maratoolMedicine Ball Chest Pass
How to do the medicine ball chest pass
- You will need a partner for this exercise. Lacking one, this movement can be performed against a wall.
- Begin facing your partner holding the medicine ball at your torso with both hands.
- Pull the ball to your chest, and reverse the motion by extending through the elbows. For sports applications, you can take a step as you throw.
- Your partner should catch the ball, and throw it back to you.
- Receive the throw with both hands at chest height.
Muscles worked
The force comes from the pectoralis major, which drives the upper arm forward and across the body.
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 deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range; the triceps straighten the elbow to finish the movement.
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 chest too, using equipment this one does not:
- Neck Pressbarbell
- One Arm Bench Pressbench + dumbbell
- One Armed Biased Push Upexercise ball
- One-Arm Flat Bench Dumbbell Flyedumbbell
- One-Arm Kettlebell Floor Presskettlebell
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 105 chest exercises in this database, 63 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.