I'm getting very good results from working out at home with my 8 pound medicine ball and my 5 kilogram ball and my 20 pound ball. But I want to go heavier.
The guy behind the gun counter at the big sporting-goods store said they could get medicine balls as big as 12 or even 15 pounds. The fact that they sell guns and do not sell big medicine balls (big from my point of view) are only two of the things that make me uncomfortable about the place. Going there again after several years reminded me that I had already told myself I probably wouldn't need to go there again. Ever. In my life.
Of course, I can buy slam balls as big as 300 lbs from Amazon. I have actually been having wildly irresponsible thoughts about doing exactly that. Once a 300-lb ball was delivered, would I be able to get it as far as from the sidewalk up onto the front porch? Interesting question. Then again, I don't see what would be so bad about leaving it outside -- who would steal it? Very likely no-one who wasn't using a forklift. It might stay right there on the ground outside for a very long time, looking like a spherical yellow lawn ornament.
I have actually been more seriously thinking about buying a slam ball which weighs 45 lbs or more.
A more responsible thought is joining a gym which has huge heavy slam balls. Which gyms have what size balls? I don't know. After looking in at the above-mentioned sporting goods store today, I spotted a nearby gym. But it's still under construction.
The first gym I telephoned about this told me that their slam balls are usually locked up. They're only taken out for classes. No lone-wolf slam-balling at any old time for them! Which is disappointing, but I guess I can see their point, which -- I'm guessing -- is safety. And far be it from me to denigrate safety. Seriously.
Seems like a LOT of local gyms don't even answer their phones on Saturday afternoons. What, are they all CLOSED on weekends? Sigh. Most of them would probably be out of my budget range, too, unless I can arrange to get a free gym membership because I'm poor, which some people actually seem to think I can do.
It may be that I am kind of crazy to to build my fitness plans around slam balls to such an extent, but you know what? I don't particularly care if it is crazy, it could still work. I know somebody who lost an amazing amount of weight on a cabbage-soup diet, and who very enthusiastically preaches the Gospel of Health through Cabbage Soup. Which is crazy, but, much more importantly, it actually worked for him, so who's crazy now, huh? I think that a huge variety of approaches to diet and exercise would each work well for some people. Would, and do. It may very well be that focusing to such an extent on heavy slam balls would be crazy for most people but brilliant for me, because I'm just built that way. (And there's also the possibility that I've stumbled across fitness gold here and am far, far ahead of my time.)
There's an Australian company called Iron Edge which makes fitness equipment, including slam balls as heavy as 85 kilograms. That's over 187 pounds.
They have some YouTube videos featuring a young man who is very thin, but wiry, who actually picks up the 85kg balls and carries them around and throws them and such, and also makes comments about the balls which I find humorous. I don't know how much he's cracking up his Australian target audience, and how many of things which crack me are just things Australians say. Like when he describes some amazing feat which Derek Boyer, Fijian-Australian strongman legend and Iron Edge spokesman, has performed with the heavy slam balls in training, and then dryly adds something like "[...] which, in my opinion, is pure mental."
Besides being funny, the fact that this fellow is so thin and can still carry and toss an 85-kg slam ball makes me confident that I can carry a 300-pound ball. Eventually. If I work very, very hard. Probably not today.
And it may actually be very tricky to even find a slam ball as heavy as 85 kilograms, let alone 300 pounds. (And I've said in this blog, and I stand by it: they should make them even bigger than 300 lbs.) I don't know yet how common they are in gyms. Maybe they're all over the place, and it's just a matter of hooking up with a gym.
Or maybe, to most fitness enthusiasts, the very thought of slam balls as heavy as 85 kilograms, never mind 300 pounds, let alone even bigger, is still pure mental -- either because it really is pure mental, or because I am from the future.
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