maratoolCatch and Overhead Throw
How to do the catch and overhead throw
- Begin standing while facing a wall or a partner.
- Using both hands, position the ball behind your head, stretching as much as possible, and forcefully throw the ball forward.
- Ensure that you follow your throw through, being prepared to receive your rebound from your throw. If you are throwing against the wall, make sure that you stand close enough to the wall to receive the rebound, and aim a little higher than you would with a partner.
Muscles worked
The force comes from the latissimus dorsi, which pulls the upper arm down and back toward the ribcage.
A plyometric repetition is over before a slow contraction could contribute anything, so it has to produce that force immediately on contact.
Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the abdominals brace the trunk so force can pass between the hips and the shoulders; the chest adds pushing force at the shoulder; the deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range.
Every exercise for:LatsAbdominalsChestShoulders
How this movement works
The working muscles shorten as they drive the load away from you, and more than one joint changes angle to do it. Load spreads down a chain instead of sitting on one muscle, which is why a compound push handles more weight than any single-joint alternative — and why joint position, not the muscle, is usually what fails first.
It is filed under plyometrics, which trains the stretch-shortening cycle: loaded fast, released immediately. Contact time matters more than volume, so these belong early in a session.
What you need
A medicine ball can be thrown and caught, which suits movements where you keep accelerating the load all the way through instead of decelerating it to spare a joint.
Every exercise using:Medicine ball
These train the lats too, using equipment this one does not:
- Chin-Upbody only
- Close-Grip Front Lat Pulldowncable
- Latissimus Dorsi-SMRfoam roll
- Leverage Iso Rowmachine
- Narrow Parallel Grip Chin-upsbarbell + body only
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 45 lats exercises in this database, 23 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.