PB Extreme Medicine Ball Review

I’ve been a college sports performance coach for 20 years and have used hundreds of medicine balls over that course of time. This includes all different brands and styles.

Recently, I decided to do my own side-by-side comparison. So, I bought 10 different medicine balls. Some are med balls that I’ve used before and I added in a few more popular medicine balls to try out.

The PB Extreme Medicine Ball was one of those ten and (spoiler alert) it ended up being my favorite of the whole group.

Click Here to see my complete review of all 10 medicine balls.

In this review, I’ll break down everything you need to know about the PB Extreme ball so you can make an educated decision about whether it’s a good fit for your own gym.

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Why Trust My Reviews? I’ve spent 20 years as a collegiate sports performance coach and have been lifting personally even longer. I’ve bought and used equipment for both 14,000 square foot weight rooms and for my own garage gym. Finally, I only review products I’ve personally tested.

Details

This medicine ball is what most people now refer to as a Wall Ball. This type of ball has been made extremely popular by CrossFit. Wall Balls, the exercise, shows up in many of their workouts and is essentially doing a squat and then throwing the medicine ball up to a target on the wall.

They have a larger diameter (this ball has a 14″ diameter) and are relatively soft, at least compared to rubber medicine balls and slam balls.

Most manufacturers will state that this type of ball is not meant to be slammed. However, in my experience, a high-quality soft shell medicine ball can take quite a bit of punishment before busting apart. The key is to find a high-quality ball that allows you to do any exercise you want, including slams, and will still hold up long term.

PB stands for Perform Better which is a manufacturer and distributor of training gear. They’ve been around since before I started my career and I’ve bought tons of different products from them over the years.

The ball comes in 11 different weights ranging from 4 pounds up to 30 pounds. (I bought the 20-pound version of each wall ball I tested)

What I Liked

There is a ton to love about this ball.

First, the ball is packed crazy full. For some balls, you can tell that whatever stuffing is on the inside doesn’t quite fill the ball completely up which creates dead space in the ball. This ball fills like they shoved every single bit of stuffing they could inside of it and then somehow got it to close up.

Because it’s packed so tightly, the bounce you get on the ball is amazing. When I slam it off the ground it pops back up to my waist every time. This made it awesome to roll right through a set of slams.

The seams are sewn toward the inside of the ball. This makes the surface smooth which I appreciated the more I used it.

When I say the surface is smooth, don’t confuse that with slick. The surface material of some medicine balls can be almost slick making gripping and throwing the ball a little more difficult. The PB Extreme Ball has a tacky feel to it. It’s really easy to grab hold of and throw with max power without worry about the ball slipping in your hands.

Finally, its durability so far has been amazing. It hasn’t lost its shape in even the slightest. In fact, it’s still looking and performing the same as the day it came out of the box.

What I Didn’t

My only real grievance with the Perform Better Med Ball is the shipping cost. Including the “temporary fee” that was added to my order, the total to ship my ball was $16.

This brought the total cost of the ball to around $100. This still puts the total cost around the middle of the pack for the wall balls, but it was the most I paid for shipping for any ball.

Overall, the all black look of the PB Extreme ball is solid. However, the 20 Pound lettering on the ball is a little too big in my opinion and it throws off the look of the ball. Maybe that’s being too nitpicky, but it drops it down just a notch in my opinion.

Final Verdict

The PB Extreme has been my favorite ball.

The bounce it gives is ridiculously good and consistent. It’s been a tank thus far from a durability standpoint and it’s priced very competitively.

From a performance standpoint, the top two balls have this ball and the Dynamax ball. The ultimate advantage between the two is that the PB Extreme med ball cost me about $30 less than the Dynamax ball.

Once I’m completely done testing all the balls (I’m going to keep using them all evenly until at least one of them completely gives up), this will be the ball I stick with.

Finally, if you’d like to purchase your own PB Extreme Medicine Ball, head over to the Perform Better website here.

PB Extreme Med Ball Review FAQ

How Did I Test the Durability of Each Medicine Ball?

I slammed them… a lot. I did a set of 10 slams on each medicine ball during the warm-up and at the end as a finisher for every one of my workouts for two months.

That’s 80 slams a week for 8 weeks for a grand total of 640 slams. At this point I felt I had enough information to make an informed recommendation. I’ll keep using each ball and will continue to update all of my medicine ball reviews as I do.

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