7 Reasons To Start Mace Bell Training

Mace bells are our favourite unconventional piece of functional training kit. You don’t see them in many gyms, but they’re the perfect addition to a home gym set up. Mace bells are small, easy to store, and amazingly versatile. Here are 7 reasons to add mace bells to your home training set up.

What are mace bells?

Mace bells – also called steel maces – are the ultimate functional fitness tool, combining cardio, conditioning, and resistance training. You can use mace bells to train upper or lower body in isolation, or for a lung-busting HIIT workout.

What makes mace bells different to most training tools is that they challenge your balance, stability, and rotational movements – helping strengthen small muscles and deep stabilisers of the core, hips, and shoulders.

Here are 7 reasons to add mace bell training to your workouts – ranging from metabolic conditioning to deep core work to bullet-proofing your shoulders.

1: Scalable

Mace bells are unique in the fact that you can scale the difficulty of the movement up or down without needing to change the equipment. Just change your grip. Keep your hands closer together at the bottom of the handle for advanced moves, or widen your grip to make the workout a little easier.

2: Shoulder training

Mace bells target the shoulders (traditionally one of the weakest joints in the body) and help you train throughout the entire shoulder girdle with dynamic movements. Try the 360 exercise to see what we mean!

3: Grip strength

The design of mace bells means you’ll naturally be working on grip strength as a by product of every exercise you do. The unbalanced weight distribution challenges your grip and builds strength through the hands, wrists, forearms and elbow joint.

4: Stabilising muscles

Mace bell training is dynamic and functional, putting a lot of work through the stabilising muscles that act as a foundation for your posture. A big benefit for anyone who lifts or trains for a sport.

5: Core training

Using the mace bell for rotational and anti-rotational work trains the core through the transverse plane, engaging your core muscles at a deep level to support your entire body. Useful for strength and injury prevention.

6: Conditioning work

Who doesn’t love a heart-pumping, calorie burning conditioning workout? Mace bells are an excellent conditioning tool, increasing your heart rate rapidly for optimal cardio output in a short amount of time.

7: Muscular endurance

Mace bells are more than a metabolic training tool. They also build strength and muscular endurance with every exercise. Mace bell training is compound movement training, so you can rest assured that you’ll be working push, pull, upper, lower, and everything in between!

Check out our “how to” blog for exactly how to get started with mace bell training so you can master exercises like the 360, pendulum, and metronome. https://www.gravityfitness.co.uk/blogs/blog/how-to-use-mace-bells-for-the-ultimate-unconventional-training