Exercise ball jousting is far from the recommended use for a piece of fitness and rehabilitation equipment, and you can easily injure yourself by doing it. But the Internet videos of giggling young men charging toward each other with exercise balls, then bouncing off each other, make it look amusing and harmless. If you're about to give in to temptation and try exercise ball jousting, follow a few common-sense rules to at least minimize your risk of injury.
Equipment Selection
Although exercise balls are quite strong--some have a maximum weight limit of half a ton or more--they're designed to support static weight, not the full-speed impact of two grown people flinging themselves together. So do your exercise ball jousting with a piece of equipment that isn't going to be missed if it bursts on impact.
There's no way of eliminating the risk of an exercise ball bursting from a jousting impact; they weren't designed for this sort of use. But you can minimize the risk by selecting an exercise ball with the highest maximum weight limit possible. Although cardio exercise balls aren't meant to withstand sudden impacts either, they are designed to support some bouncing, so they might have a slightly better chance of surviving intact.
Location
Exercise balls are made of strong, flexible plastic. When you connect ball-to-ball, one or both of you is going to go flying. A padded room would be the ideal location for exercise ball jousting. Barring that, an open lawn or snowfield, where you can fall with relative impunity and don't have to worry about smacking into any obstructions, is your next-best option.
Play
Each player clutches an exercise ball against his body and runs toward the other person as fast as possible. The goal is to meet with the exercise balls first. The person left standing wins. Often, neither person remains on his feet. Depending on how fast you were moving and how you hit, one or both of you may catch some serious air time. There's no set rule on how far apart you should be when you start running; either agree on a distance beforehand and mark it out with tape, or agree to improvise as you go along.
Contact
The only hard-and-fast rule about how to make contact is that you must both lead with the exercise ball. Ideally your hands will be at the sides of the ball, not the front, at least somewhat out of the way of direct contact with the other player's hands. Jumping just before impact is a popular way of making contact, but you may want to communicate with your partner about this to avoid belly-flopping directly on top of him.
Players
There are no formal rules for exercise ball jousting, but because the players have to meet balls-first, common sense dictates that they should be of roughly similar height. A very tall player would be unable to contact a very small player properly, and vice versa.
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