A Cheaper Homemade Medicine Ball

Daring to try again!

How hard can it be? Well, now that I’m experienced, it’s not hard at all. And I got plenty of experience last Christmas making my first medicine ball, and if you haven’t read my post on that particular gem of an evening, I suggest you do it right now. It’s worth the effort and you’ll learn everything not to do in the meantime.

Yes folks, on my one-year anniversary of medicine ball disaster, I decided to try again. Only this time I would: i) get the right sand; ii) invite a friend to help; and iii) avoid any materials even remotely sounding like “expanding foam”.

Armed with said experience, I met my friend Lisa (who also wanted her own med ball) at my place to puncture, fill and seal two more basketballs with about 20 pounds of sand each. Desperate not to repeat last year’s fiasco involving coarse, damp sand – I went to the trouble of ordering 50 pounds of indoor playsand from another friend who worked in a day care centre. This was premium playsand – it was even pre-dried (usually the stuff comes slightly damp so it doesn’t fly everywhere when you pour it from the bag). Lisa and I called it “luxury sand”.  It even glittered, I swear.

Not just sand, this was "Sandtastik"!

Luxury sand glitters!

We punctured the basketballs with a radial tire puncture tool, and had rigged two funnels for filling– one using a plastic 3-in-1 oil container with the bottom cut off, and the other using a turkey baster. Both worked just fine and the sand ran through fairly quickly. At least at first. Perhaps it was the jubilation of seeing merely seeing the sand flow at all that made it seem fast. Or, perhaps our judgement was a little impaired by having imbibed several glasses of red wine (one needs an occasional vice, and this one had anti-oxidants!). Anyhow, things were working.

Does this weigh 20 pounds yet?

In fact, everything was going swimmingly. Of course, we had a few mishaps. The evening gradually stretched into late night as the basketballs filled, because at some point the sand would invariably reach the level of the air hole where air needed to escape in order to get more sand into the ball. At that point, filling became excrutiatingly slow. My medicine ball got so full at one point I thought it would be impossible to get a single extra grain of sand into it.

Nevertheless, what a difference when compared to last year’s experience. I can’t tell you what a delight it was to work with nice, fine sand. That stupid, coarse and pebble-filled stuff I contended with last December was now a distant memory. Eventually, both basketballs weighed a respectable 20 pounds.

Gee, this is fun!

Mishaps? Just some red wine spills...

Now the fun part. Each had to be sealed with plugs (using the plugging strips that came with the puncture and repair kit) and further sealed with some Shoo Goo. The plugging strip was threaded onto the tool that is used to push the plug into the ball, only when the tool was pulled out — the plug came out as well. The balls were filled so full, that the plugs were being driven into sand, and the sand instantly coated the sticky rubber plugs rendering them useless.

Tire plugs or Blair Witch twig sculptures?

This is gonna work, really??

After several failed attempts, we decided to seal the holes using a bit of creativity. Lisa came up with the idea of threading two plugging strips onto the tool, and pushing both strips almost all the way in. I was a bit skeptical, but it seemed to work. Rather than pulling the tool out rapidly (and risking the strips coming out too), we just pushed the strips almost all of the way in, jamming them into place as best we could. Thus sealed, they seemed to be fine, but of course the real test would come only from slamming them on concrete. The medicine ball I made last year has been slammed many many times, and it has held up perfectly. I wanted these to be the same.

After some trimming of the plugs, a bit of Shoo Goo was applied to each ball to further seal the holes. Could we have been successful? Whatever the case, we certainly had fun. We finished at around 3:15 am, having spent most of the night filling sand, in between fits of hysterical laughter (you had do be there, trust me). Now we needed the seals to dry and cure for about 2 or 3 days before trying them.

The week after, Lisa came by again and we tried slamming them. The results? Medicine ball perfection!!  Can’t wait to try for more.  Well, maybe I’ll wait a little bit, lol.

Here we are trying them out on December 24th:

Have a great holiday everyone!

Tags: homemade equipment, medicine ball, natural movement, training, workouts