Medicine balls are underrated, in my opinion. You can use them to improve your core stability, increase your strength, and test your cardio.<\/p>\n
However, I think their most powerful benefit is their ability to crush stress.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n I have a personal training client who often arrives at our sessions feeling tense, so we start her workouts with high-energy ball slams.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Throwing the heavy ball repeatedly against the floor increases her heart rate and helps shift her mindset.<\/p>\n Recently, I realized that my own stress levels seemed to be rising, and I wanted to find a way manage this.<\/p>\n I grabbed my two heavy medicine balls and decided to try slamming them into the floor for 30 days. Here\u2019s what happened.<\/p>\n It helped me decompress <\/p>\n Mornings are busy in my house, with two young daughters to coerce out of bed and off to school, all before 8am.<\/p>\n There\u2019s little time for anything other than breakfast and teeth cleaning. If I\u2019m lucky, the kids will also brush their hair before it\u2019s time to go.<\/p>\n When I get home after the school drop-off, it takes time to decompress, and ball slams really help with that.<\/p>\n I got into the habit of jumping out of my car and heading to my backyard for the ball slams as soon as I was home. Without fail, I always felt calmer after.<\/p>\n This high-energy movement forced me to focus, and the combination of intense concentration and physical exertion was a natural stress reliever.<\/p>\n My upper body and core strength increased<\/p>\n A ball slam is an explosive full-body exercise that works multiple muscles.<\/p>\n Specifically, it targets the core (the rectus abdominis<\/a> and the obliques<\/a>) as well as the pecs (chest), shoulders, and triceps.<\/p>\n I definitely felt stronger in my upper body and midline after 30 days doing the move.<\/p>\n I\u2019d love to say slamming the medicine ball helped improve my coordination, but I still found myself dropping the ball at the end of the month-long challenge. It will take more than just one exercise to fix my natural clumsiness!<\/p>\n My cardio fitness improved<\/p>\n I don\u2019t do much cardio, as I prefer strength training and mobility work. But I really enjoyed my daily slams and it felt good to get my heart pumping, especially on colder mornings.<\/p>\n Doing some extra cardio had a big impact on my energy levels and I found I had more stamina when doing other types of exercise, including cycling to school with the girls.<\/p>\n Improved cardiovascular fitness is also said to help with circulation\u2014so I\u2019m going to keep doing daily slams to see if this improves, which might help me stay warm over winter.<\/p>\n How to do a wall slamStand with legs hip-width apart, knees bent slightly and core braced.Hold a medicine ball overhead with straight arms.Throw the ball onto the ground with as much force as you can.My wall slam program<\/p>\n Week one: 10-20 wall slams, 7.5lb ball<\/p>\n Week two: 30 wall slams, 17.5-22lb ball<\/p>\n Week three: 10-20 wall slams, 22lb ball<\/p>\n Week four, 30 wall slams, 122lb ball<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Medicine balls are underrated, in my opinion. You can use them to improve your core stability, increase your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[6647,102,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-186159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}