Do you have one? What are they good for? Are they good at it?
I’ve heard a lot about these gym balls, and how they are supposed to help “improve your posture” and “flexibility” and “areobic exercise” and I can’t for the life of me imagine what sort of exercise/posture help a gym ball could provide. If they did work, I would be quite happy, especially since I seem to have getting a backache from the chair I’m sitting in now (too low).
Anyone?
I just moved to a new physical trainer, and she is very much a “ball” advocate. I spent most of my last session doing various exercises to do exactly what you state (flexibility, posture, building core muscles, etc.).
She’s encouraged me to buy one of my own (and I think I probably will so it’s easier to do my assigned regimen), but I’m still doing weight training and cardio separately, too.
I’ll report back if I notice any progress.
You mean the these? (everyone seems to have a different word for them) I’ve got two and think they’re great.
I sit on one at work (the link I provided has info about using one as a chair) and it’s great. Supposedly, it forces you to use your core (trunk) muscles to sit upright so it helps with posture. I think it works, it made me tired when I first started using it and I had to phase it in. I’ve been using it as a chair for over a year now and hate whenever I’m forced to use a real chair (i.e.airline flights, when I work in a different office). Sitting on a ball means I move around more (easier to wiggle on) and can more easily stretch my back.
I have a second ball at home that I use to stretch my back and for crunches. I feel crunches way more on a ball as compared to the floor. They’re good for back extensions as well.
Did I answer you questions? The balls don’t do much for aerobic exercise but I think they help strength and flexibility. If you decide to get one, you can find 'em pretty cheap on Ebay. I got burst resistant ones because I had visions of rolling over a staple and abruptly winding up on the floor. The burst resistant ones will deflate slowly if they’re punctured.
They have their uses, but like everything else out there, they’re grossly overrated by their most extreme advocates.
You mean like these .
They’re very popular at our gym. I see them used mainly for crunches type exercising. I do see a lot of guys using them though along with dumbells. They usually plant their feet on the floor and lean back and rest their back and shoulders on the ball and do flys or presses.
I was looking for a new ab exercise so I started doing my crunches on a ball. I got a really terrific burn.
My sister got me one of these for Christmas a year ago, and it’s great. For one, it’s a little more stable than simply perching on the ball, but it still makes it much easier and comfortable to sit properly. For two, the frame keeps your “chair” from rolling down the hallway when you step out of the office for a minute.
The ball just lifts out if you want to use it solo.
The term I’ve heard is “stability ball”; worth keeping in mind because if you say “gym ball” some people might think you mean a medicine ball. Medicine balls are also finding their way into gyms again after being long thought of as passe and associated with the likes of Jim Thorpe and James Jeffries.
The effort required to balance on the stability ball while doing, say, crunches, involves other muscles in addition to those that would be trained by doing crunches on the floor. I like to do crunches on the stability ball, using a three- or five-kilo medicine ball, and then while I rest between sets of crunches, sit up on the ball and toss the med ball from hand to hand. That way I work out two major body regions in one set of sets.
Though I admit that 5Kg ball is still a bit too heavy for me, tossing it from hand to hand.
The primary reason crunches on a ball are better than crunches on the floor is because you get an increased range of motion on the ball. Since you’re not generally used to working in that range, it’ll feel tough at first, but you’ll get used to it. That still leaves us the question of the value of unweighted crunches, but that’s a topic for another thread…
I also have to wonder how many of the guys who are doing flies and presses on the ball have a reason for it, and how many are just doing it cause of “monkey see, monkey do” syndrome.
FWIW, there used to be a fitness studio on Wilshire in Santa Monica called Triangle, where they held classes largely built around using these balls. They were the ones who trained Meryl Streep up to handling the whitewater raft in The River Wild.
So it does seem like they can be very effective.
Okay, can someone point me to a good website where they illustrate some of the stuff you’re talking about here? Stuff like crunches on the ball, etc - I need a bit of help visualising that. 
Don’t happen to have a website handy, but I can try to describe how you might go about some of these exercises to help you visualize them.
crunches (and these are maybe the most obvious example of how the balls work -just try them and see how it feels):
“bench” press. You only need to use light weights (like 15 lbs. for each arm).
Another good one is to simply
Yeah, go to the site I linked above. It’s a retail site but they have some good pages on exercises with illustrations.
Regarding foot position, that’s a good way to vary the degree of difficulty. The closer together you put your feet, the harder your stabilizer muscles have to work to keep you and the ball in position.
cormac262, do you think it would be worthwhile to substitute a couple of sets of this type of bench press for a couple of the heavy sets I’m doing now? It sounds intriguing, but I can’t really add any more excercises to my routine due to time constraints.
Why do you want to do that? I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad idea; rather that you should have a reason to switch other than “it sounds cool”.
Back before these things became popular like they are now, my trainer-for-the-day taught me to do unweighted squats with them - you start with the ball in the center of your back and do your squat by rolling it down the wall, paying careful attention to your form. The idea is to start with a big ball and move down to the little ones. Of course, I quit for a year or so before I moved down more than one ball.
That’s what I wanted to know. You could give the stabilizing muscles of your midsection some extra training by doing lightweight bench presses on a ball, but by giving up a heavy set of BPs to do it I suspect it would be at the expense of your pecs. Which is fine if you don’t care about pecs, but if you’re like most guys who work out you consider the pecs to be fairly important.
Preface: I am not a personal trainer.
The short version: yes.
When I started with this personal trainer (who, by the way is a power lifter), I explained to him what my usual routines were. And though he kind of gave that shaking head “not again” kind of sign, he said he sees people working out in the same way that I was a LOT. In a nutshell, what he explained to me was that in continuing with the routines I had been doing, I was pretty much getting into a rut. I was working my body out, but my body was also “getting used to” the limited set of exercises I was doing.
So if there has been one theme in my sessions with this PT it has been variety. These ball exercises I described are only just a few of the seemingly endless variations he comes up with (to torture me ;-). His point being that I needed to start working these other muscle groups or even the same muscle groups in different ways. And, he said, the end result would be that (in the case of something like benching) when I got back into heavy lifting I would initially likely not be as strong as where I left off. But I would not only be able to get to where I was, but would be able to surpass it very quickly. Which makes sense given the “rut” theory. And once these other muscle groups have been made stronger, they would then compliment the main muscle groups used for a given lift. In other words, he said that had I continued the way I had been going, I would have plateaued and it would take a while to push past this. I could tell that I had already sort of been hitting that.
I’ve even been kind of surprized at how much lighter the weights have been that he has me use. I know part of it has been just to make sure I get the motion correctly (and focus on the key aspects like not moving the ball in the example I gave). But I also think it has more to do with “starting from scratch” on these other muscle groups - don’t want to stress them too much to start with.
So it depends on your goals (and I certainly don’t aspire to become a power lifter), but if there’s one lesson to be learned, it’s that variety is important. You really do want to mix it up to balance your body out.
Seems to me if you wanted to work your core, there’s probably more efficient ways to go about it. Say, by deadlifting or squatting more. I’m not saying it’s a bad exercise, but if you only have limited time…