Everything You Need to Know About Resistance Bands

Resistance bands are lightweight and easy to carry, allowing you to do exercises wherever you want: at home, in a gym or even outside. In this article we will try to explain everything about resistance bands.

The advantages of resistance bands

They allow you to build up your muscles thanks to the constant tension they release. This resistance increases as you stretch the band, which also increases the power of the exercise and makes your muscles work harder.
If you attach the tape to a fixed point such as a bar or squat rack, the resistance increases as you stretch. Because of this special property, muscle-building elastic bands can be used to make a movement more difficult to control, requiring more strength from the user and thus causing greater muscle gain.

On the contrary, they can also be used to relieve or assist a movement. This is the case, for example, with pumps, dips or pulls that you can perform with elastic bands as a support. This will make movement easier and allow the user to gradually increase his strength in order to improve. This weight training accessory is also useful for taking your workouts at home even further. The weight bands can help you to do extra repetitions when you train on your parallel dips bars or your pull bar. Then, once your muscles have become accustomed to this new type of workout, you can gradually do without this "auxiliary" muscle-building aid.

This progressive resistance generated by the elastic bands differs from the resistance that you can have with dumbbells for example, which is constant. Training with weight bands allows you to have a variable intensity throughout the exercise. This variable intensity then allows you to increase your strength little by little to improve over the long term.

Limit injuries with resistance bands

As we have just seen, the big advantage of working with elastic bands is to be able to fluidify the muscular tensions during fitness and strength training exercises, on the one hand by increasing the tensions when our positions allow us to develop a maximum of strength, and conversely by alleviating the tensions during our muscular "weakness" positions. In this second situation, training with an elastic band also helps to relieve the forces exerted on the joints, thus limiting the risk of injury.

Resistance bands: synonymous with a variety of exercises

You would like to strengthen your arms, legs, abs, back, shoulders, pectorals... Whatever your level and your objectives, resistance bands and tubes allow you to perform a multitude of exercises. You will only need to equip yourself with different more or less resistant models, and different "anchors" that will allow you to fix your elastics just about anywhere (door, tree, post, railing, etc.).

Improve your performance with our resistance bands

Strength training exercises with elastic resistance are increasingly used at a high level because they allow significant gains in strength, speed and power. 2 main reasons:

During the last degrees of a movement's amplitude, the increase in elastic resistance makes it possible to stress more muscle fibres than during exercise with a constant load.

The use of elastic bands allows the realization of plyometric type training, which corresponds to the rapid sequence of an eccentric contraction (the muscle stretches) and a concentric contraction (the muscle shortens).