One of the things I love about resistance band training is how easy it is to crank out an interval strength workout when all you have is floor space and 1 single band.
Today’s RBT Live gives you exactly that, an awesome workout using a single band. All you have to do figure out what size of band do you want to rock and roll with.
I hope you enjoy this week’s RBT Live and like usual. Let me know your thoughts and comments.
Training Beyond the Bar
Dave Schmitz
PS.. If you are looking for an inexpensive way to get started training with resistance band and setting up your own strength training interval workout consider picking up an Economy Band Training package and will throw in my 4 week Beginner training program for FREE!!
I am blessed to have the chance to work with so many different groups of people who want to get better.
Last year I had the pleasure of working with an entire high school football team for 4 months. This is a team with a good winning tradition but had been bitten by the injury bug for 2 straight years. After 2 years we have a but eliminated season ending injuries.
Every day in my bootcamp, I work with helping 30-65 year olds stay active, stay injury free and get stronger by keeping themselves flexible.
2 days a week I help people get rid of low back and shoulder pain by rehabilitating them and teaching them how to elongate, lengthen, distract or rotate using a resistance band.
That pretty much covers the entire gamut of people that love being active.
When it comes to flexibility, it comes down when…. Not IF.
I believe there are 2 things that go along ways in helping improve flexibility and decrease injury potential and they both can be easily done using my favorite training tool. Any Guesses??
Here’s why these 5 groups will benefit from band stretching
1. Baby boomer weekend athletes are injury waiting to happen because they are doing high velocity activities with increased momentum while playing with limited joint range of motion and restricted muscle length. As the saying goes, if you’re going to play, you better pay the price to keep your mobility.
2. Working out to drop unwanted fat comes downraising the metabolic rate. The best way to do that is high intensity interval cardio and strength training. The greater your mobility
3. Athletes who want to get faster can do so quickly by getting rid of their own internal resistance. Eliminating this, especially in the hips, take consistent dynamic stretching and assisted lunge reaching. Done regularly, I have seen athletes cut tenths of seconds off their 40’s in a couple of weeks.
4. Continual history of shoulder and low back pain typically comes because people compensate through the shoulders and low back as a result of tight hips and mid back. Make the right joints start moving and the innocent low back and shoulders are free to enjoy life again.
5. Those 50+ fitness enthusiasts that want to keep golfing, playing a little tennis, or doing their morning jog need to understand it is not going to just keep happening unless you keep your body fit for this. In most cases it comes down to lack of mobility and poor integration between the shoulders and hips. The Assisted Lunge Reach Series does a great job of teaching everyone how to get their arms talking to their leg via the trunk which is the way it was meant to happen.
So if you fall into one of these groups… my suggestion is to start stretching with bands and get better.
Band Training for Rotational Strength… Tapping into our power center
Your body loves to rotate and by now you know that this is your body’s power center. What is funny to me is that very few people every work rotational running or rotational pulling. It’s always in the same old straight plane. This has alot to do with our medical profession and the old fitness approach we got growing up. Machines were the best.. Wrong.
As for the medical field, they would rather we just avoid the issue by not rotating. Well try avoid rotating all day. Good luck…. It will not happen.
But I am not suppose to “twist”!! Thats right.. Twisting is rotation without using your whole body.. especially your hips. Twisting will crush your low back and knees. Rotation will not. Most people twist.
It has never made sense to me knowing that our power comes from our ability to rotate. If you don’t use it you lose it. Interestingly, I think this also is why we lose our balance and why falling is a big problem, especially in our senior population.
So it’s time to start looking at how you are going to start training the rotational plane.
Let me get you started.
Reactive Training.. Powerful Results
Dave Schmitz
PS… With the Total Fitness package you get my 4 week Beginner workout which has several rotational based workouts. Keep that in mind if you struggle figuring out how to use your bands to train rotation
Band Training for Shuffle strength… do you work on it??
Our body was designed to primarily to move forward which is why we can run the fastest in a forward direction. Ok now that I have enlightened you with that wisdom… Did you know that in order to be powerful forward we must be incredibly stable side to side.
Yep, we lose power forward when we have to spend time working so hard on stabilizing in the frontal plane. It’s called having a frontal plane force leak.
How do you correct it??
Start strength training and running sideways as well as forward.
Have you ever done a high speed shuffle workout?? or all your strength training in a sideways direction??
I have and continue to do this often with bands. It’s the easiest way to get cardio in and work on dynamic lateral stabilization at the same time. Now add a little pulling or pushing action with this and you can really rock your frontal plane stabilizers.
As promised a frontal plane cardio-strength workout. I hope you get a little laugh from the screen shot.
It’s no secret that our body is a tri-plane integrated creature that ultimately needs to have full mobility with stability in all planes, at all joint and in all muscles to, optimize function and performance. This vary philosophy has been the emphasis behind all of my personal resistance band workouts as well as my performance and adult fitness boot camps for the past 15 years. I never thought much about it until recently but after seeing how people lose their mobility and how so many individuals lack stability in the transverse and frontal planes, I think it has been a god sent for me to have stayed with this training approach.
With this tri-plane thought in mind, I recently went back into the band workout achieves and dug up one of my favorite cardio - strength workouts. These are workouts where I use a locomotion exercise in conjunction with a strength exercise to maximize metabolic effort while challenging myself in all planes of motion using our most complex movement skill of locomotion.
You know I always have you do it before I share it. So like always, I put myself through this workout to see if it was still the butt kicker I remembered it being. It did not disappoint. Matter a fact it was so challenging I decided to break it into 3 separate workouts picking a new locomotion plane on each workout. So let’s kick off this awesome tri-plane - 2 band workout series with the sagital plane first.
What is really cool about this workout is you can plug it into any interval workout sequence you wish.
20:10 - 4 exercise circuit x 4 rounds with a 1 minute break between rounds
30:30 - 4 exercise circuit x 5 rounds with no break
40:20 - 5 exercise circuit with the 5th exercise being a core exercise
Or for you that want to really go for it…
50:10 - 5 exercise circuit where you add a lunge variation as the 5th exercise
Your call…
Here is the final bonus of this workout… you need about a 5 foot x 5 foot area. No more space excuses! Get after it.
PS.. If you are looking for a great christmas fitness gift the Total Fitness Package is a great option. Order today and I will ship on Monday. Don’t wait because shipping gets crazy by Wedneday.
Now I know that the real benefit of resistance band training in the way the band man does it is its ability to integrate multiple force vectors and planes of movement with any given exercise.
This allows for greater muscle activation which leads to greater calorie burn and thus greater fat loss.
But sometimes you just want to work your arms and that’s it… and I get that.
I mean we all have an area of our body that we just like to attack and then show off in the hours between workouts, right
And for me, like most guys, that area is my arms.
Whenever I feel like hitting my arms after completing my strength training (10-15 minutes) and total body metabolic training (20-30 minutes) components, I add in a little 4-minute 20-10 Tabata finisher performing band drop sets.
Here’s how it works:
I select 2 movements, one that works my biceps and one that works my triceps.
Then I perform 4 consecutive sets of one exercise, starting with the highest band tension I can handle for at least 8-10 reps and then dropping band tension from set to set.
I then immediately repeat this process for the second exercise as outlined below:
Set 1- Band Shoulder Presses- Green XLarge Band
Set 2- Band Shoulder Presses- Purple Large Band
Set 3- Band Shoulder Presses- Black Medium Band
Set 4- Band Shoulder Presses- Red Small Band
Set 5- Band Curls- Green Band
Set 6- Band Curls- Purple Band
Set 7- Band Curls- Black Band
Set 8- Band Curls- Red Band
Band training allows you to very quickly and easily move up and down in resistance without needing much space.
I use 20-10 interval workout music powered by Workout Muse to get the job done. I just press play and the music tells me exactly what to do so I can focus on getting nasty with my bands.
Check out the video below to see me crank out this awesome arms workout:
BJ Gaddour is not only a tremendous friend but also an outstanding fitness professional. His revolutionary ideas using workoutmuse have not only impacted my workouts, but have made my bootcamps using bands unmatched by my bootcamp competitors. Bands and Workoutmuse can give your bootcamps a definite market abvantage.
All the workouts found in the FitnessBandBootCamp are set up to be used with exclusive Resistance Band Training Workoutmuse sound tracks that come with the entire kick . Bands and workoutmuse will not only jump start your workouts but now it can jump start your camps.
Our extremities are designed and neurologically wired up to alternate. Running, walking, crawling and swimming are all movements that implement some form of alternating motions. When you look at our body and watch how it moves, you will quickly notice that functionally it is driven by alternating forces of the arms and legs and not by voluntary muscle contraction. By getting the arms and legs alternating in an integrated fashion, the body is able to functionally perform at an incredibly high level of power and efficiency.
Not only that, here are some other benefits that occur as a result of alternating movements
1. Increase abdominal activation
Extremities are attached onto the trunk so needless to say when the legs and arm start swinging the trunk is going to get really busy.
2. Increase rotational power
Our power production comes from our ability to rotate. Alternating arms and legs allow us to rotate aggressively and produce great force production which in turn makes us faster and more powerful
3. Improved balance by implementing an reciprocal counter balance
Our body uses alternating movements to counter balance our body and keep our center of gravity well positioned. Without alternating movements, our body would always be overloaded to one side.
4. Improved dynamic flexibility
One of the easiest ways to get the body to relax is to train or activate rotational movements. This is seen in physical therapy all the time with many of our activation techniques we use. As a result if we maintain rotation and improve our rotational control, we maintain our ability to keep moving freely and safely. The cool thing is all alternating movements use rotation.
5. The ability to handle unilateral forces on the body
Alternating movements make our body learn how to handle being overloaded to one side. This becomes important when you look at all the unilateral loading activities we do every day. Teaching unilateral control goes a long way in preventing injury.
The goal of this blog is not to go into extensive detail on how these benefits occur. The goal is to make you aware of how important it is to strength train your body using alternating movements and to show you how to do this easily with resistance bands.
When training alternate movements, most people typically only make on side of the body work at a time by placing the non-working side in a resting lengthened position. To optimize recover between reps this would make the most sense unless the goal was to improve core stability and metabolic output.
In this case you want to maintain a stabilizing contraction on “non-moving” side while the other side goes through a full range of motion movement. Interestingly, this enhanced stabilization will not only increase core activation but it will also help with opposite side power production which you will feel when you try it.
Once again, seeing and trying is believing. Bands make this form of training so easy to do especially in the horizontal plane which is where most of us really lack stabilization strength.
This week’s RBT live is all about how to train the entire upper body using alternating movements that emphasize stabilization as much as dynamic movement.
Enjoy and please shoot me your comments. I want to know your thoughts
Reactive Training …. Powerful Results
Schmitty the Band Man
PS… When I created the Fitness Band Boot Camp my goal was to build in as much alternating workouts as possible. I honestly feel is the number 1 reason my bootcamps become so functionally strong and balanced. You just can simulate this type of training with other tools, especially in the horizontal and rotational vectors.
Have you every seen a Boxer that was good and fat. Ok maybe a few heavy weights but when you get into any weight classes below that, these guys are ripped through the trunk.
Is it any wonder, when you look at how functional the art of punching occurs.
From a neuromuscular standpoint, punching uses the concept of reciprocal training to enhance punching power. Simply stated, your body uses pulling to enhance pushing. See our body often use the opposite side of the body moving the opposite way to enhance movement on the other side of the body.
This happens with running all the time.
As a result a few years ago I started to do band reciprocal training to enhance my arm action with sprinting. This training helped but what I got as bonues benefits were a great reactive trunk workout and a alternative way to maximize my heart rate without running.
Seeing and trying is a must when it comes to reciprocal training. Here are a few tips to doing effective reciprocal push - pull training.
1. Don’t always emphasize number of reps. Instead see how fast you can push each individual rep by reloading on each rep. You will see how I do this. Interestingly, I think quality reps burn even more calories than if you just try to knock out a lot of reps.
2. Also don’t keep your feet the same. Change it up on every round. Your trunk and hips will hate you but your back will love you. By the way if you are into hitting the heavy bag. Do this workout first and then go hit the bag. Look out because you may bring it down.
3. Make sure you stay athletic and let the system load. As I always say, learn to load and you are guaranteed to explode with incredible punching power.
4. No low back pain. This means you are not loading and instead are trying to muscle with your upper body. Your punch starts from the floor and must go through your hips…. Use them.
I hope you enjoy this weeks RBT Live 43 Episode and as always please leave thoughts and comments below.
Reactive Training.. Powerful Results
Dave “The Band Man”
PS.. The Advance Total Fitness Package is the perfect package to learn about tons of other band training options to enhance reciprocal strength. It provides you all the bands you need as well the the training DVDs to get you strarted and the really good thing is you save about 30% automatically.
What types of bars do I need to hook my bands onto??
What types of bands do you use and what are all the different resistance levels??
etc, etc, etc…
It just goes to show you, first of all how exciting resistance band training is becoming and secondly how versatile it is when it comes to training anywhere.
So I thought this week I would invite you into my resistance band training world to see where I workout and where I create so many incredible Resistance Band workouts.
I hope you enjoy getting a little upclose with the Band Man.
Make sure you shoot me your comments and thoughts. I always want to hear whats working for you.
Reactive Training .. Powerful Results
Dave Schmitz
PS.. As a 46 year old who feels like 30, you can imagine how exciting it is for me to get this email.
Dave,
In the past month I have taken time off the weights and been doing all body weight and band training. My aches and pains are getting better and better, I am way more explosive, my flexability is better than ever, and I am running like I never have before.
One of the things I really love about band training is how easy it is to partner up. I don’t know about you but I crank up the intensity when I am being challenged by a partner. Especially when that partner is getting after it.
Attachment Free Exercises - Stationary Partner Holding - Dynamic Partner Holding or Combo Band Drills. I go over all of these in the new Partner Band Training DVD.
Combo band training allows each partner to be connected up into a linked band set up so you are getting the horizontal vector impact while also performing another exercise. This could require using another tool like a sandbag or kettlebell or just using another band like I am about to show you.
Regardless how you set it up, this is like doing a Super - Super band set.
A few suggestions before you get after this awesome Partner Band Training option.
1. Make sure you have mastered the exercises individually first
2. Make sure you have a willing partner
3. Give yourself at least 10-15sec to transition (30s is ok as well)
4. Choose easier exercises at first
5. Make sure you know how to hold
6. Keep band strength low and train high reps first
7. Use time based sets not rep based sets… However you can challenge your partner to match reps with you if you like a little competition.
These are great workouts for fat loss, building strength endurance, improving metabolic workload or just making it fun for your bootcampers.
Here is a run - push combo that I just recently did using 50-10 Workout Muse Interval. Enjoy the video and make sure you shoot me questions and comments you have about RBT Partner based training. Also let me know how RBT is going for you.
If you have bands and are not using partner based training, give it a try. I promise you clients will love it.
47STRETCH…INTO YOUR ORDER FORM.
swimming are all movements that implement some form of alternating motions. When you look at our body and watch how it moves, you will quickly notice that functionally it is driven by alternating forces of the arms and legs and not by voluntary muscle contraction. By getting the arms and legs alternating in an integrated fashion, the body is able to functionally perform at an incredibly high level of power and efficiency.
