. Raise your arms out to a “T” and hold for a few seconds, then lower down.
3. Start with one set of 10 reps, then try another set and adjust the weight accordingly.

Stability Ball Basics

Stability balls have been used for building strength and for physical therapy exercises since the 1960s, but they have become increasingly popular as part of any balanced total fitness regimen.

Keep these points in mind when starting to use an exercise ball:

1. Choose the right size. Fitness ball sizes approximately correspond to height. Check the guides to find the one that fits you (or your fitness client).
2. Start squishy. It’s easier to learn basic ball moves such as crunches on a stability ball that’s not fully inflated. Once you get the hang of it, pump up the ball to make the same moves more challenging.
3. Get help. Form is more important than the number of repetitions. Ask a fitness pro for advice if a fitness ball exercise feels especially painful or if you aren’t sure whether you are doing the move correctly.
4. Get support. Try holding onto a wall, or prop the ball against something sturdy for additional stability and safety.
5. Start slowly. If you are a beginner, try one set (8-20 reps) of an exercise (such as a basic ball crunch) then work your way up to more sets.