Are you looking for a way to improve the results of your workouts? Using the right equipment can help you break through plateaus in your training and help you progress toward your health and fitness goals.
Resistance bands can be used as functional training equipment, or as a rehabilitation tool to recover from an injury or correct muscular imbalances. Here are our top five reasons why you should add a set of resistance bands to your gym bag.
#1: A Challenging Total-Body Workout
Using resistance bands in your training will add dynamic tension to your movements. This creates a muscular and nervous system response beyond the traditional training stress that it expects from your usual bodyweight workout. The dynamic tension requires your body to incorporate stabilizer muscles to balance the movement.
Resistance bands provide a further challenge to both the concentric and eccentric fields of motion, allowing you to get more out of your workouts. Training with resistance bands will help you develop intensity, strength, mobility, and range of motion.(1)
#2: Adjust Intensity and Resistance to any Level of Fitness or Strength
Resistance bands are available in various strengths depending on the thickness of the band. It’s a good idea to purchase a set of bands that have two to three different resistances. Using different resistance allows you to add variation to your workout and structure progressive resistance from the bands into each exercise that you do.
Bands can be added to free weight exercises as well. Chest press, leg raises, and hip thrusts are a few examples of traditional movements that can incorporate resistance bands to increase the tension of the exercise and improve the training effect. (2)
#3: Effective and Inexpensive
You can pick up a set of resistance bands for less than the price of a monthly gym membership. Bands are one of the most effective and inexpensive training tools that you can add to your workouts.
#4: Portability
Throw a set of training bands into your gym bag and take them with your wherever you go. They are ideal for people that travel a lot and need to workout in the hotel room, on the beach, or out in the park.
#5: Functional Training
Resistance bands add to your functional movement training, improving your strength and mobility in real-world applications. Resistance bands can assist you with training your posture, strengthen your muscle-balance, and enhance the range of motion in your muscles and joints.(3)
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