In the olden days medicine balls were used for throwing, and smashing and lifting and all sorts of other cool stuff. Nowadays med balls have been relegated as butt targets for squatting. How the med ball became the preferred target of a million sweaty butts is neither here nor there. Suffice it to say I never squat onto a ball and I almost never encourage it in others. Here’s why:

Short-stroking and skill transfer

Sometimes the med ball is touted as useful for enforcing a consistent range of motion. But consistent for whom? Short people might not even break parallel squatting onto a fourteen inch ball. And if you’d like a good cry watch someone over 6’4″ try to squat onto a medicine ball.

I get that we need defined standards, and a standard is always going to feel somewhat arbitrary. I can live with that. What bugs me about the med ball squat is that for most people it engrains a short-stroke squat pattern that doesn’t transfer well to other skills.

Take the oly lifts for example. Olympic lifters practically sit on their heels at the bottom of a snatch, waaaayyy lower than the plane of the knee. That difference in squat depth translates into a 5 or 10 additional kilos on the bar for a beginner weightlifter and perhaps double that for a skilled lifter.

Taking a dump — not that kind of dump

Here’s a pop quiz. At what point in your squat is it okay to lose tension in the system? The answer is “never”, and therein lies another problem with med ball squats. Particularly in timed workouts people tend to bash the stuffing out of the ball through repeated and violent application of butt cheeks.

Why is this a problem? Because when you bounce off the ball you lose tension in the system. You dump energy out of your body and into the ball. If there were a way to harness all of the watts that people dump into med balls every day, you could probably power a small city. There’s a patent in there somewhere.

Habitual bouncing also inhibits your stretch reflex, which is your body’s way to prevent a muscle from over-lengthening. The stretch reflex is key to efficient movement because it allows you to maintain muscle length. Since length is tension, and tension is strength, when you bounce off the med ball you are really inhibiting your stretch reflex, thus training yourself to be weak.

Twerking: the un-squat

When you reach back with your butt your hips tip forward. Then, because your head and hips are connected by your spine, your chest drops. Now add in a couple of knee bounces and you’re twerking. Congratulations!

But seriously, except for very narrow applications, you do not want your chest to drop when you squat. I would suggest to CrossFitters that you never want your chest to drop when you squat. The thruster, wall ball, front squat, back squat, overhead squat, clean, snatch etc. all depend on an upright chest and vertical-ish spine.

So what to do if your silly trainer makes you squat onto a ball? Pretend that your hips are a basket full of eggs. If you twerk all of the eggs will tip out of the front of the basket. Instead, move your hips straight up and down by lowering yourself between your legs. Remember not to bounce! Give the ball a kiss and maintain tension throughout.

This article was originally published on teddykim.com.