 Hey everybody I'm Lance Coyke and today we're going to discuss why med balls are just excellent for speed and power development. So if traditional lifting is generally very heavy, medicine balls are nice because they you know they only get so heavy you can be weird and buy really heavy medicine balls I suppose, but generally they're from four to 15 pounds and that type of load is is reasonable for me to still move very quickly. So if I am trying to throw a punch my hand is mostly weightless not totally but mostly weightless. Sometimes I can't access my max speed because I don't know how to get more force into it and so I can replicate a punch with a side medicine ball throw and I could even just take something like a four pound medicine ball it's ridiculously heavy compared to a punch but now I can access more of my force development because maybe I'm good at finding it when I have some sort of load to push against it's going to slow me down a little bit let me create that force so now I can start to learn what that feels like and then maybe it will unlock me to throw stronger punches. Now if you're really well trained you're going to hit plateaus it's going to be a lot harder as you get even more returns on your power development they're going to be smaller and smaller and smaller but it's you know the concept still stands still. So medicine balls are great for overloading something like that we've given this specific example of a punch but I can think about throwing a baseball as well um if when I you know as a pitcher I wind up and I try to get kind of high on the ball stand straight up and then they fall down and turn at the same time and that turning comes from the hips okay that it's you know it's very violent right it's a very violent motion now a ball weighs a few ounces and the same principle applies maybe I don't have enough time to develop a little bit more force maybe my body just doesn't know how to get that extra mile an hour out of the ball so I can throw a ball faster if I practice in the gym with a medicine ball if I teach myself how to throw something else really really fast if I throw something heavier at the same speed which you know that's not going to happen but if that's the goal and you get towards that then I'll definitely throw the ball faster than I ever have before right so that's what we're looking for medicine balls are great because you know they're not too heavy you can move them really quickly and most importantly they're ballistic like I can use them for ballistic movements I don't have to slow the ball down you know as long as I have somewhere to throw it I can just throw it right it can just leave my hand I can accelerate all the way through and it can just leave my hand and that teaches me to develop more force to develop more power and so if your goal is to get faster and even if your goal is only to get stronger you probably still want to get faster at some point especially if you've been doing five by five for six months then I think medicine balls are something that will really unlock your programming