Furthermore, it ANGERS me that so far I have only found one company, D-Ball, which makes medicines balls that big. This is a 300-pounder from D-Ball:
It's 15 inches, which is a lot bigger than, say, a basketball, but also a lot smaller than some other medicine balls which are much lighter.
(A d-ball, or dead ball, also known as a slam ball, is different from a traditional medicine ball in that it does not bounce, so that you can slam it straight down into the floor or ground or point-blank against a wall without having to worry about it bouncing all over the place and injuring people.)
And more recently it has begun to anger me that there are -- as far as I know -- no medicine balls which are larger than 300lbs. The next-biggest I've found so far are 85-kilogram slam balls from an Australian company called Iron Edge:
85 kilograms equals about 187 pounds.
There are people running around loose out there, purporting to be experts on such things, who say that slam balls only go up to 150 pounds.
The 300-pounders are used, among other uses, to train for strong-man competitions in which one has to pick up a stone or a keg which may weigh as much as 450 lbs, and then either set it down on a shelf around shoulder or eye-height, depending upon the strong man, or carry it for a distance before putting it down on such a shelf. How, I recently asked, are you going to train for that if there are no medicine balls bigger than 300 pounds?
Turns out they have an answer for that: they just train with stones or kegs, with the same objects which are used in the competitions. Here are some people training with the stones:
And I have an answer for THAT: they should use medicine balls in the competitions. The heavier ones may be sand or steel shot or other things on the inside, but they're rubber on the outside, and that's the way to go. No discussion, I'm right, everyone else is wrong. Rubber, AND SPHERICAL, is the way to go. Yes, the Atlas stones are spherical, but there are also kegs used in competitions, and sandbags used for training, which are not.
Spherical is the way to go because it's most difficult shape to lift and to keep steady. Barbells and dumbbells have handles specifically shaped to fit your hands, to make lifting easier, and to make it easier to keep them steady once they've been lifted. Nautilus-type machines make it even easier, because zero energy is required to stabilize the load: you just go straight up and come straight back down.
Well, what are you there to do: lift the maximum amount of weight off of the ground, or get the maximum effort into your workout? A sphere, a ball, requires the maximum effort to be lifted by a human, and the maximum effort to stabilize it, to keep from dropping it. And in return for that maximum effort, it returns the maximum reward in building strength. Right now, having used medicine balls which weigh much less than 300 pounds, I can feel muscles all over my body which have been woken up and stimulated. (In a good way.) Including some muscles which I can't recall ever having felt before at all.
There are some medicine balls which have indentations in them, sort of looking like the Death Star, and in those indentations are handles. Talk about completely missing the point of what you're making.
Okay, I admit, I don't know all of the biological science, and maybe there are plenty of good reasons to use barbells and dumbbells and Nautilus-type machines, and maybe I'm totally wrong to say that medicine balls are always the way to go. Maybe saying that only proved that I'm a total noob at the entire subject of lifting and throwing weighted objects. I suppose it's even possible that I'm completely wrong about the Death Star-medicine balls. But that's not my point right now. My point is that medicine balls are way cool and that I love them almost as much as kitties.
Rubber is the way to go because stone can scuff up your skin really badly and you don't need that. Also because you don't want to go around throwing either stone balls or barbells or dumbbells, generally speaking. Generally speaking, I think it's safe to say, throwing stone balls and dumbbells and barbells is a bad idea. And throwing Nautilus-type machines, of course, would just be much worse.
But you can throw the medicine balls and slam balls. They're designed to be thrown. You can throw them in more ways than the shot from the shot put. The shot is also way cool, but that's for another post.
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