The Power of Resitance Bands
Due to the world pandemic there has been a surge in buying workout equipment in order to resume our gym workouts and achieve our own individual goals. Resistance bands can offer us a lot of benefits such as giving us the proper amount of resistance in our workouts. While gyms have machines and different weights, one may think that resistance bands and tubes may not do the trick. However, by buying the right amount of resistance for each band, following appropriate sets and reps schemes, and a little bit of creativity, you can have an effective workout.
When thinking about which bands to get, one may get overwhelmed with how many companies or types of bands there are on the market. There are three types that we will cover, beginning with your regular resistance bands. These are often used at your local physical therapy clinic or by gym goers as a warm up, but these can be quite effective if you buy the right amount of resistance. Depending on the brand they should display how much resistance each band provides in pounds. The availability of this information should determine already what brand you should get. Another option is to get resistance bands that have consecutive loops. Not only do they provide us the option of having differing resistance but we are able to be more specific in how much resistance is being used depending which loops we use. Finally, if you have strong door knobs/door frames, sport cords or resistance tubes/cords can be used as well.
With the possession of these bands we can then alter the sets and reps scheme in order to get as much as we can out of our in-home workouts. By increasing the amount of repetitions and sets while decreasing the amount of resistance you can provide your body the right amount of stimulus for muscular hypertrophy or muscular endurance. This also depends on the amount of resistance you implement. Remember whether you are training for strength, agility or plyometric based exercises, the sets and repetitions will have to change, depending on what your individual goals are.
Creativity when using this type of equipment will be able to help in improving your chances of giving you a complete full body workout. This will also help in attaining your goals and decreasing boredom which leads to falling out of your program. For example, if you place a band around your ankles to perform sidestepping or around the knees for clamshells in order to improve your hip strength. Or you can work on decreasing the likelihood of knee injuries in your high impact sport by keeping the band around your knees and performing consecutive squat jumps. This will decrease your knees from coming in during high impact activities. Other exercises that you can are running high knees, side lunges or hip abduction and extension with the sport cord.
The draw to the gym, its dumbbells and machines gives us the aura that we are actually getting a good workout. When in fact with the right amount of graded resistance, organized sets and repetitions can give you the biggest bang for your buck if you do not have gym access or to dumbbells. Without a proper exercise program or equipment, you are in danger of under- or overworking yourself. If this occurs you are more likely to discontinue from your program which leads you will be back to square one!
