Overhead Slam

🎯 Lats🏋️ Medicine ballBeginnerCompound

How to do the overhead slam

  1. Hold a medine ball with both hands and stand with your feet at shoulder width. This will be your starting position.
  2. Initiate the countermovement by raising the ball above your head and fully extending your body.
  3. Reverse the motion, slamming the ball into the ground directly in front of you as hard as you can.
  4. Receive the ball with both hands on the bounce and repeat the movement.

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.

Every exercise for:Lats

How this movement works

The load travels toward you and several joints bend to bring it there. The arms finish work the back starts, so grip and elbow flexors sit in the path of every repetition: when people stall on a compound pull, it is more often the hands giving out than the primary muscle running out of force.

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:

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.

Related exercises

Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.