3000 BC - 2026
A short history of the medicine ball
Three thousand years of people throwing heavy things at each other.
The earliest drawings we have of a medicine ball are roughly three thousand years old. Persian wrestlers trained with sand-filled bladders - crude, heavy, and effective.
The idea survived and resurfaced in ancient Greece. Hippocrates had animal skins stuffed and sewn so that patients could throw them as part of their recovery. For centuries afterwards the object was known simply as the health ball.
Gladiators found another use for it. To them it was straightforward preparation for the arena.
Why "medicine"?
In the nineteenth century "medicine" simply meant health. The sand-filled leather balls that filled gymnasiums of the era were prescribed the way tonics were - as a cure, which is how a training tool ended up with a pharmacist’s name.
The idea is older than the name. In 1569 the physician Hieronymus Mercurialis published De Arte Gymnastica, cataloguing ball work among the exercises he prescribed to patients - arguably the first training manual with a medicine ball in it.
The basketball connection
Basketball was born in the same world. In December 1891, at a YMCA gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts, James Naismith invented the game to keep athletes busy through winter - in halls where medicine balls were standard equipment.
The first games were played with laced leather balls that looked remarkably like the medicine balls resting by the wall bars. A ball that blurs the line between the two is not a gimmick; it is a return to where both objects started.
A ball fit for a president
In 1929 the White House physician invented a game for President Herbert Hoover: two teams lobbing a six-pound medicine ball over a net, every morning, on the lawn. The press called it Hooverball. The president played daily for four years.
And now
Medicine balls come in every weight, size and material you can think of. Basketball and football players use them. So do baseball players, martial artists, strongmen and CrossFitters.
The range of things you can do with one is limited mostly by your imagination - which is exactly why the tool has never gone out of fashion.
Basket Bullet is our contribution to that lineage: made individually, from good materials, finished with attention to the details most manufacturers skip.