Essential Medicine Ball Exercises for Boxing Training

Meet your maker: the medicine ball

So you want to be a better boxer? You're looking for boxing training tips, right? That means hours upon hours of working on the fundamentals and honing the craft and art of boxing. Shadow boxing in front of the mirror for technique and strategy. Working on the heavy bag to actually practice hitting and adding power, while putting your techniques into motion. Hitting the mitts to have real, moving targets. Sparring to work on your defense, your conditioning and putting it all together.

On and on you go, those are all boxing exercises. You are improving your boxing, through boxing. Pretty simple. But there's more to it than that if you really want to be a better boxer. I wouldn't be doling out very useful boxing training tips if all I said was, go and box some more!

What I do have to tell you is that you can improve your boxing without actually boxing. This is important for a handful of reasons:

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Breaks up the monotony of training
Takes away excuses when you can't get to the gym or don't own the proper equipment
Improves overall conditioning and strength

I suggest purchasing a 10-12 pound medicine ball to keep around your house. You can be inventive with this and use it in a variety of ways. Here are a few absolutely essential medicine ball exercises to incorporate into your boxing training.

Medicine ball swing: Squat down and hold the medicine ball with both hands. As you stand up, straighten your arms out in front of you and swing the medicine ball up while clenching your hands. Lower the ball slowly as you squat back into the starting position.

Medicine ball twist: Now hold the medicine ball with both hands extended out in front of your body. Instead of squatting down and swinging it up, turn from side to side in as far of a range of motion as your body allows. Focus on clenching the side of your abs that you're turning towards and make sure to keep the medicine ball straight up and at arms length.

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Lying Medicine Ball Vertical Toss: Lie down with your back on the floor and your body straight. Grip the medicine ball so it's on top of your chest. Throw the ball straight up into the air, focusing on using your triceps and chest. Work until exhaustion, which can be anywhere from 20 to 100 or more tosses. Test your mental strength here, with a training partner you will find you can always do 10 more if you tried. Always work on improving your total.

Medicine Ball Sit ups: This works best if you have a slanted/vertical ab board and a partner to train with. If that's the case, grab the medicine ball and start leaning back to perform a sit up. As soon as you're on your way back up, explosively toss the ball to your training partner who should be standing a few feet back. The partner tosses it back as you reach the starting position. Catch the medicine ball and repeat. If you don't have a partner, simply hold the medicine ball as you perform your sit ups. Extend it out and twist it from side to side for extra variation.

Hope you enjoyed this special medicine ball edition of my boxing training tips. Be sure to look around our selection of cheap medicine balls, I'm we have what you need to boost your training. If you have any questions on proper technique, more boxing training tips or more ideas for using a medicine ball, ask away!