Recently, I was reading an NYT article written for the New Year’s Resolution crowd that covered some basic medicine ball exercises for people who don’t like lifting weights. It took me back to the first time I saw these balls being explosively slammed into the floor with loud thuds; it looked like anything but a “gentle” alternative to lifting heavy. After five years working at a luxury gym chain and my own exploration of workout methods, I’ve grown to appreciate the medicine ball, even though I couldn’t see the point at first. Admittedly, the tool has never done me many favors. Similarly, the only time I’ve ever pulled my back was when my gym manager pressured me into using a far too heavy kettlebell for a mandatory group workout—a move that left me paralyzed on my kitchen floor that afternoon.
Seeing the medicine ball presented as a gentle alternative sparked my interest in how these two pieces of equipment became mainstream. We didn’t see these tools much in the 80s or 90s. I suspected I’d find some recent pioneer who popularized both, and while CrossFit culture is definitely responsible for their current fame, both of these simple tools actually date back to ancient history. True to CrossFit ideals, these tools are all about functionality and simplicity. They both differ from weightlifting because they allow for complex movements you just can’t get from static weights, like throwing and twisting.
Related Read: Crossfit. It’s Successes, Failures, and Mired Future
To my surprise, equivalents of the medicine ball show up in ancient Persian depictions of wrestling training, and a leather bladder filled with sand was a favorite training method of Hippocrates. He prescribed patients to toss these weighted balls, noting that the rhythmic swinging motion was therapeutic.
In recent Western history, the medicine ball was as common as it is today around the turn of the century. They were in every YMCA and in all the popular fitness routines. Back then, iron weights were perceived as tools for “circus strongmen,” while the medicine ball was for functional fitness.
In the 1920s, President Hoover’s physician used the medicine ball to create a game inspired by the Navy where players threw the weighted ball over high nets. It was scored similarly to tennis—basically, imagine if pickleball met volleyball. At the time, Hoover weighed about 200 lbs, and the game became his daily movement routine. It was the physician who coined the name “Medicine Ball” at a time when the word “medicine” was interchangeable with “health.” At 7:00 AM, key members of Hoover’s cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and the media attended “Hooverball” every morning except Sundays for a half-hour game followed by a light breakfast. They became known as the “Medicine Ball Cabinet.” However, when FDR (who was a swimmer due to polio) took office, the game vanished, and medicine balls largely went with it.
Through the power-pumping 70s and 80s, you wouldn’t commonly find a medicine ball at the gym. As the Schwarzenegger-style ideal for men and aerobics for women took over, the medicine ball was forgotten until the mid-2000s when CrossFit revitalized it. However, CrossFit put its high-intensity branding on what used to be a more gentle exercise, and soon the weighted ball was reinvented with bounce technology. Today, there are two types: one will bounce and the other sits like complete dead weight. When Greg Glassman of CrossFit added Hooverball to the franchise’s “Workout Of The Day” rotation, more people were playing Hooverball than in Hoover’s time.
As I learned this, I wondered if kettlebells were the same thing, just with a handle slapped on. Turns out, I was wrong, kettlebells have their own historic roots. They actually come from Russia and originally had nothing to do with fitness. They were used to balance scales for grain and produce in the 1800s. As a cheap way to entertain people, vendors started using them at local carnivals to show off feats of heavy lifting.
Similar to the medicine ball, the kettlebell was elevated by the physician to the Czar, who saw its potential and incorporated it into his weightlifting school in the late 1880s. From then on, kettlebell training was a staple of Russian military and sports training, while it was unheard of in the U.S. until the early 2000s.
In the 1990s, a Belarusian trainer named Pavel Tsatsouline introduced kettlebells to the U.S. He had been a Russian Special Forces trainer and started training U.S. groups like the Navy SEALs and the Secret Service. By the early 2000s, he became a mainstream pop-culture trainer, jokingly leaning into his “Evil Russian” persona with books like Simple and Sinister. Today, he’s a regular on podcasts like Joe Rogan and the Huberman Lab. Paval comes across as a very intelligent trainer who emphasizes many components like neurology in his fitness recommendations.
You may have noticed that kettlebell weights aren’t in even increments of 10 lbs or kilos. That’s because they are measured by “poods”, a Russian market metric. Since one pood is about 16 kg, kettlebells typically come in 16 kg, 24 kg, and 32 kg increments.
So, whether you’re a gym regular or someone who finds these tools intimidating, you now likely know more about them than the average personal trainer. Looking back at that moment with my ex-Marine manager enthusiastically demoing a kettlebell Russian Twist, I have to laugh. At the time as a Pilates instructor, it was a “how did I end up here?” moment. But today now that I know popularity of kettlebells, that entire day where I ended up with a pulled back makes a lot more sense.
