Movement Spotlight: Wall Balls
Wall Ball = Squat To Press
The wall ball is a fantastic way to test your squatting with an added layer of upper body fun. If you have poor squat form or weak shoulders, your wall ball efficiency will suffer! We’ve outlined some wall ball basics for you to implement to make your next workout even better.
Performing a Wall Ball
Execute as perfectly as we would execute our air squat. if you have issues with your air squat, you will have issues with your wall ball tosses!
Standing about an arms distance away from the wall, our feet are shoulder-width apart and toes are pointed out at about a 45 degree angle. This should look identical to your air squat setup.
As you send your hips down and back, your knees will track directly over your toes in your descent. Make an effort to keep your weight distributed between the mid sole and heel of each foot.
As you descend, keep your chest upright. Often you’ll hear this cued as “tall chest” or “chest open”. We want to get your chest as close to perpendicular to the floor as possible. This means that the ball ALSO needs to stay “tall”. Try to keep the ball at face height as you descend into the bottom of your squat. If you let the ball lower or your chest fall forward, you will have to work that much harder to get it back to an eye level before you can toss it overhead.
On the way back up from your squat, generate power from driving your feet into the ground. The goal is to transfer as much energy as we can from your legs (the strongest part of your body) to your arms (one of the weakest parts of your body) to effectively throw the wallball to the target height.
Make the squat-to-toss one, swift motion. If you pause at the top of your squat before you toss, you will lose all of the upward momentum you’ve generated and therefore lose power!
As the wall ball makes its way back down, begin your squat before you catch the ball. Again, it will take much less effort to follow the ball down on its natural, gravitational path than to stop it mid way and then descend. Gravity is your friend on the way down, so use it!
