Medicine Ball Squats & Presses

Series Summary

Medicine balls have become popular weight training devices. Resistance training is the foundation of building and toning muscles. Whether you want to shed pounds, build bulk, or strengthen your heart, resistance training is right for you. Of course, your doctor would know best. Resistance training includes weight-lifting, body weight exercises like push ups or crunches, and more recently doing exercises with heavy medicine ball weights to offer resistance. Trying out medicine balls might be just what your workout needs to start targeting and toning your muscles while you lose weight or train.

In this free video series Sue Conrad teaches you how to use medicine balls for a good resistance training workout. You will learn to use medicine balls for squats, crunches, tricep extensions, and more. Sue gives you tips on bringing medicine balls into lunges, presses, trunk twists, and other core muscle exercises.

Video Transcript

"Okay this clip is going to be a squat with an overhead press. Okay. I'm going to start off with the stance of the pile. Toes out to the sides out towards the corners of the wall. You're going to grab your medicine ball. This is an eight pounder. If you've never used a medicine ball you may want to start off with something a little bit lighter. This is usually a standard that I use with most of my healthy clients. Okay you want to sink down, bend your knees slightly, grab your medicine ball with both hands, push up in the air and sit back into your chair. Come back to center and start with the ball from the chest, okay you're going to exhale, push the ball up, exhale down. Now when you extend your arm up you want to make sure you don't lock out your joints. Exhale up and bring it down. One thing that's really important is that you don't let your knees go over your toes. You can still keep the pile stance that's comfortable for you. You're going to push up, extend, sit back in that chair, watch the back. Now if the pile is too easy for you, you can always have your toes facing forward which is a little more challenging. You're still going to sit back in that chair, watch the back, push the ball straight up, keep the shoulders back, exhale up, and inhale down. You want to make sure that you're feeling it in the quads and the glutes, not to much in the back cause those are the areas that we're trying to focus on."