Create your own fitness plan with resistance bands

Use resistance bands to reach your goals

Elastic bands can have different shapes, sizes, colours and resistance levels. Here is a small overview of the main categories...

The resistance bands are colour-coded according to the resistance level. 

With Fittstar, the colour coding is as follows:

Pink: very light resistance, recommended for women who want to start practicing. Study for a toning up.

Blue: light resistance, recommended for men who are just starting out. Also recommended for women already initiated to the practice of bodybuilding with the goal of muscle building.

Red Camo: strong resistance, recommended for people practicing fitness.

Brown Camo: very strong resistance, recommended for bodybuilders practicing in the gym with heavy loads.

The resistance of the bands varies from very weak to very strong: the small and thin elastic bands offer a resistance ranging from 3 to 35 Lbs kg, while the thicker and longer bands offer a resistance ranging from 15 to 195 Lbs.

Build your own resistance bands training

There is no clearer indication of the transition from beginner to intermediate level than the moment when, for the first time, you will start to spread out your training and carry out or adapt your own personalised weight training programme.

No more full-body workouts. Remember that the perfect distribution of your workouts involves more than just choosing the muscle groups you prefer to work. The distribution should not only be balanced and focused on your specific goals, but should also be modified to follow your priorities while honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses.

Keep in mind that you only have a certain amount of time and energy for your strength training. If your strategy is poorly developed, these precious resources will be wasted and you will end up with the same poorly muscled physique you had at the beginning.

So here's what you need to know in order to create the workout schedule that works best for you.

Plan for recovery

As you progress, a fairly regular pattern will emerge in terms of the general distribution of weight training sessions.

Shortly after your first session, as you add more sets and exercises, it will become imperative to continue to split your workout to accommodate the increased volume of work.

However, a well-designed division is not just about putting in place a plan to bludgeon each muscle group with a large amount of training and then let it rest while you work on other muscle groups on the following days.

Ask any experienced bodybuilder and they will immediately recommend that you carefully balance your workout with adequate rest and recovery time. When structuring your distribution, be aware that rest days are just as important as training days.

In addition, make sure that you absorb sufficient macro and micronutrients during the day, and especially after your training, to replenish your energy reserves.

Vary your intensity when using resistance bands

It is obvious that rest is a fundamental component of muscle building, but training is not just about working a different muscle group every day and thinking that the muscles not exercised that day are recovering.

If you systematically do high-speed sessions, it doesn't matter which muscle groups you will be working: accumulated fatigue will sap your energy and therefore decrease the degree of muscle development that can occur.

If you only consider local muscle fatigue and do not take energy into account, you are heading for trouble. This is a common mistake that limits the progress of athletes in all sports, at all levels.

Why is this? While it is true that by dividing up the sessions, you alternate the muscle groups being exercised, you are still using the same source of glycogen. After consecutive sessions, we train with glycogen stocks that have been depleted, which limits not only the ability to train hard, but also the possibility of allocating the resources needed for muscle growth during muscle recovery.

In other words, if you are running around the clock on a half-full tank, your body won't be able to waste fuel to build muscle tissue that will require even more energy to maintain!

When reviewing your current training plan, consider both muscle distribution and the rebuilding of energy reserves throughout the body. Vary the intensity of your workouts to stimulate each muscle group as often as possible and ensure that glycogen stores are replenished.

Choose a distribution type

Usually, when you first switch from a generalized to a split workout, you split it into upper body and lower body workouts.

With training time cut in half, you can do more exercises and sets for each muscle group that you still stimulate twice (if the plan is two days of training followed by a rest day) or three times a week (alternating six-day sessions with a rest day).

Either of these two strategies may be effective for conditioning large muscle groups, although training six days in a row at high intensity may be problematic from a resource management and recovery perspective.

When this breakdown is adopted in the form of a two-day training program, one day of rest, two days of training, excellent results are achieved. The ideal pattern: most muscle groups can be worked twice a week with maximum recovery time to replenish glycogen stores and repair damaged muscle tissue.

The most perfect plan would be to do a very intense session on Day 1, moderately intense on Day 2, then have a full day of recovery on Day 3. Day 4 would involve a moderately intense session while the session on day 5 would be very intense.

Those who feel that they respond better to very high volume training may find this schedule inadequate given the number of sets and exercises they want to include for each muscle group.

On the other hand, if you have been working each muscle group once a week for some time now with a high volume of training, this type of distribution should work well for you.

Upper body/lower body session using resistance bands

Spread over three days (push/pull/leg method)

If you're like most practitioners, you probably tried an upper body/lower body split at first, but as you continued to add more exercises to the upper body workout, it started to take you twice as long as the leg workout, so you had to resort to another split mode.

The three-day split lends itself to a variety of configurations. Like other multi-day sessions, any muscle group could be combined to make three separate sessions.

However, the most common three-day split is to adopt the push/pull leg method (also called push pull leg) with modifications. A variety of polyarticular exercises are often used, with a full day of rest between each session, for example:

Monday: Push-ups (push-ups, triceps extensions, dips).

Wednesday: pulled movements (pulls, vertical pulls, rowing, curl for the biceps).

Friday: thigh (squat, elastic bands squat front, oblique, front lunge, standing calf).

Another possibility: you can do a rotation over three days, followed by a day of rest. This method makes it possible to work each muscle group almost twice a week, but if you train at high intensity 5 to 6 times a week without modulating this intensity, overtraining will certainly result in stagnation. By alternating training with rest days, you will be sure to be sufficiently rested before each high intensity session.

Distribution 4-6 days per week

Once we adopt this method of modulated distribution, we discover all sorts of logics on the effectiveness of work combining, in the same session, the muscles that push and those that pull.

This is an excellent way to train if you are doing mainly basic exercises; on the other hand, if you want to develop muscle groups or concentrate on each muscle individually, then the sessions will drag out and you will have to split them up again.

You can train hard and you can train long, but not both at the same time. So as you assess your body's response to training and identify your strengths and weaknesses, you may decide to split your training over four or five days.

This will allow you to focus more on certain muscles and make sure you're training each muscle group when your energy level isn't dropping. 

For example, if your arms are lagging behind your pectorals and back, since you still do the biceps and triceps after the two large groups of the torso, it may be beneficial to do a separate workout for them.

By prioritising certain muscles in this way, you can work them with heavier loads at the beginning of the session, when you're fresh and energetic. It is not advisable to group together in the same session muscles that work together, such as the pectorals, shoulders and triceps.

Once you have finished the first muscle group, the secondary muscles are too tired to be mobilized at maximum intensity. Therefore, you cannot work the next muscle group with as much energy.

As far as the possibilities of repetitions on a 4-5 day programme are concerned, variety is not a problem. One can work only one muscle group per day (e.g. chest, back, shoulders, legs and arms) before the small groups (such as arms) on the same day, especially not the triceps before the shoulders or pectorals, or the biceps before the back.

Note: Just because you may be at a confirmed level does not mean that you will never have to follow a two or three day spread again.

By varying the intensity and volume of your workout, you can make all of these spread patterns productive, regardless of your level of experience.

By changing your workout routines frequently enough, your muscles will continue to grow and your strength will continue to improve.