Here is an exciting way to warm up.  Of course, you do need two balls to be able to do it.  And a bit of space to bounce those balls about in.

Before doing serious exercise, it is worth while waking up the nervous system, and any kind on fooling about on the Swiss ball does this.  So it starts with learning how to balance on the thing, then progresses to more challenging drills, if the nerves are up for it.  You only want to do this kind of thing for 20 – 30 secs and you definitely want to do it at the start of the workout, whilst fresh.  If the treadmill is up for it, then sprinting for 40 secs will also wake things up.  However, jogging for 2 minutes is pointless.  If you are about to do a serious weight workout, you want to keep all exercises within the same time frame.  So a set may take 40 seconds to complete, for example.  Any set of anything over 60 secs trains the endurance fibres – long, weak fibres.  If this is what is desired, then certainly jogging along for 2 mins will be fine.  But if you want to get stronger or bigger, then you want to exercise the bulkier fibres, so therefore any warm up is sub- 60 secs.  Therefore the warm up will either be scary or sprinty.

I was actually looking for a different 2 Swiss ball exercise, also called the caterpillar where your hands are on 1 ball and your knees on another and you simply move your balls apart and then bring them together.

Finally, I don’t recommend standing on a Swiss ball.  Yes, it is scary, but fall off the wrong way and you can break your neck. I suppose you would never be scared again.  Bit of a price to pay, though.

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