If you’re looking to do more than just lose weight and build muscle, incline medicine ball pushups can help you improve coordination.
And strengthen those secondary and tertiary muscle groups necessary for giving you better control over your body.
“Incline What Now?”
The phrase “incline medicine ball pushup” might strike you as a bunch of random words slapped together, but that’s just how we talk in the gym. It actually makes a lot of sense when you break it down.
“Incline” refers to the angle of your body relative to the ground. If you’re at an incline, your head is above your feet. The rest should start to make sense, now. While in this incline position, you hold a medicine ball and use it as your grip to do your pushups.
The First Incline Medicine Ball Pushup
While every fitness guru has a different, motivational story behind the invention of the medicine ball (and every other weightlifting implement on the market), the real story dates back at least all the way to Ancient Greece.
Nobody knows the exact details of all of the exercises the Greek athletes and warriors did with the medicine balls, but we do know that they were reliant on medicine balls as a therapeutic source of weightlifting progress.
More than Just Weight Loss
The primary benefits that incline medicine ball pushups have over other forms of pushups is that they do more than just help you burn weight and gain muscle; they also help you tone and strengthen your stabilizing muscles.
Ordinary pushups don’t incorporate the difficulty of balancing on a round object with a somewhat uneven grip. You simply push up, go down, and repeat. With incline medicine ball pushups, you have to constantly twitch your muscles side to side to stabilize your body and avoid falling over.
Put the Theory to Practice
Preparation for this exercise is relatively straight-forward. Simply grab a medicine ball (preferably one of the large ones), set it on an elevated surface such as a workout bench, and get to work.
The actual exercise itself might sound difficult because of all of the extra anatomical focuses that this exercise involves when compared to ordinary pushups, but it’s really quite simple.
To do an incline medicine ball pushup, make sure your body stays straight. Any unnecessary bending can make the exercise more difficult, more dangerous, and/or more useless. Bad form is more than just deadly; it also renders exercises total wastes of time.
With a straight back and a head looking forward rather than downward, drop down to an almost prone position, stopping yourself just before you hit the ball. Then push up and repeat. But be warned! Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.
As with any exercise, there are plenty of different variations that you can try. Consider adding a weighted vest for more resistance. If that’s not doing it for you, try medicine ball pushups from a vector parallel to the ground. If that’s still too easy, check out decline medicine ball pushups.
Incline medicine ball pushups have a long and diverse history in use as a practical exercise dating back all the way to Ancient Greece. Think you have what it takes to make the Greeks proud? Try incline medicine ball pushups.