The Best Workouts With An Exercise Ball

Are you familiar with exercise ball training? If not, you should spend a little time experimenting with the exercise ball with your weight training. It will take a regular weight training workout and make it perhaps one of the most challenging things you have ever completed. But why is the exercise ball so intriguing? What makes it so exciting and interesting to lifters, and why are trainers so gung-ho on the idea?

Exercise balls make workouts challenging by forcing you to train the core of your body and doing so by exercising something you probably don’t use all that much in the gym – BALANCE. Most of the time when you train, you let the machine, whether it be Hammer Strength or Nautilus, enjoy the bulk of the workload. The bench is flat, meaning your back can rest on it soundly. You only have to focus on pushing the weight in one direction, or pulling it in another direction. If you’re using machines, the range of motion is fixed. If you’re using free weights (such as dumbbells or barbells), you do have to recruit some stabilizer muscles, but not a great deal of them.

When you train with an exercise ball, you have to use these stabilizer muscles more than you can imagine. The workouts are the same as you’re using now, with some variations so that you can work the ball into your training whenever possible. You cannot use all of the same exercises you use now. For example, heavy bench press with a barbell is going to be out of the question – you can’t exactly do that on an exercise ball. But you can train the chest with dumbbell presses and flyes, while lying upon the exercise ball. Try your standard workouts as usual, but work in a few sets with the exercise ball whenever possible.

Athletes may benefit a great deal from adding an exercise ball to their training routine. Balance, coordination, and core control are keys to success in sports, and you can enjoy these positive results very quickly once you add the exercise ball to your workout. You will lose the ability to use the insanely heavy weights that you might use now, so completely dropping heavy exercises isn’t the way to go. You want to keep that muscle mass somehow! Just add the exercise ball to 2 to 5 exercises per workout, whenever it makes sense, and you’ll start to see new benefit in terms of added control of your body, and greater balance in everything you do!