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Powerball
James - 17th November 2005
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Arm pump is a nightmare. Halfway through your run and it hurts to grip the bars, theres been loads of talk about solutions.. mainly doing a lot of repetitions of a small weight, to increase your wrist's stamina and endurance.
I have to admit, I hadnt heard of PowerBalls before someone told me about them, basically its a gyroscope. It spins around both horizontally and vertically to provide the force.
Now its supposed to be designed to build up the strength of your wrist and lower arm, but if you dont take the speed to the extreme, if you scale it back a little and keep it on the lower revs (you can see from the little screen which tells you the RPM) then its pretty much the same as doing lots of reps with a small weight.
First few times I used it, it was really difficult! It's really hard to get it going to start off with, because its so unusual.
Basically the technique is you put the string in, yank it hard to get it spinning, turn it back over and start moving your wrist (not your arm) in a wide circle until you can feel it speeding up, the vibrations increase to let you know its working!
Then as you get it going faster you make the circles smaller until your wrist is moving in very quick, but tiny circles (2-3cm). Eventually you just get the hang of it.
After doing it for 5 minutes a day, for around 3 weeks now (as the instructions say) I can actually notice the difference, I can definately keep it on the higher RPM for a lot longer, and out on the bike it does make a noticeable difference when you're doing tight turns or pulling the front over stuff.
It also glows when you're spinning it, which is generated by an induction coil inside the rotor, and theres a couple of batteries to power the screen, but I doubt i'll ever use them because it turns itself off after a little while, so best to check its actually on to record your record breaking score (currently top is 16,081 RPM set by Akis the Harpoon Gunner (is that a sport?)).
We managed to get up 11,325 which wasnt too bad really, doesnt put us anywhere on the score board though! Your arm tends to ache afterwards!
In all, its a really useful piece of kit, you can exercise your wrists just sitting down whenever you want, its really easy to use once you've got the knack, and you can tell the difference after a few weeks. Okay so we sound like an advert for low-cholesterol butter, but it does work. Also as its a non-impact trainer, it could be used to recover from broken wrists, etc without putting too much strain on the bone.
The only downside perhaps is the price, at £24.99 for the model we tested (here on CRC) but then how much would a set of dumbells cost you? You can still get the cheaper models for 14.99 though, so you do have an alternative.
Also we found this on the PowerBall website, a solid metal version! How crazy is this?!
Big thanks to Rory for hooking us up with one, check out the PowerBall website and look at all the prices on ChainReactionCycles.
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