Strengthening exercises with a gymnastic ball

Hajdúné Petrovszki Zita

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The gymnastic ball is a versatile tool: in addition to strengthening exercises, it is also suitable for spine gymnastics, rehabilitation and the physical therapy of people living with musculoskeletal complaints. Interestingly, it is suitable both for making exercises easier and more difficult, so it is a challenge for every child. As it is an unstable device, many muscles work at the same time and a sense of balance develops as well. The ball can be used for balance exercises alone, for strengthening exercises alone, or for a powerful combination of both. These combined exercises mean the surplus, compared with other strengthening exercises which do not contain unexpected situations, thus motor coordination greatly improves as well.

The use of balls can resolve one of the key tasks of physical education lessons, the strength development, which covers all muscle groups and is appropriate for age-related specificities.

There are three forms of how muscle strength manifests itself:

• strength endurance
• speed strength
• maximum power

During physical education classes, due to the age characteristics, we only deal with the development of strength endurance and speed strength. Maximum power development is recommended after the completion of progressively prepared amount of training that lasted over several years, and after the skeletal development is complete.

The strength endurance, which is expressed in the resistance of the body against fatigue during prolonged periods of relatively big effort (Nádori 1995), can be developed through a large number of ball repetition exercises.

Speed strength, the ability of the neuromuscular system, where relatively high resistance is defeated by a high-speed contraction (Nádori 1995), can be developed with the help of playful exercises invented for different groups of muscles, for example, with a sufficient number of receptions of direction changing movements, while sitting on the ball or during competitive ball bouncing.

Applications:

School children of both lower and higher primary school can work with this tool. By changing the Initial positions we can achieve adequate upgradeability of the same groups of muscles, according to age. Indeed, we can also provide appropriate load for children of different abilities within each class, thereby providing a sense of achievement to complete the exercises. The can be well combined with any other sports accessories/equipment, such as rubber bands, dumbbells and gymnastics hand stick as well. This way, a given task can be made not only more interesting and more diverse, but also more difficult. Naturally, this also requires more concentration, attention and even more collated movement; therefore, we use the ball only if the children can safely sit on it.

The ball strengthening exercises, almost without exception, contain such compelling situations which are virtually impossible to perform using incorrect technique, and the poor implementation becomes immediately noticeable for a physical education teacher and the error is repairable. In any event, we apply strengthening exercises after a thorough warm-up, abiding by the principle of gradualism.

It is advisable to start strengthening specific muscle groups with an easier exercise and then

Each exercise should contain 4 sets x 8 repetitions, or for each muscle group at least 3 or 4 types of exercises should be performed at one time. We should strive for symmetrical implementation as regards the number of repetitions. Strengthening of a specific muscle should be followed by stretching. For the appropriate technical implementation an appropriate ball size is required. If there are not enough balls of appropriate size we should apply circuit training. The balls are not uniform in size, as more companies distribute these products; therefore, the diameter of the balls should be taken into account body height. (I would suggest the Thera - Band gymnastic balls, because they also trade balls with the diameter of 45 cm, which is suitable for the body height of lower primary school pupils)

Recommended ball sizes depending on body height

The size of the balls is slightly variable with the volume of air supply.

I discussed the storage and management of the balls in the chapter entitled Balance exercises with a Fit-ball.