Rounding Out Your Workout Regimen With Resistance Bands

Article by Vikram Kumar

Many people are often skeptical about the effectiveness of training with resistance bands, because they have been too heavily influences by modern popular culture, and only believe in the effectiveness of hardcore weight training. The truth, however, is that resistance training can do for your body some things that regular weight training cannot. One of these things is building better muscle endurance.

Many people believe that you can easily build muscular endurance by simply doing more weight training more often. The truth, however, is that when using weights, your muscles are engaged in short bursts, and this results in much greater increases in strength than in endurance. With a fitness band, however, you will be able to keep a constant pull on your muscles, so that they are continuously activated. This will result in a much greater gain in muscular endurance than with any form of regular weight training.

How To Use Resistance Bands

Resistance bands are relatively simple to use. This is due mostly to their simple construction. A fitness band is little more than an elastic band with handles attached to it. While this may not sound like much, modern resistance bands are manufactured to be light and strong, able to withstand the pressures of being stretched over and over again thousands of times without breaking or losing their elasticity.

The basic principle behind training with a fitness band is that you use the fitness band to generate a constant pulling force, and you then use your muscles to counter that pulling force. In doing so, your muscles are constantly doing work, thus allowing you to improve on your strength and muscular endurance.

With the right exercises, you can work almost every part of your body when you train with resistance bands. How to do that may not be obvious at first, but after awhile, the working principle behind the fitness band exercises will become obvious to you and you will not even need a guide or manual to figure out which exercises to do to achieve your training goals.

The most basic of exercises using resistance bands is also the staple exercise of many regular gym users – the bicep curl. It is a rare occasion that you step into a gym and you do not see at least one gym rat standing in front of the mirror, gripping a weight and doing bicep curls. With resistance bands, you can also do bicep curls that will give your biceps as good, or even better, a workout as you would get when doing bicep curls with free weights. Simply place your foot over the middle of the fitness band, then pull your arms upwards to your shoulders like you would with a regular bicep curl. Your foot will stop the band from moving, and you will be able to use the resistance generated from that to train.

The possibilities are endless when you exercise with resistance bands, and things get even more interesting when you start to make use of the fixtures around you such as pillars and railings to give your workout some variety.