Tales of the Medicine Ball

I made a medicine ball. There are some old soccer balls in the garage. I invested $5 in a 50 pound bag of sand. I cut a small V into a #4 soccer ball with an exacto knife, stuck a kitchen funnel in the resultant hole and filled the ball with sand. This actually took a long time because the sand wasn’t completely dry so it didn’t flow right down the funnel. I had to use a chopstick to coax and push the sand into the ball. Then I patched the hole using a standard bike tube patch kit and wrapped some duct tape around the ball passing over the patch. When I picked up the ball, my first impression was, “damn this thing is heavy.” It weighs in at 11.5 pounds!!! That’s about double what I was hoping for. I’m sure I will find ways to use it and torture myself, but I am already thinking of ways to make a lighter medicine ball. Buy one? what fun is that! I have a smaller soccer ball, and I was thinking of using rice instead of sand, or maybe lentils (I’m not kidding, lentils may be less dense than rice and sloshing lentils might give it a nice sound), but how do you get lentils down a funnel (ANS: get a bigger funnel).

Yesterday was an indoor workout day and I made sure I included various medicine ball play (4 or 6 pounders). I watched a whole bunch of videos on youtube and I spent 15 or 20 minutes doing a bunch of different exercises and movements, whatever I remembered and seemed to be working, nothing specific. It was actually fun to “go with the flow” instead of doing 10 of this and 12 of that. As a result, I am a little bit sore today in a lot of different places, including my abs and other small muscles all around my core.

In the meantime I have roughly 40 pounds of sand in the garage which I can donate to a neighbor’s kid’s sandbox, but not before I make some sandbags.