Wrist building Evening all. I caught your posts on this topic in our web stats earlier and thank you for throwing our Powerball product into the discussion mix. Badminton is certainly on our radar screen as a sport which will greatly benefit from use of this gyroscope and we'd be pleased to get some feedback from a few of you who reckon that your wrists and forearms could do with some additional strength improvement. Simply email me at rory@powerballs.com with a preferred name/delivery address and we'll fire off a free Powerball to [each of] the first three requests we receive. Try it out for a few weeks and come back here (or directly to us by email) with your thoughts on how it has helped to improve your game (I promise that it will greatly exceed your expectations in every case). There are no catches or clauses - we're simply looking for genuine feedback on this. I look forward to hearing back from any of you who wish to take us up on this and thank you for your time - regards, Rory
I purchased a Powerball a couple of months ago after doing a bit of research on the internet about gaining power for both Badminton and Golf which I play. I found out that several top golfers and badminton plays apparently use one so I thought, why not, lets give it a go. Anyway, I find the ball rather hard to use as it is quite big for my hands. On my very first use of the Powerball though it created notable torque and resistance on my forearm so it is very easy to see how they would improve your muscle strength. However, I'm now struggling a bit as it just seems to hurt my grip making me try and hold onto it harder and harder making my grip stronger but giving me little resistance on my forearms. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a smaller ball? I do genuinely think that badminton players would benefit from a Powerball as when you get it going there really is a huge amount of torque making the muscles work like mad! Hope this is of some use
Powerball size Hello Richard And thank you for the mail earlier and your subsequent post to the board - we greatly appreciate the comments. We have noted similar feedback on this matter in the past also and do sympathise. Unfortunately, at present, we have no plans to commercially build a smaller version as any of the prototypes we have created [of smaller models] have been found to generate a much weaker inertia and so end up being regarded as mere toys (for children) as opposed to sports/fitness products like the current models. You'll probably smile at this, but we have actually had several customers (who have slightly smaller hands) suggest that [their] cure is to wear a simple rubber glove while using the ball! This will basically serve to give you a huge increase in natural grip and allow you to concentrate on using the gyro at much higher speeds than you would otherwise be able. In truth, as a fully grown adult male, you will need to be hitting speeds of 8000-9000rpm, held for sessions of around 30 seconds each time (several times each day) - this is guaranteed to have a significant impact on your game and will give you power in the wrist area that you'd not have believed possible beforehand. But you've got to be able to hit those speeds Richard - anything less is just for rehabilitation purposes...(btw, we've just had a South African Powerballer hit 14870rpm last week - you should download the little clip on the site and have a look at his forearms/wrists...serious stuff altogether!) Well, we have had three people take up the challenge on this and will be sending the shiny spheres off later today as promised - we hope that you'll each enjoy the experience and will be able to come back in the future to report your findings. Thanking you once again therefore and with kind regards - Rory
has anybody taken the offer from Rory? i just got mine and i will post a review of it after i use it for a few weeks.
i too find the ball difficult to grip. both the rubber strip and shiny plastic surface are slippery especially with a little bit of sweat. as a badminton player, my solution is to get a racket grip tape and wrap it around the ball. a regular full length racket grip tape will cover all the exposed surfaces of the ball and now it is much softer, absorbs sweat and also grippier. try it!
if it's hard to grip, then that just means you're supposed to squeeze harder (but seriously, the grippier the object your're holding is, the less muscles you need to use, and hence you'll get less strength and muscle growth. Also, motion to make powerball related stuffs a new thread)
well, it depends what the goal of the exercise is. i see this little device something i use to train my wrist's rotation strength, and not my gripping strength. however, as a result of the slippiness, i could not grip the device properly and my wrist training was affected. thus i added the grip tape. if i need to train my gripping strength, i will use a finger strength training device. or if it trains my grip strength without affecting my wrist training, that's fine too but that's not the case here!
I just got mine in the mail today! Did a quick read over the included documentation, and then fired it up. To my surprise, blue LEDs in the ball started lighting up like crazy! It was really neat to see bright blue light streaking out from between my fingers while it was screaming away like a high RPM VTEC engine. Very cool! I managed to sustain a maximum of 8,400+ RPM. Looks like I have a long way to go to hit 13,000 RPM! Thanks Rory and RPM! I'll use it whenever I can, and provide some feedback to compare with other BFers after a lil while.
I don't quite understand, where is the energy coming to sustain such a rotation? And how real are these RPM readings? Is it an actual shaft encoder in there reading this? *Engineer's curiosity*
the energy comes from your wrist! this is actually quite a smart mechanism. there is a spinning mass (gyro) at the core of the ball. by the conservation of angular momentum, the spinning mass will resist any rotational force that is not aligned to its axis. if you have held a spinning electric motor, you will feel that force. it is this force that the hand is resisting against. the smart part is how the energy of the hand get transferred to the gyro. the gyro is allowed to rotate on another axle 90 degree from its spinning axis. if you managed to resist the gyro's motion and causes the gyro to spin on this axis, somehow the energy gets transferred to the spinning gyro, causes it to gain energy (spin faster). by using argument on conversation of energy alone, since you are spending energy resisting the gyro, the energy must go somewhere, the only place that it can go is either friction (heat) and/or kinetic energy in the spinning gyro. i think a small amount do disappear as heat, but most of it will go into kinetic energy. --- to add, i think the higher the rotation speed, the more energy goes into heat/noise/LED. thus it gets harder and harder as it goes faster. quite a nifty device. i played with it for a week now, and i only managed a top score of 11,650. i noticed that one needs fast as well as strong wrist motion as well as good timing (techniques). quite an intriging device.
the electricity that lights up the blue LEDs comes from electromagnetic induction, similar to a electric generator. there is a coil inside the gyro that spins at 8,000+ rpms. the cool part i think is that, usually in a generator, there is a magnet to provide the magnetic field, but i see no magnet in the powerball so i think it is working against the natural magnetic field of the earth...
can anyone compare this gyro to the feeling of cold hard iron in your hands? I cant find the link anywheere, but somewhere on www.newyorkbarbells.tv, they sell a rotating barbell that attaches to any weight bench. It comes with a T attached to a weight holder that allows you to add up to about 500 lbs to the bar for you to try to rotate. (So basically a glorified broom+weight type thing.) It's apparently very good at adding strength to the forearms. This gyro is obviously much more portable, takes less space, and costs much much less. But i'm curious which one gives better strength results. Most of the ironheads seem to think pulling iron is much much more effective than gyros, but to be fair, they don't really care about rotational strength and probably don't give anything with neon colors a fair shot. I know quite a few here do weight training with the broom + weight method, so people doing both definetly needs some input! edit: http://www.newyorkbarbells.tv/0140.html
Could I try the powerball? Please bring it VRC on Sat. I want to compare it to the Dyna-Flex ball that I already have.
This appears in this week's RadioShack flyer. Would this comparable with the other powerballs? I am tempted to buy one of these. or this link: http://www.radioshack.ca/estore/Sea...ssager&keywords=wrist+exercise+ball&pagenum=0
Interesting. From the website, I can't see the actual rotor but one thing that immediately struck me is the lack of grip (that black band) on this version. I have a Powerball and it could really get away from you if you don't have a firm grip or even if you tend to have sweaty palms. Some of the other posters mentioned adding a grip (just regular racket overgrip). If you do get one of these RadioShack balls, please let us know how it turns out. At $9.99, it's a steal.
