Medicine Ball Slam: Build Explosive Strength

1. Setup in an athletic base position while holding a medicine ball at your chest with a soft bend in your knees.
2. Rise up tall on the toes and extend the arms overhead with the medicine ball.
3. Exhale, pull the arms down towards the toes, and aggressively slam the med ball into floor.
4. Catch the med ball as it returns from the floor and repeat step #2 for the desired number of repetitions.

1. With med ball drills, the goal is speed throughout the movement. There are only a few rare instances where one might want to move slowly through a weighted plyometric drill with a medicine ball.
   • A good rule of thumb - if the weight is so excessive that it affects the technical execution of the movement then it is too much.
2. You can use these drills as “fillers” in between your large compound movements or you can implement them within your warm up as a method of potentiating your central nervous system for heavier strength based work in your accompanying training session.
3. Keep the torso rigid and ensure some tension through the core to help transmit force out through the extremities.
4. Initially you may want to focus on pausing in between reps to ensure proper positioning but over time you can eventually progress to more rhythmic (i.e. back to back) repetitions.
5. If you are using a denser medicine ball which will react with “an equal and opposite reaction” then you may want to stand a little ways back from the wall to allow yourself time to react.
   • However, if you’re using a more absorptive ball then you can stand closer and catch the ball as it comes directly off the wall.