Hi there. Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness personal training studio, your home for all things health and wellness, and today we’re talking about bands. If you have any questions about today’s blog then please give us a call at 806-322-3188
I absolutely love bands. I wanted to share with you why today, and why you might wanna love them too.
Bands come in all different sizes, shapes. I love the circular bands because they are so versatile. There’s so much that we can do with them so that’s what we keep here at the studio. There’s therapy bands that are much lighter. These go all the way out. The purple bands are about 65 to 70 pounds of resistance or assistance, depending on how you’re using them, all the way down to about 10 pounds of resistance or assistance.
And we use them for all different things from strength training, to cardio, to Pilates work, to dynamic stabilization, as well as post-rehab work. So we work through a lot of different issues with bands. And what I can tell you is one of the reasons that I love them is because we have such a variety of resistance and we don’t have to change weights all the time. So all we have to do is step in a little closer, step out a little closer, pull the band a little less, pull it a little more, to get a different change in resistance.
Now obviously if you’re using bands, you do have to be careful. You’ve gotta check them, make sure they’re not tearing, or drying out, or any of those things. And they do have to be replaced more often than your metal weights do.
Now, my second reason for loving them is because whenever I fold them up, they end up fitting into a bag about this big or smaller. So I can take these things everywhere I go. I have had a ton of trips this year that I’ve been going on and it’s just been amazing how often I’ve traveled compared to the last 20 years of my life. And so I’ve been able to take the bands with me every time. And there’s usually some way that I can use them in a hotel room. So with weights sometimes, your setup has to be a certain size, you can’t take them on an airplane, they weigh too much, big and clunky in the car, those kinds of things. So these are really easy to carry around and travel with.
Not to mention, my next reason for loving them is the fact that I can either attach them to a wall anchor like we have here, or I can do them freestanding without the wall anchors. So free standing would be more like doing your dumbbells, using those. On the wall we are able to get so many more varieties of things. So if I’ve got something, say at a hotel room, maybe a table leg, or something, a sturdy table, that I could wrap it around, or a bed leg I could wrap it around and be able to attach to that.
The other thing you can do with these is you can use a door anchor, which is what we give our clients to use at home. And that’s just another little piece of fabric that you put into the door that has a big knot sewn on the other end and you tie the bands into it. So then if you have a door and you’ve got enough room there, you can use any of the hinges of the doors as your anchor points. You can go from a high, medium, or low anchor point. So you’re able to do pretty much any exercise with these.
Now, the last thing that I wanted to mention was what I’ve said before. They can count as resistance, like your dumbbells, or they can actually count as assistance and help you. So if I were to attach a band to our wall anchors, step inside of it, and put it around my hips, and step back into my lunge, that band is gonna pull me back to the front. So instead of me having to do all the work here pulling back up, that band is gonna help. Same thing on squats, same thing on a pull up, same thing on pushup.
We’ll do, just for fun sometimes, we’ll kind of have some challenges and we’ll have people do some jumping pushups. If you’ve tried those, you probably know they’re hard. That’s when you come down, you jump up, and you can clap in the middle, or you can just jump off the floor. But, I’ll tell you what, where we assist people with bands, they can do it and it’s a lot of fun. We have a great time.
So those are my reasons for loving bands. The biggest one that I haven’t mentioned yet is the fact that bands are easier on your joints than dumbbells. So if you are at a point in life where you feel like you’ve got some joint pains, or you’re trying to avoid joint pain all together, or more joint pain, bands might be the way to train. They can really make a difference in your workouts to where you feel more comfortable with it, you can have longer endurance with it, your muscles feel happier, your joints feel happier, and you’re able to continue for longer, which means that you get more done. So you’re being more beneficial with all the work that you’re doing.
So if you would like to know how to put bands into your workouts and how to make that better for you, more efficient, and be able to get a workout that’s anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes long depending on what you’re working towards and how long you have available, feel free to give us a call. 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz We’d be happy to set up a program for you and show you just how versatile and beneficial these things can be. Have a great day.