maratoolMedicine Ball Scoop Throw
How to do the medicine ball scoop throw
- Assume a semisquat stance with a medicine ball in your hands. Your arms should hang so the ball is near your feet.
- Begin by thrusting the hips forward as you extend through the legs, jumping up.
- As you do, swing your arms up and over your head, keeping them extended, releasing the ball at the peak of your movement. The goal is to throw the ball the greatest distance behind you.
Muscles worked
The force comes from the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.
A plyometric repetition is over before a slow contraction could contribute anything, so they have 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 hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down; the quadriceps straighten the knee and take load on the descent.
Every exercise for:ShouldersAbdominalsHamstringsQuadriceps
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 shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:
- Narrow Parallel Grip Chin-upsbarbell + body only
- One Arm Dumbbell Shoulder Pressdumbbell
- One-Arm Kettlebell Clean and Jerkkettlebell
- Pullover On Stability Ball With Weightexercise ball + dumbbell
- Reverse Machine Flyesmachine
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 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 74 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.