I just purchased a newly designed medicine ball today at Argos which was advertised as a “revolutionised version”. To be totally honest the design is pretty cool and the structure of the ball is different. This medicine ball behaves very strangely.
In functional training and personal training, we do a lot of smashes in our core strength classes with water filled medicine balls. They bounce just enough to repeat the exercise in safe and smooth repetitions.
The ball in the picture has air and sand inside where the sand is able to move in the middle around the air filled outer cover. Doing chops is pretty good due to the sand travelling further through the direction of the chop. The only problem that I have found with the medicine ball is that there is no chance to
smash the ball hard enough in order for it to bounce back from the ground. It just sticks to the floor! This is such a shame, but now it has got me thinking how we can use this disadvantage to make some interesting training movements.
For personal training I am sure the sand inside gives a lot of benefit to the training but the dynamic movements will be missing. Training alone with this medicine ball certainly limits most of the dynamic exercises such as step over smash, single leg smashes etc.
Testing of the new ball begins next week, I will post some updates here soon! 30 days free trial on our online medicine ball training system with our sister company – 4 Core fitness®