What Is a Bosu Ball?

Series Summary

Many people want to lose weight, and despite claims for quick fat burning pills and powders, the best way to lose weight is still through proper diet and exercise. Exercise does more than just maintain physical fitness though. Working out can also help build healthy bone density, muscle strength, and joint mobility. It can also reduce your general health risks, boost the immune system, and help with depression and insomnia. Whether your reason for exercising is to lose weight, or improve muscle mass, working out is always a good idea to help promote the health of your body and mind.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to do a variety of Bosu Ball exercises. This unique fitness training apparatus is similar to a balance ball but has one flat surface connected to a round globe half. Using a Bosu ball for basic exercises can help increase core muscle strength and balance. Our expert will show you how to do Bosu ball balance exercises, abduction exercises, Bosu ball lunges and squats. You will also learn how to do knee lifts, hamstring curls and push ups with your Bosu ball to increase the affect of each exercise. If you are looking to pump up your normal workout routine, let our expert show you how to incorporate Bosu ball exercises into your fitness regiment.

Video Transcript

"ALICE MONSAERT: This piece of equipment is called the BOSU, B-O-S-U. It stands for "both sides up," and it evolved into the fitness industry from the stability ball. The stability ball is nice and round. It gives you balance challenges; however, there's a limitation to how many exercises you can do on it. So, there was a guy, pretty brilliant guy in the fitness industry, and he decided to take the ball, chop it in half and put a stable surface on the bottom to create so additional balance challenges that you can do on the BOSU. The BOSU can be used for cardiovascular exercises, it can be used for strength training exercises, but the main it is, again, is a balance training tool. Once we've mastered exercises just standing here such as a bicep curl, our body gets used to that so we want to provide different challenges for it. We can move it to the stability ball and sit on the stability ball and do the same exercise to add a challenge, or we can move it onto the bosu to add those same balance challenges. So, you'll see in these series of exercises, different exercises that you've done probably for a long time in your fitness regime but now we're going to move it onto the BOSU."