subject: Why You Should Use Medicine Balls In Your Cardio Workouts - Part 3 [print this page] Ok, we've looked at all the awesome things med balls can do, and how you can use incorporate them into your cardio workouts. But one of the most important aspects of med ball training is a fairly intangible one - the mental aspect of training.
You can't just "dead-head" your cardio training. You have to have your head into what you're doing, and have to be paying attention. Just "going through the motions" won't get you anywhere. You can study, work, have a relationship, or pretty much anything else important by just showing up - you have to put in effort, and have to be mentally acute to what you're doing. Exercise is no different.
Because many med ball exercises can be somewhat awkward, it almost "forces" you to pay attention to what you're doing.
First of all, most med ball exercises are fairly demanding. Try as you might, you can't do much of anything that takes any real effort unless you're paying attention. You have to work hard at med ball exercises, and this forces you watch what you're doing.
Second of all, simply grabbing a med ball can be tough. Med balls don't have handles (well, some do, but you shouln't be using one of these anyway), so you have to keep a stable grip on the ball itself. This can be tougher than you think. When your hands get sweaty (which they're going to), the ball can become slick - even if you have one that has a decent surface to grip (which most do). And if your med ball has any real weight to it (at least 8-10 pounds or more), if you're doing any kind of dynamic exercise (e.g. - Woodchoppers), the ball is going to want to fly out of your hands, and you're going to have to keep it from doing so.
You also have to really pay attention to what you're doing any sort of med ball exercise where you actually let go of the med ball, as you can end up with a real situation your hands if you're not careful. (Now, this will vary depending on if you have a med ball that bounces or not.)
For example, say you're just doing a simple med ball slam. Simple enough exercise, right? Sure - until you don't watch what you're doing, and slam that ball into your foot. Ouch. Or until you let go too early and that ball goes flying somewhere it shouldn't. Hopefully you won't have broken anything. Best case scenario is that you just spend a bunch of time running around chasing the darn thing.
Hopefully this series of articles has given you some ideas on how to implement med balls into your own cardio workouts.
