Value of the Stability Ball + 7min Workout

So a simple thing with these, it is also wonderful to take around if you're traveling from one place to another. You can inflate these easily through this little tiny hole here and then you can head off to your nearest service station when you get there and refill it up and pop the plug back in. So they're easily transportable, they're great for balancing posture.

So when you're on a fitball, they're working every single muscle that you've got in your body to try and stay on the ball. So they're amazing for people who don't have good balance or good posture. They actually make you hold yourself up.

You cannot sit on these and kind of just let your form go because you'll actually fall off the ball. So the fitball is one of my major things that I work all my clients with. Even if you're an older client, I had my 87 year old client there this morning and her 81 year old husband and they were on these fitballs as well because there's so much that you can be doing on them.

And of course you can also be adding a weight to them and suddenly you're doing weight work or weight work with one leg up and suddenly you're working all of your balance muscles, your postural muscles, all your stabilizers. So everything works not just one set of muscles. And so it also, what is really good is that our brain has to send little brain waves down to our muscles.

And every time that we start to get a bit unstable, the brain has to send little signals down to our muscles. So that's a really important one as well. And that the signals get a bit more sluggish as we get a bit older.

So it's really important that particularly as you get older, if your balance is starting to wane a bit on you, it's great to have a sit on one of these balls and simply sitting here will do you the world of good. But the moment you take up a leg off the floor, you are working it so much harder and you can find often that one side will work a lot better than the other. So then you take up the other leg and I may be more unstable on that leg.

So your homework to do there, if you find you're more stable with lifting up one leg than the other leg where I'm a bit more unstable, is to be lifting up your legs more often. Try and extend the time that you hold up there. It's as simple as that to work your balance.

If you can, so starting with your hands on the ball and then you'll be able to take your hands off the ball. So you're really relying on your little arms, bit of centre of gravity and balance on the floor. So your ball doesn't contact much with the floor.

When we're standing up, we're two feet wide, we have far more of a stability kind of stance because our feet are wide apart. But we bring them in a bit closer or take up one leg off the floor at any time, whether we're standing or sitting on a ball and you'll be making your stabilisers work that much more. So you have to counterbalance.

So the reason that this is good is that the more we work on instability and unstable things, then the more these brainwaves have to work and they also need a workout in themselves because if they're sluggish and they move slowly. So if I'm starting to fall off the ball and I haven't really trained this, then I'll probably fall because by the time my brainwaves send the signal out to my body to tell me to move back this way, I'm already off the ball and down or I'm walking along a path and I fall. So it's really great as we get a bit older to train all these brainwaves to be quick.

So by the time I move to the side, it's going to move to the side, move back that way, move back that way, whichever way. So it's a great thing for doing a whole pile of things on. Every time we move to one side, we have to counterbalance and move to the other side.

So there's a lot of brain activity going on just simply for the fact of sitting on the pit ball. And the thing is, if you're at work and you're at a desk all day, these things make a great chair to be on. Because the fact is that if you start to slump or sag, then you'll fall off the ball.

So you're working a lot of your muscles for a lot of the day, just simply sitting on this. And hopefully you're also sitting upright as well, so you're not slouching forward. You're actually holding yourself upright and you're working so much.

By the time you get home from work at the end of your work day, you've already done a fairly big workout working your muscles, just simply to sit on the ball. So these are great. These balls are great to rehab people who have had back problems, people who need to get a stronger core.

These things are majorly fantastic. And then as I said before, you can even add to that by taking hand weights and doing exercises on top of the ball. So they're great for rehabilitation.

It activates your major motor recruitment patterns. And because we're on an unstable ball, so it's fantastic. I just wanted to really show you just a few things that you can be doing on a fit ball, because these things are great for building up specific muscles.

Now, if your glutes have started to wane as you've gotten a bit older, because remember last week we talked a bit about muscle strength and psychopenia. If you haven't watched that Facebook live last week, we talked a bit about that, because as we age, things get weaker. So I want to show you a really, really great glute strengthener.

And actually, if you put a hand under your lower back, you'll find that works out as well. 

I just want to explain how good a fit ball can work as well, if you didn't want to be working on a normal bench.

So fit balls are great for doing our normal bench work as well. So if you've got a barbell and you want to do a bench press, you can be doing that on there as well. So say for example, if I want to do some little, yeah, just a press.

Now every time I work here, or if I'm doing whatever here, so I can opt to use a fit ball instead of a bench, and suddenly I'm working right through my core, I've got my hamstrings working, my glutes working, they're all working to keep me on the ball. So it's a really interesting thing, if I do, say, I have a bigger, let me grab a bigger weight, and I'm doing a one arm press. Now suddenly, I could feel this whole core has got to work to stop me from being pulled off the ball.

So I can actually do my chest work and all my work that I'd normally do on a bench, you can do it on the ball instead. And that will give you a really, really great workout, because I can feel everything working. So right now, my hamstrings are working, my glutes are working, my proprioceptors are going overtime to try and hold me on the ball while I'm doing a one arm press.

So this is a 10 kilogram kettlebell. So yeah, so there's a lot of great stuff that you can be doing on these. And even just a stretch at the end of a long, hard day, if you've been sitting at a, you know, hunched over a computer throughout the day, even just simply to go onto your ball, and at the end of the day, and leaning back, just taking these arms right back is a beautiful stretch, because it takes it right through these abdominals.

So it's a lovely, lovely stretch, taking those arms right back, and you can feel these abdominals having a beautiful stretch. That feels really lovely. It's a stretch all of us can do, because we don't do this sort of going backwards very often.

Beautiful. Good. Great.

And so there's a lot more we can be doing on these balls. And we use these balls as well as resistance bands and a weight, like a kettlebell, or if you didn't have a kettlebell at home, you could use a milk container or juice container. But we use these a lot on our online program.

So the Spice Strong program, which is about to launch, that's around $3.50 per week. Hi Gretel, good to see you. That's about $3.50 per week.

And so very affordable. And that's the pre-launch price. And that's still going at the moment, but not for long.

Within days we'll be launching them. It'll go up to $4.95 roughly per week. But yeah, we'd love to see you on there, because we use these little mothers.

These cost, these are very, very cheap as well. So these Fitballs cost about $8 from Kmart in Australia, and about $12 from Big W. You want to sit on your Fitball and kind of have your knees a little bit below your hips, or up about the same as your hips. And so for somebody, actually I can put a little link below after, so you can see what height you need, so how tall you are, what size ball you would need.

And also if you go to the link we'll have below, we'll also have how you get online for our online Spice Strong program. You get three sessions a week sent out to you, and there for two of those sessions, two of those classes is a beginner, intermediate, and advanced. So you can follow the person that you feel best suited to, so it can work at your own fitness level.

Next week, so next Thursday at one o'clock, I'm going to specifically speak on women's weight gain as a near menopause, pre-menopause, menopause, post-menopause, and the spare tyre, because a lot of women do not know what to do about it. And there are some simple things. We can't get rid of hormones.

Hormones are there, and many women I think spend so much money buying powders and all sorts of stuff to try and combat weight gain. Of course, there's all sorts of other things as well, but I'm going to have a bit of a chat with you next week about how we keep this middle without a tyre or reducing that tyre that we get as we get near mid-middle age. So we'll have a bit of a chat about that.

I'll bring in a few different aspects of intermittent fasting, a bit of aspect of gut health, and we'll be talking about some specific ways that we can keep these lower abdominals nice and flat and taut, and I look forward to seeing you then. So we'd love to see you for our next Facebook Live next Thursday, Australian Eastern Standard Time at one o'clock. See you then.

All right, if you have any questions, please type them in the line. I'll answer them next time. Thanks for that.

Bye.