This month Steve from NSD Powerballs Australia approached me and his original email was along the lines of trying to convince me that in some way this little ball would be beneficial to kiters looking to build up their arm strength.  I thought "hey gimmicky but lets give it a try."  Keep in mind that I was completely skeptical about any difference this thing could make.

Fast forward about 3 to 4 weeks.

After the initial week of having my wrist feeling like it is about to fall off you build up a bit of stamina and your wrists stop hurting, the soreness now moves up your arm.

I used the powerball for about 5 minutes twice a day, changing between left and right arms during the 5 minutes.  This increased to about 8 minutes twice a day once again alternating between both arms.  After a few weeks of this there is a noticable difference in how long you can keep going.  I'm not sure how you would measure the strength built up over this time, however I am convinced that they actually work merely by the fact that I can keep going for longer with the powerball.  You no longer get a sensation of your wrist about to fall off, instead when you're done you feel like you have just been lifting and shifting bricks, it works out your whole arm.  For something that I initially thought was a nice gimmick it actually has proved to me that it works over time.  By now most people have googled the videos and seen people look like they are enjoying some private time.  However when you use the device you don't go flat out, just like you don't go to the gym and do 100 bench presses as quick and as rapidly as possible, you pace yourself.  Same with the powerballs, at first you don't think anything is being done but after a minute to two minutes you can really start to feel it working throughout your whole arm.

Initially when using the powerball it was a bit hard to grab hold of the concept and how to keep it going, easiest way I can explain is to imagine you're holding a glass of whisky with two ice blocks in there and you want to swirl them around, use this same motion with the powerball rotating your hand once every second.  Don't try to go to fast, the trick to it is to start off slowly and let it build up, moving to fast and it won't pickup speed instead it will stall and you need to start again.  As you gain speed and momentum the action of your arm naturally changes, so you use less of your wrist and start using more of your whole arm, this is a natural progression where your body is reacting to the forces of the powerball.  Once you have it going you can try and achieve longer durations and swap hands to give the other arm a rest.  

There is a certain "wank" factor to using these and they do look like a gimmick, perhaps a glorified yoyo craze for the adults.  However use it for two weeks twice a day and you will see yourself that it's not only a gimmick with wank factor but one that actually has results at the end of it.  Perhaps if it was one colour and marketed as some dull boring piece of fitness equipment we would all be a little less skeptical initially.