I’m a big fan of medicine ball drills for power. This week I’d like to go over the simple yet extremely effective exercise: “Medicine Ball Chest Pass”. Whether you’re a NYC personal trainer working with a general fat loss client to a sports performance coach working with an elite level athlete, this drill is useful across the board.
Below is Olympic hopeful Ben Bratton doing a set of the chest passes:
How To:
- Sit in an athletic stance and focus utilizing your hips and upper body to through the ball has hard as possible.
- Make sure to utilize both hands and not compensate.
- There are a few ways of doing this, you can either have a reactive component where the athlete will catch and throw the ball in a fast sequence OR you can have the emphasis focused on just the throw.
Common Errors:
- Using too heavy of a medicine ball. For most people this movement will be utilized for power, if you use too heavy of a ball there will be a limit on the speed and compensation patterns may occur = diminishes the effectiveness of the exercise.
- Not fully extending through the arm. Sometimes the tendency is to not fully PUNCH through i.e. get full extension, you’ll need that full extension to get the most out of the movement.
Programming:
We typically implement the medicine ball power drills after our warm up and activation series. This helps fire up the CNS and get the blood going for the next phase of the workout.
Set/Rep scheme: We typically do anywhere from 3-5 sets of 8+ reps depending on the phase of the program and the needs of the client.