Swiss Ball Training Part 1

The first in a five part series of Swiss Ball training videos.

These exercises are fairly challenging but good fun and stimulate multiple muscle groups in multiple dimensions of movement all at the same time providing ‘bang for buck’!

Here are the first three Swiss Ball Exercises :

• Hip Extension
• Single Leg Hip Extension (an advanced version of the above)
• Swiss Ball Wall Squat

Swiss balls are a great tool to incorporate into your training to improve your strength, core and joint stability, movement skill, co-ordination and balance. But because they use lots of different muscles at once they also have the potential to boost your metabolism too (amongst many other benefits).

Exercising on an inherently unstable surface such as a sphere or ball helps to actively include all the postural and stabilisation muscles and stimulates the balance mechanisms (righting and tilting) that we have to use to perform any functional exercise or dynamic movement within sport; it is essentially the opposite of machine training.

Another advantage of Swiss ball training is that it stimulates and develops your nervous system and the speed of your reflexes (which can get sluggish if you don't use them). When doing exercises on a Swiss ball, your body must react fairly quickly in order to maintain your posture and balance. You have to counterbalance any sudden movements or changes in your centre of gravity and this keeps the nervous system awake and active.