Upper body

Medicine ball chest throw

A bench press measures force. A med-ball throw measures force produced quickly — and those two things come apart more often than people expect. Some athletes press a lot and throw badly.

Short answer

The seated medicine ball chest throw measures how fast you can press rather than how much. Back against the wall, 3kg ball, both hands from the chest, best of three.

Used instead of a bench press for sports where nothing is pressed slowly — and it needs no spotter.

Upper-body power: the speed end of pressing.

Why it is in the Train Smart battery: Upper-body power rather than strength — the speed end of pressing.

Protocol

How to run it

Seated against a wall, 3kg ball, both hands from the chest. Three throws, record the best distance.

What you need: A 3kg medicine ball · A wall to sit against · A tape measure

Benchmarks

What is a good score?

We are not going to publish a precise-looking table for this test. Reported ranges vary too much with protocol, equipment, level, age and sex for a single table to be honest, and most of the tables in circulation for it are uncited copies of each other.

The comparison that actually changes your training is against your own last score. That is not a consolation prize — it is what the monitoring literature supports, and it is what Train Smart does: re-test every eight weeks under the same conditions and let the trend, not the percentile, drive the program. The papers behind that are here.

Getting it right

What people get wrong

Most of the variation between two tests is protocol, not fitness. These are the faults that make one score incomparable to the last.

Leaning forward off the wall.: The back stays against the wall. Leaning in turns it into a whole-body throw and adds distance that is not upper-body power.
Changing ball weight between tests.: A 3kg and a 4kg ball give completely different distances. Fix the weight.

Power responds to intent. Throws, plyometric push-ups and speed-focused pressing at moderate loads moved as fast as possible — alongside the heavy pressing that builds the force to move quickly in the first place.

FAQ