Top 5 Slam Ball Movements to Take Your Training to the Next Level

Heavy, awkward, and multi-purpose, Slam Balls are great for taking your “real world” strength and conditioning to the next level. Here’s our list of the top 5 exercises we do with slam balls.

1. Slams

As the name suggest, this is the classic move done with Slam Balls. With a flat back, pick the ball up off the ground and bring it over your head in one fluid motion. Once it reaches it’s peak, slam it down to the ground and then repeat again, and again, and again!

2. Ground to Shoulder

Made popular during the 2012 CrossFit Games. Much like the beginning of a slam, set yourself up to pick the Slam Ball off the ground, and then in one fluid motion clean or roll the ball to your shoulder. Depending on the weight of the slam ball (and they can get pretty heavy!), you may need to treat this movement more like picking up an atlas stone, where you pick it up to load yourself in a squat position, and then roll the ball up to your shoulder as your legs and hips extend.

Take a look at this for inspiration!

3. Carries

Once you’ve managed to load the slam ball on your shoulder, carry it for distance, time under tension, or speed. Carries are great to incorporate in a slam ball workout to act as a transitional movement while you switch from one exercise to the next.

4. “Keg” Toss

If you’re training strongman, or odd object movement in general, Slam Ball “Keg” tosses are a great way to harness the explosive power needed in a regular keg toss, without actually having kegs (which can take up a lot of space and be hard to come by).

Find a place where you can find a target to measure height (field goal posts or even the outside walls of two story buildings work well) and then set up facing away from said target. From there its simple, toss the slam ball as high as you can. If you have multiple slam balls at different weights you can set a given height and try to hit it with increasing weights, or you can take one slam ball and go for max height. Focus is full and explosive hip extension.

5. WallBalls

Like normal medicine ball wallballs, only more taxing, slam ball wallballs work similar muscle groups however since they are smaller objects and fall faster with more impact than a med ball, can be fairly tricky and very exhausting.

Set up at your normal wall ball station and put it to the test!Need a slam ball to add to your garage gym? Buy one a slam ball from FringeSport today. 

Author Orion Hones:

Orion started Olympic Lifting in early 2011. In late 2013 he found and began training in CrossFit and has since competed with a team at Regionals and the CrossFit Games. Currently Orion trains and coaches out of CrossFit Jaakarhu in Austin, Texas which he is extremely passionate about and is continuously furthering his knowledge of program design, nutrition, mobility, and all things related to human performance.