Exercising with a Medicine Ball

Recently, we’ve been thinking lots about functional fitness and getting hard without the gym. Although we like to avoid equipment as much as possible, a medicine ball could be a useful addition to our “home gym” (which is thus far small enough to stash under the bed, bicycles aside).

Medicine balls are those big heavy black balls that are a little scary except to those few masochistic folks who like to toss them back and forth to one another. It may harken bad memories of gym class. I remember when my 3rd-grade gym teacher tossed one of these cannon balls at me and I dropped it on my toe, not prepared to catch something that weighed 8 pounds (my gym teacher was a competitive body builder who could lift a car like it was a feather, but he wore those rediculous 80s Zubaz pants so we couldn’t really take him seriously).

Trying Fitness has two great videos that demonstrate various medicine ball exercises that you can do on your own. They look like they’d make you hard really fast.