Formosa Neijia

I’m always on the lookout for functional fitness toys. A lot of the functional fitness stuff is very applicable to IMA and I would advise people to take a long, hard look at functional strength training. One of the main reasons I say that, is that I know too many people, myself included, that got hurt doing IMA. Training functional strength would have saved me some pain and allowed to practice longer and stronger. Now that I know that, I’m always on the lookout for things that I can add to my workout.

With that in mind, I bought a 12lbs. medicine ball yesterday. Yes, that’s a bit heavy but I really don’t want to be buying lots of these things. The 15 lbs. was the heaviest this store had but I thought it was too heavy. The 10lbs. one seemed like I would adapt to it very quickly. Too light. So 12lbs. it was.

The first thing I noticed was that using the ball was a lot like playing instead of being like a workout. It was just fun! I did all kinds of squats, throwing exercises, and overhead presses. I could tell I was getting a good workout but I was having a blast doing it.

One thing that I noticed immediately this morning was a feeling of strength in my wrist. Holding the ball in my palm and doing exercises gave my wrist a great workout. Don’t buy the medicine ball with handles! If you do, you probably won’t get this effect. I do grip strength exercises but apparently I was neglecting wrist strength. I’m glad I found something that can address this.

In the past, the balls were qute expensive but they have really come down in price now. And you can get soft ones, balls on ropes, or really firm ones if you want. The variety allows tons of different training. And the best thing is, you can use most of these while watching TV. I just stood behind the couch and worked out while the wife and I watched a movie.

A free PDF with lots of exercises for the ball can be found here. Take a look at the variety of exercises and look at all that core twisting they’re doing. That stuff is ideal for BGZ.

Has anyone seen Chen Qing-zhou do his ball exercises? I have the VCD of it and these medicine balls would be perfect for doing those exercises. Most of the exercises on the VCD are self-explanatory to a certain degree. In fact, the throwing exercises look almost the same as in the PDF above. Thing is, it really shouldn’t take someone with IMA experience long to see the utility of the ball training IMO.

I’ll post about the progress of my ball training from time to time.