I don’t believe that medicine ball training does much in terms of ‘power’ development. There it is, I said it.
My opinion has changed on this topic. I once thought that throwing med balls would develop rotational or overhead power and that this would lead to an increase in groundstroke or serve speed.
I held this belief for a number of reasons.
For one, every elite tennis player on the planet uses med balls in their training. But just because your favorite tour player uses an exercise modality, does that make it useful?
On top of that, there are obvious similarities between the movement patterns of something like a med ball side throw and a forehand. But just because something looks similar, doesn’t mean it’s driving a physiological adaptation.
In this article, I’m going to tell you why my opinion on this topic has changed (hint, it’s got a lot to do with the stimulus – or lack thereof – that med balls elicit). I’ll then present a landmark study that further proves my point.
Finally, I’ll provide a brief summary of why I think med balls are still useful, despite their ineffectiveness for ‘power’ development.
Why did my opinion on med ball training change?
As I mentioned, I was previously convinced that med balls would increase serve and groundstroke velocities. So I devised all these schemes in my programs with that exact intention in mind. To make things more objective, I would track groundstroke and serve velocities using a radar gun – and I would do the same with med ball throws.
The thing is, players I worked with weren’t gaining any speed on their strokes. And there weren’t any significant changes in how hard they threw med balls either. But then I noticed something.
Once they started to adapt to their strength training, that’s when the numbers started to increase. What I ended up realizing was that when they got stronger, they could express more power in things like med ball throws (and serve speed too).
Power is an interesting metric. It can be expressed in many ways but the most prevalent is probably force and velocity (i.e. power = force x velocity). While this topic is one I’d like to tackle in another article, I will say this – trying to ‘optimize’ for power output doesn’t really do much. What we should do instead is tackle one end or the other – force or velocity – then we’ll see a big shift in power!
And in this case, it’s the force side of the equation that was allowing the players I coached to express more ‘power’. Essentially, they were able to exert more force, which contributed to an increase in med ball speed (and stroke speed too!).
Think more about the training stimulus!
The problem with med balls is that they’re very difficult to progressively overload. Do we keep increasing the weight of the ball? But then the movement becomes slower, effectively disrupting the ‘velocity’ component.
Do we maintain the load but increase the speed of execution? This might work early on, but inevitably, we’ll hit a ceiling.
Maybe more throws is the answer? But I don’t believe ‘volume’ is going to help us achieve the desired adaptation here.
And that’s really the point. We need a large enough stimulus to drive a certain adaptation. In the case of med balls, they simply don’t provide a very good training stimulus. You’re not getting stronger. You’re not recruiting high threshold motor units. You’re not training RFD (rate of force development) or ‘power’.
All you’re doing is expressing power!
So what does provide a good stimulus (the force side of the equation)?
Before I answer that, read this quote from an article titled ‘Medicine Ball Training Implications for Rotational Power Sports’ (Earp and Kramer 2010):
Medicine ball training can allow a higher degree of sport specificity to be attained because exercises can be performed that can more closely mimic the range of motion (15) and velocities encountered in sport (3). Thus, such exercises can help build on the sport-generic exercises needed in every program (e.g., squats, bench press, power cleans, etc). Supplemental medicine ball exercises should complement the generic component, and exercises should be chosen to emphasize sport-specific demands such as velocity, plane of movement, and body positioning during the movement.
Two things that stick out:
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I agree that ‘generic’ exercises (like squats, bench, cleans) should be in every program. They’re the ones that can provide an actual stimulus (almost indefinitely!). In theory, you can always drive some sort of physiological adaptation with these movements (we’ll get into this more below).
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The authors argue that med ball exercises should be used and chosen based on similarities like velocity, plane of movement and body positioning. But do you know what does a better job at tackling these ‘sport-specific demands’? The sport! And in the case of tennis, striking groundstrokes and serves will do this so much better than med ball training ever could.
