Today I want to talk about an extremely underrated tool for gains: resistance bands.
Now, there is typically this aura around bands that they are “toning tools”: meant to maintain a little muscle, but not necessarily great for making actual gains.
The reality? This may have been true decades ago, but the bands of today are anything but mediocre.
Let’s get into their massive benefits, and how they can deliver gains.
Benefits Of Working With Resistance Bands
1. Versatile Resistance
This benefit goes beyond being able to grab bands of various resistances: even in a single band, you can add or subtract resistance. For instance, to add more resistance during lat pull-downs, you can place your hands closer together on the bands, which will create more tension when you pull down. If this is too much in your later reps, you can release a bit of the band by moving your hands farther apart, releasing some of the resistance.
This essentially means that you get an awesome amount of varying resistance levels in one band – much less two or three! Talk about versatility.
2. Provides Assistance
Bands are also epic for helping you make progress with difficult exercises. Take pull-ups, for example: if you’re having trouble completing a pull-up on your own, you can attach one end to the bar and place your foot in the opposite end, and the resistance of the band will help pull you up to the bar. In this way, you develop the muscles needed to complete the exercise by actually being able to do it, assisted.
Bands can also provide assistance in making exercises more challenging. Using another example, say you want to make pushups more challenging; instead of attempting to balance a weight on your back or doing one-handed or elevated variations all of the time, you can place a band around your upper back and under your palms. This will add resistance when you push up.
3. Great For Injury Recovery
Unlike weights, which apply pressure to joints and bones, resistance bands add resistance without this pressure. This makes them excellent for injury recovery, or even low-impact work.
4. Engages Stabilizer Muscles
Stabilizer muscles are the smaller muscles throughout our bodies that aid in balance and movement control. These are the muscles that run along your entire core that help you stand on one foot, carry heavy groceries in one arm while staying upright, and engage when you carry any weight on one side of your body.
Bands engage these muscles when you pull them away from the center of your body – as you pull them, your body resists the pull (so you can stay upright) by engaging your stabilizer muscles, and thus strengthening them.
5. Portable
This one is pretty self-explanatory, but bands are truly amazing for getting in a quality session anywhere, anytime. Whether it’s in your hotel room, on the beach, or visiting family, they can be whipped out of a small suitcase where they barely take up any room.
Gaining Muscle With Resistance Bands
A common misconception around bands is that they’re simply “toning” devices and not necessarily meant for “gains” work. Aka: they aren’t the best tools with which we should try to use to gain muscle.
Fortunately, this isn’t necessarily true, especially considering how advanced resistance bands have become in recent years. Instead of simple bands with minimal resistance, we have bands today that can lock onto your wrists, or even a pole, and have an extremely high resistance level to mimic heavy weights (p.s., I recommend Rogue or Elite FTS bands if you’re on the hunt).
As such, the key to gaining muscle with bands is similar to gaining with standard weights: you want to find a resistance that is challenging to complete 8-12 reps with. You can also grab a middle-ground weight for higher burn out reps if you prefer.
You also want to consider eccentric training while using bands as well. Studies show that eccentric training produces significantly more muscle growth than standard training, and these movements are easily done with bands just as well as with weights. The key with eccentric training is to go slow and controlled on the lowering/extension phase of a lift. So, for example, if you’re doing a bicep curl, you want to curl, then lower that curl very slowly, instead of just letting momentum carry it back down. Trust me, you’ll feel it.
These standard growth methods, combined with the continuous tension and variation resistance bands offer that many weights don’t, we may actually have a significant tool on our hands for serious changes, regardless of how simple they appear.
The Bottom Line
• Resistance bands offer versatile resistance levels, even within one band
• Bands offer continuous resistance and continuous muscle tension, which may result in more growth
• Resistance bands, when used properly, can be used like weights to gain muscle
• The versatility of bands contributes to our success, since we can work out with them anywhere, anytime
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