 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk about an exercise tool that is versatile and extremely valuable for all lifters of all experienced levels, from beginner to advanced. Now we're talking about the stability ball, now for a while there it looked like everybody was training on one, then it seemed to get abused and people threw the baby out with the bathwater. So we talk about in this episode how to properly use this tool to maximize muscle building, fat loss, how to use this tool to help your body improve faster. We talk about everything from the history of this tool, the stability ball, and we also talk about how we use it with our clients and we talk about our favorite exercises with the stability ball. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ForSigmatic. Now ForSigmatic makes some of the best adaptogenic, mushroom-based supplements out there. These are supplements that you can take to help your body deal with stress, to improve your body's ability to adapt to stress. Now stress comes in many forms, one of those forms is exercise. So oftentimes adaptogenic herbs can help your body actually adapt to your workout routines. In other words, build better muscle, faster, help your body burn body fat, give you better sleep. ForSigmatic is one of the best sources, again they're one of our sponsors and because you listen to MindPump you get a huge discount. So here's what you gotta do, go to ForSigmatic.com that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash MindPump, use the code MindPump at checkout for 15% off any of their products. Also this month, all month long, MAPS Starter is 50% off. Now MAPS Starter is an excellent at home workout program that utilizes dumbbells and a stability ball. Now this program is ideal for beginners, people who need to rehab their body or people who are in advanced shape who need to go back and revisit their form, their technique, learn how to connect better to their muscles. In other words, MAPS Starter is a program that can benefit anybody. Again, it's 50% off, here's how you get that 50% off discount. Let's go to MAPS Starter dot com that's M-A-P-S-S-T-A-R-T-E-R dot com and use the code Starter 50 that's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0 no space for the discount. We recently brought something up in an episode and I think that we should bring something back and we should make it cool again. Oh, I like this. Yeah, well you brought this up I think Sal in an episode. And then of course this month, we have the Starter sale going on right now so it's like always whenever we have something going on like that it makes me go back through it, remember like oh when we created it and the stuff behind it that made it so valuable and in there is a lot of stability ball training and it's fallen out of favor I think for a lot of the wrong reasons and I think we should make it cool again. You know what's funny is that? So something that the fitness space does exceptionally well unfortunately is they take something with merit and value and then they use the hell out of it. They mess it up, they mess it up and it becomes this crazy be all end all thing and then because of that everybody loses its value and everybody forgets it because the stability ball has tremendous value. I remember distinctly when stability balls became a part of the trainer's repertoire and it was actually a ton of value. I remember when we never used them then they came into the scene, we use them with our clients and the value and the benefits were tremendous but then again the fitness space does this. It went crazy and then everything was stability ball and it was people standing on it doing squats with heavy barbells and cut it in half made it into a new thing, there's like pads that are unstable, it just was all about unstable and what happened is because of that it lost its value and everybody said oh it's not, that's crazy, there's no value to it so let's just throw it away completely which is a complete travesty because 100% real talk besides barbells and dumbbells, the number one used tool that I had with my clients that I would bring out probably almost in every workout if not every workout was a stability ball. There's nothing else I can think of again besides barbells and dumbbells that I used nearly as much regardless of my client's experience if they were advanced or beginner if it was correctional work. If you know how to use it, it's got tremendous value, I mean I'm sure you guys use it like crazy too. Oh yeah, I mean if you think about like your average client that would come in, the biggest hurdle initially is to get them stable, to be able to have them function properly and be able to control their body and so this is such a valuable tool to be able to teach them certain things like the squat and just even sitting and lifting weights and to be able to get access to their core and be able to feel what it feels like to be sturdy and stable was real crucial. Well, if I'm being honest, there's this kind of curve that I went through like so when I first started, right, so I started off in 2000 and that really was the peak or getting to the peak of a stability ball. Yeah, I saw it start to take off in about 98 or 9 I remember, because I started in 97. So 2000, 2001, 2002, that whole range I would say was like the peak of you know stability ball training and I loved it, like I was fully bought into it to the point where I was part of the problem, right? So I was part of the trainers that learned how to use it, that found the benefit behind it and then it was like stability ball everything. Yeah, you just get excited. Yeah, exactly, that's a 21 year old trainer who's learned something new and valuable and I think that's, I think this is common in our space. I think almost anything that we see that gets mass appeal or popularity is rooted in some good, right, is rooted in some truth, but it's like the space for us to bastardize something and abuse it and I too was responsible for probably abusing it. I used it and then it turned into like a almost like a gimmick that I had to get everybody on it because I thought I was so fascinated by it. And then you see me fall off of that and stop using it almost altogether and then realize when I'm not using it anymore for a few years that I am missing out on some really good benefits and then you see the reintroduction later on in my career again. And then I would say towards the end of my training career that it not a day would go by that I didn't train at least one client with it in my day. So that's how regularly I use that tool. Same here. But I would argue that I use it as much or more than any other like tool inside the gym because it does have tremendous value and application for all levels of fitness. Totally. Now, you guys know the history of it. It's pretty interesting, right? It was actually invented 1963 by an Italian plastics manufacturer. I can't believe you didn't know this. I know. I didn't know this before and I had to look it up, but he created these vinyl balls that were durable burst resistant and he sold them throughout Europe. And now he discovered them in Switzerland, okay? But he's the one that produced them. So they're called Swiss balls. Sometimes they were actually invented by an Italian or actually marketed by a tiny anyway, but they were first used by physical physiotherapists because they were used for treatment of newborns and infants with cerebral palsy. There were physical therapy schools that used it because it was so effective at again, at therapy, at helping people with neurological orthopedic applications. And it didn't really enter into the fitness space until the like in the small part until the late 80s. Our friend, Paul check, being one of the pioneers who brought it into the space, by the way, Paul check, one of the I mean, if you want to talk about somebody who predicted everything that became great in the fitness space, he's like a guru. I mean, he was talking about microbiomes when people would laugh him out of the room. He was, he was using these stability balls. Yeah, he was way ahead of his time. I mean, he saw this stability ball in the corner there and was just like, you know, around all these physical therapists and, and, uh, you know, it was like, why is nobody using this? What is this used for? Figured out, you know, a way to apply this to athletes even. And that's where he took off with a lot of people don't know this, but he was actually, didn't he coach or was part of the strength and conditioning, uh, from the bulls, the bulls, the bulls and the all blacks. And, and one of the things that he used was a stability ball. Um, and that's part of how it started to kind of get popular. Cause a lot of times fitness techniques and strategies and tools start with professional athletes, or at least they become popular because people see pros using it. Or like in a region, we, I mean, we recently talked about BFR, right? And that's kind of like this started in the physical therapy world kind of first, right? And then it's now, okay, if there's application there, how can we use this with advanced athletes? And like, even the average gym goer, and I know Paul was responsible for part of that move. He's probably one of the first guys to ever probably grab a hundred pound dumbbells and get on the stability. Up into that point, it was very, you know, I think the therapy, yeah, therapy based, then you weren't using anybody with heavy weight, but he's one of the first people to really push the limits of it. And again, I want to be clear. It had so much value in the fitness space. And by the way, this is a characteristic of trainers. Okay, I'm just going to out all trainers when you learn something new and it's valuable and you see benefit to it, you tend to become obsessed for a short period of time. Get excited. Yeah. So it's like you learn, you know, a new technique for stretching. And then that becomes what you do all the time or you learn a new way of deadlifting. And that's what you do all the time. So yes, trainers are partially responsible. But I mean, to shift blame away from them, you used these things, if you use them properly, you saw your clients progress explode, then you use it on yourself. This is what I did is I would use it with clients and then I'd start using it on myself for certain things and that's a lot of value. But again, it got abused so much that what we did is we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We completely discarded it. It's no, it's not nearly as popular anymore to use stability balls, which is terrible because there are things that the stability ball does better than almost anything else. There's tremendous benefits to using them. Yeah, we're here to save the baby. Well, yeah, this, but it reminds me so much of the BFR thing where, where it starts to become a problem is when it starts to replace some of the foundational things that really build a physique. It gets out of its lane of tool, right? So like, this is the core. And that, and that's, that's exactly what I think is that's a perfect way to compare it because I see that I saw or I see the same thing happening with BFR because that's become popular in the last, in the last five years or so. Now that's becoming a thing. And we talked about it early on when the podcast first started, like, listen, there's tremendous value in this tool. But if it starts to replace your traditional strength training, now you're losing, you know, you're losing a lot of the benefits you could be getting if you're using it as something intermittently or to supplement. Tools have to be used appropriately. Any tool, I mean, if you have a screwdriver and you're using the screwdriver to hammer nails, it's not going to be very effective. The, the stability ball is a very effective tool when used appropriately and when phased in appropriately. The number one benefit I see across the board with the physical ball is it is a phenomenal way to encourage, encourage perfect form. Now some people might think this isn't that big of a deal. Oh no, it's a huge deal. Look, here's the difference. I'll give you an example. Okay. Why do bodybuilders do seated curls instead of standing curls? Why do they do seated shoulder press instead of standing same exercise? It's the same movement. Why do they choose seated sometimes overstanding? It places them in better posture. It places them in a different, better posture. And what do they say? What do bodybuilders say? Oh, it eliminates cheating, perfects my form. Why do people use an arm blaster? Why do they do all these different techniques that look almost identical to the previous one? It's oftentimes they do it because it encourages perfect form. Now I can't think of anything that's more important in resistance training than form. It's the, in fact, form will take an exercise from effective to not effective or worse, make it dangerous. So how does the physio ball do this? Well, if you ever sat on one and tried to do a shoulder press, you know, okay, you cannot sit on a physio ball and do a crappy form shoulder press. You're going to bounce, roll. If your core isn't tight and active, if you're not sitting with good posture, if you're bouncing the weights, not having complete full ranges of controlled movement, you are going to lose your balance. That ball is ensuring perfect form. Now, why is that important? Is it because you need a reminder? Kind of, that's part of it. But here's the other part of it. What you practice is what you get good at. What you train is what you get strong at. So if you train in a way that encourages and forces perfect form, the strength that you'll develop is in perfect form. Then you move, again, if you use it as a tool, then you move to the other foundational movements and those movements now become far more effective. Well, I remember it as a trainer hack. You know, one of the best ways, and this is also the birth of my split stance bicep curl or tricep push down that I always teach. Totally. The philosophy comes from stability ball training. So I first, you know, picked up on that like, oh, wow, when I put a client on a ball and I teach them a chest press or a shoulder press, it's an unstable environment. So it forces them to activate their core. I know when they activate their core, they brace at their spine so they have good, good spinal alignment and they can't cheat the exercise left or right or leverage it because then they'll roll off the ball. And that was really what got my wheels turning on. Oh, OK, wow. So and what makes that nice when you're queuing, like I can queue all the shoulder or chest movements. And I know that because it's an unstable environment, they have to do it slow and controlled. It was just a great trainer hack. It reminds me of the split stance thing I did later, also doing things like a step up to a balance or a lunge to a balance. It's why you like the z-press so much. That forces you to have really, really good form. 100 and most people struggle with that, especially when and you guys remember this, right? Like I could always tell when I got a, you know, normal average client or I got a client with an athletic background. Like if I got a client that, you know, is in their thirties or forties and they played sports their whole life, I can tell them queues or show them exercises and then mechanically they just kind of get into it. They look at me, they commit. Now, if you're somebody who didn't train that way, which is a majority of the population, most people don't have athletic backgrounds and you're just trying to teach something as fundamental as a shoulder press or a bicep curl or a chest press. Man, that is a lot of moving parts for someone to do that with good form and the stability ball would help with forcing them into that good posture. Yeah, I love them mainly because if I got a new client that I wanted to really build this control, I always hated putting them on a bench and doing things where everything was, you know, conformed to good posture. So to be able to have an option of putting them in a horizontal position where they have to isometrically hold their hips up while they're also, you know, lifting weights to me was invaluable. That was such a great way for to to teach them how to, you know, control their body and also get more hip extension, which, you know, they weren't getting throughout their day because they're seated all the time. I got something on that. So I'm going to talk to the advanced lifters right now. OK, so here you are. You've been working out for a long time. You've built some good muscle and strength. OK, here's the deal. And I'll use one of our favorite exercises. One of what we would consider one of the top five or six movements for building upper body muscle and strength, the bench press. OK, the bench press. Great exercise. I would put it top five. Definitely top 10, one of the most effective exercises. Now, I remember years ago, after years of training, after years of training, trying to get a better bench. Of course, when I was a kid, bench press was how you measured your strength. Nobody asked you how much you could squat or how much you could curl. Everything was how much could you bench. So I was always trying to get a higher bench press. And I remember working with a power lifter and power lifters. Of course, the best bench pressers in the world and something that he told me at first didn't make any sense. He said to me, use leg drive to get the bar up. And I was like, leg drive. Like my legs, what the heck do my legs have to do with the bench press? Besides keeping my balance, what does it have to do with me pressing more weight? And he used this example. He said, OK, he said, squeeze your right hand as hard as you can, but keep your entire body relaxed. Don't tense up your face. Don't tense up the other arm. Just relax your whole body, but just squeeze your right hand as hard as you can. Do that. And he goes, OK, now what I want you to do is squeeze your right hand as hard as you can. But now tense up your whole body and let me know the difference. Now, if you're trying this out now, if you listen to the podcast and you're testing this, what you're probably going to find is that when you tense up your whole body, the squeeze is much stronger. In fact, we can measure this. If I gave you something that you could measure your strength, tensing up your entire body, activates the central nervous system fully, activates more muscle fibers, which long term means you're going to build more muscle and gives you more strength. This is a technique that lifters understand. Now, one of the hardest things to teach somebody is to activate their whole body without cheating while doing a movement to maximize the effectiveness of the exercise. So if I have someone on a bench press and I tell people, leg drive, do this, activate your core and it's like, oh, in fact, if you're an advanced lifter, you might actually forget this. You might not even be necessarily good at this. OK, put yourself on a stability ball. Roll down so that the stability ball is underneath your shoulders and do a chest press with dumbbells. Guess what's going to be forced to be activated? Everything. You are now learning how to press. And I don't mean just learning like, oh, I figured it out. I mean, your body is actually adapting and your central nervous system is adapting to learn how to press when everything is activated and tight. And so now how does this translate to the to the advanced lifter? Do spend some time doing some presses with a physio ball. Then go to your traditional bench press and watch what happens to how connected you are to your body, watch what happens to your strength and then downstream, of course, look how much more muscle you build. I want to circle back to what Justin said, because the first trainer hack was the stability component of the stability ball and what that did for form and technique. The second thing that was, you know, paradigm shattering for me as a coach was hip extension. And the reason why this was such a game, the stability ball was such a game changer in this in this area. And let's let's explain why that's so important as a coach. After you've trained tons and tons of people, you start to realize that I would say 80 plus percent of people have an anterior pelvic tilt to it's at some degree. So the butt sticks out. Right. So and the end deal with low chronic back pain, tight hip flexors. This is super common because big source of pain is this. Yes. Extremely, extremely common. And the, the counter exercise to counter that is hip extension is finding, which would great. Obviously the best moves are dead lifts and things like that. But if you have a client that struggles with connecting to their post to your Jane, their butt, getting their glutes to activate in that hip extension, if they have a hard time doing that and they're not doing, and by the way, just deadlifting for five sets in a, in a, in a routine two or three times a week is still not enough to counter all the work that they're doing by sitting in a desk all day long and doing the opposite of what you're trying to work on. So by doing these movements like the, like the chest press with the emphasis on the hip extension, which was an area that I saw a lot of coaches and trainers not do, they would put them on the ball because they saw that it was popular and it was an unstable environment. So, but then they would just let the hips sink down. And to me, though, one of the most beneficial parts of using this stability ball is to focus on the hip extension part because so many people suffer from that. So I got a tremendous amount of value of making that connection and teaching clients. Listen, I know we're doing chest press right now, but talking to you like you just said about the full body. So is I want you to think about everything. I want to think about your feet that are planting the ground. I want you thinking about your butt being squeezed and keeping that hip extension as this gets tiring, as we get hard, as the weights get heavier and this gets more, this gets more difficult. You're going to notice your hips are going to want to sag and you're going to hear me queuing the whole time. And I remember that. Oh, keep squeezing your glutes, keep your butt squeezed, you know, because they do three or four, they're unstable. They start thinking about all these things. And then all of a sudden you see it sink back down again. And just getting them to learn that good mind-muscle connection to that really carries over to other exercises that I teach them. And then they're everyday behaviors. That's why I literally would not even use the bench. I wouldn't use anything horizontal bench. To have them, I would use the stability ball until they got that concept down first. That was so crucial because just like you guys are saying that translates to everything after that. They call that a radiation. How can I then, you know, promote that in everything else that I do exercise wise, there's a way to do that where now I'm stable because I can squeeze, I could feel my way into that position. And now I'm capable of lifting even more. Yep, I would do it the same way, Justin. And then another way I would use it is when I would have advanced lifters who we hadn't gone through a cycle of, you know, stability ball training for a while, we go right back in into a four week or five week cycle of using the stability ball. I'd bring them back just like mobility. I, you know, I'm working on something that may be causing a plateau. We would focus on that. It would perfect their form, teach them how to connect. Then we'd go back to more of our traditional lifts and we would see their plateau break. They'd start to break through the plateau and surpass their previous best. The other thing I would get, this was a common comment that I would get, especially for my female clients, was just what you guys were talking about. You're getting hip extension, you're activating the glutes. One of the side effects of that that people would always tell me is my butt, my butt is looking good. It's looking rounder. What's going on? I'm like, well, besides the fact that we're training your butt with specific exercises, because we're activating it so often with the stability ball, it's like you're doing trigger sessions throughout the day, gets a lot more involved. It does. Now, the other thing is the proprioception that you gain from using a stability ball. So that's a complicated term. So here's what proprioception means. It means you know where your body is in space. Okay? You're aware of where your body is in space. An extreme example, a super high level extreme example, would be a gymnast or a diver. You know, when you see a diver jump off of a really high position, you watch them spin and turn, and they know exactly when to point down and where the water is. Now the average person, if you spin me four or five times, I have no idea where left is or right is up or down, right? So that's an extreme example of proprioception. Now, what about for the average person? Well, if you've ever done a back step lunge or a side lunge or a row that's inverted with a cable or any other exercise and you find yourself losing balance or it's hard to connect or can't figure out your positioning. And what happens when you're doing that is you can't maximize the exercise. You can't maximize the muscle building, the metabolism boosting effects of the exercise because your body's proprioception is the limiting factor. If you're proprioception, if you're doing a barbell squat, which is, you know, you need basic proprioceptive ability for. But if you can't balance, there's no way you can push heavy weight to maximize the effects. Well, there's a lot of exercises that require you to step and move even basic exercises. Again, a back step lunge is an example of this. If your proprioceptive ability is what's lacking, you're not going to get, you're not going to reap the benefits of that exercise. The stability ball encourages and strengthens proprioceptive ability because of the balance factor, because you need to constantly think of where your body is in space so that you don't roll off the ball or so that your position is off. The ball is constantly giving you feedback. And again, what you train is what you strengthen. The diver and the gymnast weren't born with that level of proprioceptive ability. They trained it. You also can improve your proprioceptive ability. And the stability ball is a fantastic way to do this. Well, and the carry over to real life is incredible. I mean, especially when you talk about getting in the advanced age category or even is just starting to get above 35 and 40. I mean, we talked before about, you know, the things, the importance of even plios and being able to jump out of our truck. Random stuff like that. You know, when you when you have somebody who you've trained as a client of yours and you've incorporated stability ball training like this, these are the ones that are less likely to fall down the stairs when they're walking in or or turn a certain way and then, you know, bust their knee or do something because they're used to kind of being in this unstable environment. So then when it happens to them in real life, they regather themselves without even with subconsciously just just do it because they've been training that. So there's like these underlining things that are happening besides just, oh, the benefits of it's for your core, oh, it's benefits for hip extension, hip extension, okay, blah, blah, blah. That's all great stuff. But just for practical functional living and the things that may happen to you, everybody has had, I can't, how many times you've been in the shower, right? And just kind of stepped one way and lost your balance a little bit. Oh, yeah. I mean, how many times that happened to you as an adult and you go like, I don't know. That could have been bad. Right. They could have been really bad. I could have went down and I think, man, that's, thank God for my training that I do, that my body kind of just reacted and it got it got stable. Navigate through that. Right. Now, one of my other favorite things about the stability ball that I think is very relevant today is it's a very inexpensive, easy to use tool that you can use at home. Now, today that's very relevant because lots of people may not have access to gyms. They may be closed. Some of them are reopening, but they're reopening with new parameters. I just read an article saying that most gyms will have to reopen and allow, you know, they'll be open for 24 fitness, for example, actually said this, they put out a statement and said that they're going to open their gyms for 60 minutes at a time, only going to allow about 30% capacity. And then they'll have to close for 30 minutes after every 60 minutes for deep cleaning. That's how you do it. Right. So, so you're, it's going to be very hard to have access to gyms. And then maybe you do have access, but you're still a little weary. Maybe you want to stay inside. You don't really feel comfortable in that environment sharing equipment. A physio ball or stability ball used at home, very inexpensive. You can buy them for 20 bucks, 30 bucks, almost anywhere. You can buy them at Target or Walmart. You can buy them online. And they're so versatile. Like there's, there's hundreds of exercises that you could, you could do on a stability ball. And again, an inexpensive, very durable tool that you can use. Now, here's something that I think stability balls are superior for across the board because we are referring to the stability ball as a tool. Okay. It's not going to replace barbells and dumbbells. It's not going to replace your fundamental, you know, movements and exercises. It is a tool though that you can use and inject if you're advanced, inject cycles of it to, to, to amplify your progress, break through plateaus. If you're a beginner, great way to teach you form stability. It's a phenomenal tool, but there is one area where the stability ball is superior. There is nothing better than this, than the stability ball for ab training. Ab and core training, nothing comes close. It's the only, I've seen every ab and core machine in existence. In fact, I love machines because I love to study them, see how they work. Ab and core machines are terrible. I've never had one where if I didn't know precisely how to connect to my abs and work it, I would go in there and it would, it just wouldn't work or would hurt my back. The stability ball because of the shape of it, it allows you to go into full extension and full contraction of the lumbar spine, which lets you activate- With support. With support, right. And it lets you activate your abs in a phenomenal way. So for ab and core training, it's the only tool that I use aside from the floor or a bench or whatever or bands or something like that. Talking all about this too, this just reminds me of the theme, I think during this whole COVID that we've been trying to express to people. Instead of getting so down that your gym isn't available or we're getting frustrated because you don't have access to all the things you had access to. This is a perfect time to be focusing on other types of modalities or other tools that you weren't potentially using. You bring up a great point. So I mean, stability ball is nothing. Most people probably have them laying around their house somewhere or collecting dust somewhere. And if not, they are cheap as hell on Amazon. It could be at your house the next day. And you can, you can get an entire full body workout using that and a pair of dumbbells. You can get a great workout. Oh, that's how we design map starter. Literally, it's a stability ball and dumbbells and it's a full body workout. That's why it's so versatile, so inexpensive, so easy to use, easy to store. If you deflate it, you could fit anywhere. It's the number one tool I would say if somebody says, hey, what should I get for my home gym? I don't have much space. Besides dumbbells, it's always the first thing that I say. Bands, dumbbells and a stability ball is typically the top of the list. And if it's something that you've been neglecting, okay, so if you're the hardcore gym goer that's listening right now and you don't have access to your gym and you're, you know, 500 pounds to be lifting, you know, this is a great opportunity to, you know what? I probably would have never caught myself doing stability ball work inside my gym where I love lifting and deadlifting and doing. Why not do something like that right now? Refocus or reframe your goal. Everybody needs this in their life. So find a way to incorporate this. Yeah, you're greasing the groove. You're going back in and you're making sure that all the hinges, all the joints, everything, you know, we're building that support system up again. And this is such a valuable tool to, you know, to provide for your body to really feel the effects of that. And then, you know, take that and go back to barbell training and see what kind of a difference that makes. That's the biggest myth around, besides the fact that it was abused and people did silly stupid stuff on it, okay? The biggest myth around stability ball training is that it's only for beginners. That is a very, that makes me upset because the value that you get, just like all tools, tools and fitness, if you utilize them properly, they bring you continued value forever, okay? Huge, huge myth. Now it's part of the myth that it doesn't build muscle. Oh, I'm advanced. What am I going to use a stability ball for? It's not going to really do much for me. It builds muscle the same way or similarly to how mobility training does. Now direct mobility training, sure. You do proper mobility training, you're not going to come out with bigger arms or bigger legs or bigger chest. But you are going to come out in a way to where you're going to break through your previous plateaus. Now you were stuck at a 200-pound squat. Now you get up to 250 because what was stopping you before was lack of mobility. Well, same thing with stability ball training. You go through phases of stability ball training and you watch what happens. You activate your muscles differently. Form starts to change, it slows you down. Then you go back to your traditional lifting and holy cow, now I'm breaking through my plateaus. So the myth that it's for beginners and the myth that it doesn't build muscle kills it and it's sad because it's not true. It highlights cracks in the kinetic chain. It's the same thing, it's the same mentality I have with unilateral training and this is why I'm always trying to bring that up because there's periods where you need to go back and you need to revisit unilateral training. You need to revisit stability ball training because it shows how your training has affected your body and now see where the discrepancies lie. And I can address those things specifically with something like a stability ball. Totally. I think we should list some of our favorite, there's a lot of exercises that I could go through but I think we should list some of our favorite stability ball exercises for most people. One that most people will probably benefit from using whether you're a beginner or advanced. The first one for me that comes to mind is the movement that A, it's the first kind of squat I ever do with a brand new client. It's one of the first types of squats. And B, it's how I help people who've been working out for a long time work on activating hips, getting the right knee position, on how to basically perfect their squat. And C, used correctionally, it's one of my favorite ways. It's great feedback, it's real time feedback. Yes, and it's the wall squats. Wall squats, phenomenal exercise for physical ball. It's a very easy one by the way. You put it up against the wall, your lower back goes up against the stability ball. You kind of step away from it a little bit. And then you roll down the ball, squat down, but make sure to shoot your hips underneath it a little bit at the bottom. This helps with people who have issues with mobility. This helps with people who have issues with depth. If you're finding trouble activating certain parts of your body. You're leaning too far forward in your squat, typically. Exactly, it's great for posture during the squat. And then let's say you're somebody who has trouble with your, you know, you want to activate your side butt. And you find that when you squat, your knees try to cave in. Very basic, simple way to work on this. You put a resistance band around your knees, push out against it, do some wall squats with the stability ball, and watch that muscle light up. Well, you can also advance this. So, I mean, as we go through these exercises, I'll give you a progression for everyone that we're going to talk about also. So, you know, maybe you're a super advanced squatter and you're going like, come on, wall ball squats. Like, what am I going to do with that? I don't need to do any of that crap. Try doing that on one leg. Yeah. That's how you learn a pistol. It's a great way to start. It's a great way to learn how to pistol squats. So, you have a little bit of assistance and feedback with the ball. You can push against it to help leverage. So, if doing that seems too easy for you, then do it on one leg and see how tough it is. So, every one of these exercises, and that's what's so great, even like in the program, like all these exercises are in the program, but there is some ways that you can take that simple basic exercise that I would take through with a beginner and I could radically change it and make it extremely difficult for the most advanced lifting. It also allows you to work around ankle mobility issues and then work on ankle mobility. So, the further your feet away are from the wall, the less ankle mobility you need. And as you start to progress, move your feet closer and closer to the wall. And it does change the squat, but what it does do is teach you how to work with ankle mobility within a squat. And it's a very safe and effective way to do so. The next exercise that I like quite a bit on the stability while we've already talked about is the chest press. I like this for the chest press for a few different reasons. One, it teaches you to activate your whole body on an exercise that a lot of people have trouble doing. Okay, when you do a press on a bench, it's really easy to lay on the bench and really just activate your upper body and maybe keep your feet on the floor, but not much else. In fact, some people take it so far as to taking their feet off the floor and just allowing the bench to support their body. And to put their feet up on the bench, I've seen quite a bit too. Yeah, so when you're doing this on a physio ball, you have to keep your whole body active. Otherwise, you're going to roll off the ball or your hips are going to sink. So it forces that issue. The other thing that it does reminds me too of why you like it so much for abs is because the ball is round. It allows the shoulder blades to kind of fall down naturally. So one of the challenges as a coach, you start to put together after you've trained enough people is, man, every time I teach a chest press or a dumbbell press, my clients want to roll their shoulders forward because they're on a flat surface like a bench, putting them on the stability ball where it comes to kind of a point, right? It allows the scapula to kind of fold over the round ball and allows it to fall down. This is also why this is, again, stability ball training is what brought me to eventually teaching the chest fly or chest press on the foam roll. That's where that concept for me came from. It brings their shoulders down. Right, because it brought the shoulder blades down. I thought, oh, OK, if that works with a ball, if I put a, if I do a foam roll down the spine, it'll do the same thing. Now, here's a way to advance this. Now, you can, you get a good, sturdy, high-quality physical ball. You can definitely go heavy. I've seen people lift pretty heavy on it. I'm not a huge advocate of super heavy lifting with a stability ball because that's not really using it for what it's best used for. Here's another way you can advance a chest press on a stability ball. Press one dumbbell. Single arm. One dumbbell or one dumbbell at a time, OK? You want to talk about that in your obliques, man. Oh, boy. You have to stabilize your whole body. You have to stay super, super tight. And then what it does is it forces you to slow the hell down with your press. One way to do it is you have two dumbbells and you press one at a time. The most advanced way to do it is you put one hand on your hip and you press with just one dumbbell. Let me tell you something. You want to talk about muscle building. It forces you to really activate the pec and bring the dumbbell to the center and squeeze the chest. This is really good if you are a bench presser and you have overpowering shoulders and triceps and don't feel a lot in your chest. Try a few weeks of one arm chest presses on a stability ball. Go back to your bench press to see how the chest feels. You could also manipulate the feet, right? So if when I start somebody off on a chest press, they have a very wide base with their feet. That wide base helps support and makes it a lot more stable as you start to bring the feet closer and closer together to a point where, I mean, you try just doing, try doing both dumbbells and pressing with your feet together. It throws off all the stability on there. So that's really challenging. That's a great way to progress it before you get to what you're saying, which is really advanced, to have one arm and do that. Well, another benefit to that, I don't think a lot of people realize, is the fact that you're fighting this rotation, too. Because the ball moves left to right, it's round, your hips have to really stay there and stabilize and be square. And this is so valuable for all movements. This is something you need to learn how to control and then providing that, give me a stable environment. Now I have stable hips that can lock in place. You're going to lift a lot. I'm so glad you brought that up. I told you recently I'm helping a client front of mind with SI joint issues. And one of the issues with that is rotational strength or rotational stability. And so, of course, all the exercises that I've now included in her routine have something to do with that. That's another added benefit that we didn't even touch on. When you think about the average client, how important is anti-rotational and rotational movements? Yeah, preventing your body from twisting because there's resistance. Yes, and having good strength and stability with that. And you're getting that as another added benefit. So that's such a good point that you brought up, Sal, about, you're not ever trying to compare to your highest dumbbell chest press or barbell press on this. You have different goals. It's just like the mobility. I'm not going into mobility going like, did I get as good of a bicep pump as I do when I do my bicep curls as I did this mobility shit? Like, no, this is BS, I'm out. No, you're focusing on different, you have different goals now. Your goal is more centered around stability, control, and form, and technique. And so instead of thinking, oh, I need to keep lifting more weight, think of how can I make this form even more pretty and better? Yeah, because one of the ways it got abused, not one of the main ways, but one of the ways is people then were, let's see how much I can lift on this stability ball. That's the wrong way to use that tool. You are not maximizing its benefit. Yeah, the ball is going to pop. Yeah, well, you're just not maximizing its benefit. Yeah, that can also happen super rare, but I've actually seen that happen. Yeah, I've seen that happen. Yeah, which is not a good thing. You don't want to do that with 120-pound dumbbells in your hands. I've seen that. Right. Another exercise I like a lot. In fact, this is one, besides exercises for my core, this is one that's in relatively regular rotation for me, which is a shoulder press. This is one of the reasons why I like the shoulder press on the stability ball. It's the same reason why I like the Z-Press. I can't do a shoulder press bad form on a stability ball. It just, it doesn't work. I'll either roll the ball everywhere. I'll start to bounce if my reps are choppy. I have to have good full extension. Otherwise, again, I start to bounce. So what it does is it forces me to sit really tall. It forces me to have a slow cadence, which increases the tension on the muscle. And then I have to have full extension. I can't lean back when I'm doing the press on this stability ball because I'll literally lose my balance and fall backwards. One of my favorite, favorite shoulder exercises. Yeah, that's one of those you see common all the time, especially when you have a bench there to support, as people then want to use that bench and lean back and push forward a lot more than they would pulling their arms back, which is the whole point of the overhead press. Dude, in fact, it's gotten, it got so bad with shoulder presses, where people's shoulder mobility was so bad that machines, there's a lot of shoulder press machines that are designed to have you press as if you're doing almost a high incline press. There are hammer strength machines like that. Different exercise. There are nautilus machines. I've seen lots of machines like this where I'm pressing it and I'm like, why aren't my arms in front of me like I'm doing a high incline? They should be straight up above my head to work on that mobility and really give me that squeeze and that contraction of my shoulders. Shoulder presses on a physio ball will do that. Now, if you want to add anti-rotation, more stability, you want to get more advanced, try this. One arm shoulder presses on a stability ball or one arm is my favorite one now. One arm kettlebell shoulder presses or one arm Arnold presses on a stability ball. Or like I said, with the chest, bring your feet together. Try doing both together. You can do both arms pressing and bring your feet all the way together and watch how unstable that becomes. Totally. But just like the Z-Press, this is exactly the same reason why I fell in love with the Z-Press is the same concept is that it just, it forces you to have perfect form. And when we're pressing something over our head, again, referring back to all the clients we've trained, probably one of the most important times that you need to be careful and be safe with them. So almost everybody, I don't care how advanced they said they were when they first got in with me, I probably started them over on a stability ball first to make sure they had great mechanics before we did anything else. So the way I use it is I'll do cycles of heavy standing overhead presses and once I start to feel like my progress is plateauing, then I switch to stability ball presses for a little while, go back to the standing shoulder presses and I'm always stronger, more stable, less achy from doing that. Now, another exercise I like, and this has to do again with the shape of the stability ball, is a pullover. When you're doing a dumbbell pullover, one of the benefits of a dumbbell pullover is that ribcage kind of extension. In fact, in the old days, now this isn't true, but this is what they used to say, and I wonder if there's some truth to this, is they used to do pullovers. First off, it was a strength exercise, so bodybuilders and strength athletes used to talk about how much they could pull over. But second, they used to talk about how it expanded the ribcage, how it strengthened the muscles in the ribcage, like the intercostals, because when you do a pullover properly, you're supposed to breathe in deep, expand the ribcage, and get a little bit of thoracic mobility involved. Well, a stability ball encourages that, because it's round. So when you're doing a pullover over a stability ball, your back will naturally go over the stability ball and improve the benefits of a dumbbell pullover. Now, it's not as much of a strength exercise, but believe me, it will contribute to strength because of the way it's done. Another exercise, reverse flies on the stability ball. I think, Adam, this is one that you really enjoyed. I love this one. Well, because when you do the reverse flies on it, you almost get kind of the prone cobra move on it also, which is also, this is not one we listed, but... Another great one. It is such a great one. It's what, again, going back to the things, the common things that you see with clients after you've trained enough, you start to realize the areas that a majority of them need to be working on. And this is one of them, like the reverse fly, the prone cobra, they all kind of fall in the same category of bringing the shoulder blades back and then the chest being up for good posture. It's just, it's an area that I don't think anybody can spend enough time in because we're doing everything in front of us all the time. And so it's one of my favorite moves to teach. Now, of course, ball crunches. I think doing crunches and ab work on a stability ball, that's the best. There is no better general... There's a lot of great core exercises. So I'm not saying there aren't other great ones. And I do a lot of them and I've trained a lot of them. But the one that's generally the best is the ones on the... If it's done properly, are the ones on a stability ball. And it's the best for beginners to advance. If you're advanced, you've got a super strong core, try long lever crunches over a stability ball with really, really good form and see what happens. Well, it's nice because it forms too in that natural arch in your lower back. And so it's something that, and it's unstable. So already before even getting into the right position, you start to feel that your core is lighting up. Like it creates the environment for you to already be able to have access to that and stimulate the abs. And now I'm going to take it down into depths and I'm really going to challenge it even further. So you don't really have to do crazy range of motion. You're going to feel it right away. Yeah, I got one more I want to throw in there. And this one is a good one. I like this exercise. It's good for a variety of different reasons, but I like it for one reason in particular. There is one machine in the gym that almost every client I've ever trained always tells me, always asks me, is there a way I could do something like this at home? Okay, that's a leg curl machine. Okay, for whatever reason, people love the leg curl machine. I think because it works to hamstrings in a specific way. Now some of the best hamstring exercises involve the hips like a Romanian deadlift, a single leg deadlift, those types of exercises, I think those are the best. Hamstring exercises, but the curling of the leg, you can't mimic that without a leg curl machine, except when you have a stability ball. Hard, very hard, especially when you do it with your hips extended in the bridge, which is the proper way I would say to recommend it. And if you are super strong and gangster, you can do that with one. Oh, really hard. Very hard, but that's a great, I mean, you want to talk about a blaster for somebody. You want to get a hamstring pump. You do this and you know what's funny, I used to teach this to my advanced clients who were really trying to build their hamstrings when we would do a lot of volume and they would do a leg curl. One way I would get them to, because one problem that happens on a leg curl machine, especially the ones where you lay in your stomach, is as you curl the leg up with your ankles, their hips will shoot up. So it's like they're activating their hip flexors and then curling the legs up. So what I'll tell them to do is I'd say, try to lift your legs off the bench. What I'm really doing is having them activate their glutes and which activates their hamstrings also. I'd say, okay, try to lift your legs off the bench while you're curling the leg back. Watch how you feel and all of them go, oh my gosh, I feel my hamstrings so much more. That naturally happens with leg curls on a stability ball because you are in hip extension, then you're curling your legs back and so you're getting this really, really good hamstring activation through this exercise. In fact, again, one of the best ways to get a pump in your hamstrings is leg curls on a stability ball. Love it. That's it. So with that, go to mindpumpfree.com, download all of our guides, books and resources. You can also find your favorite podcast hosts of all time on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Salon, Adam at Mind Pump Adam.