Balance/Fitness balls, as they are marketed, are a simple and yet very versatile piece of fitness equipment that you can add to your home gym or even start utilizing at your regular gym outside your home if they have them. You just have to be careful, because the first few times I tried the balance ball, I actually hurt my back and my neck because I didn’t understand how it should be used.

The fitness or balance ball, as it is altnernately called by some makers, is a fairly large ball that looks bigger than any ball you ever played with as a child. It’s pretty squishy, so it gives enough leeway when you are doing crunches or some other type of balancing exericise, but also gives enough firm support so that you’re not doing a back bend while trying to do ab work on it.

And that brings me to the trickiest part about the balance ball. If you’re not careful, you will end up doing something that looks like a modified back bend and can seriously injure yourself or cause a muscle pull if you’re not mindful of your body’s positioning while your exerting your contortionistic moves on the ball.

The balance ball offers a lot of versatility for you abs because it actually makes your abs work harder, which is why many fitness enthusiasts insist it is one of the best ab workouts you can buy. You don’t even realize it, but when you’re trying to balance yourself, your abs are working twice as hard as they are if, say, you are working out on that same old, safe workout mat that your body knows like the back of its own hand.

All in all, the fitness ball is a great way to get in some good ab workouts, but we’ll also talk about how it can help immensely with those love handles, and saddlebags. Oh yeah, you can get pretty creative with your moves on these things, trust me!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Fitness Accessories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.