Speed Training: Are Your Medballs Light Enough?

As a young boy, I’ll never forget the first time I heard a Major League Baseball player answer every kids’ curiosity of how to throw hard:

“If you want great velocity, you’ve got to throw hard.”

While I didn’t understand the science then, what I heard was that I need to get my reps in at 100% effort. Throwing the baseball as hard as I could would help me be able to throw the baseball as hard as I wanted to one day.

In hindsight, while throwing hard as a strategy to get good arm strength isn’t perfectly sound, it is pretty damn close. You see, speed development is a bit more complex than trying hard. Things like mechanics and strength, for example, contribute to the expression of power we know as speed. That said, an athlete with perfect mechanics and more than enough strength won’t get faster unless he/she creates a training environment conducive to speed. 

Developing the fitness quality of speed requires a movement selection that supports top end force production.

This is while sprinting (distances short enough with long enough rest) can contribute to speed development. It’s also why jumping and other plyometric training are cornerstone elements of speed training. After all, can you jump high or far slowly? You catch my drift. 

This is why we own the lightest medballs available on the market in our gyms.

When it comes to speed training, the options available to us shoot through the roof when you’ve got an ample supply of medballs (that are light enough) for the development of speed, specifically with throwing exercises. After all,  “If you want great velocity, you’ve got to throw hard.”