Archive for the ‘Speed and Agility training’ Category

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5 People that will benefit for resistance band stretching

Monday, January 11th, 2010

 

 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 down raising 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.

Training beyond the Bar

 

Dave Schmitz

www.resistancebandtraining.com

 

Make sure you don’t forget about my special birthday offer of 20% off either the       Total Flexibility with Resistance Band DVD or Band Flexibility Package.  If you have flexibility issues, I am pretty confident this approach will help.  

JUST MAKE SURE YOU PUT THE COUPON CODE….total-flexibility-3d-icon 47STRETCH…INTO YOUR ORDER FORM.

    

  

 

 

   

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Posted in Band Training Tips, Fat Loss Band Workouts, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 53 Comments »

Resistance Band Training and the Fountain of Youth

Friday, January 8th, 2010

 

In honor of my 47th birthday today, I decided to go back into the video achieves and share with you a fountain of youth secret I discovered at age 37.

As I moved into my 30′s and continued to be (in my own mind) a great athlete LOL, I suddenly realized I had lost my ability to move.

As a physical therapist, fitness enthusiasts and athlete want-a-be, I should have realized that joints that are stiff, muscles that are tight and fascia that is bound down, is not good for your body and definitely does not enhance function.

As a result I started to bend, stretch, elongate, and actively move in directions that were not part of my normal daily movements.  One the key things I implemented into my new program was resistance band stretching for my hips. 

Within 2 months of daily band stretching, I had eliminated nagging low back pain, was back on the track doing sprint works and could do workouts with my athletes 10 years younger than me.

 

 Also as a bonus:

I had 10 times more energy to do daily task

Experience no more cracking and groaning getting out of bed in the morning

The ability to do real athletic based workouts was back

The respect from clients and athletes that I did what I taught became a great marketing tool

I had a niche to what had now become an incredibly fun and exciting career not just a hobby

I acquired a cool nickname… “The Band Man”

The ability to run with my 3 amazing children everyday

It was easy to motivate others and let them know they can get back what they lost  

 

As we age we are going to lose mobility.  Sometimes as a result of instability but mostly as a result of soft tissue shortening.

 

We all have physical activities in life that Jack us up and provide a sense of physical accomplishment.  Doing repeat 100 meter sprints at age 47, full out and fast, is what gets me jacked.

So today’s First 2010 RBT Live episode is my gift to you on my birthday.  Here is your RBT Fountain of youth Secret….   Good luck and trust me if flexibility is your issues, resistance band stretching will work it just takes a commitment to keeping what you got or getting back what you like to do.

 

Training beyond the Barband-1blog

 

Dave “The Band Man” Schmitz

 

Make sure you Check out my Birthday Special Below!!!

 

 

 

Save 20% on a Total Flexibility Training with Resistance Band Kit  that includes Bands, DVD and everything you need to get back your mobility or just the Total Flexibility DVD.    Buy before 11:59pm Monday night and you will recieve  a 20% discount off the normal price. 

 JUST MAKE SURE YOU PUT THE COUPON CODE…. 47STRETCH…INTO YOUR ORDER FORM.

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Posted in Band Training for Coaches, Band Training Tips, Fitness Boot Camps, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 45 Comments »

Helping out a Champion!!

Monday, December 21st, 2009

band-1blogI have never won a Team Championship but this weekend I had a chance to watch a team win a championship and guess what….  They train with bands.

Now before you send all you comments my way about being a band wagon jumper, or saying “Right Dave I am sure it was the band”, hear me out.  I know it wasn’t the band training and I know it wasn’t anything I did but I did get a chance  this spring to work with for the second straight year the 2009 NCAA Division III Football champions Wisconsin – Whitewater Warhawks.

So yes I am proud and yes I am very excited for them….. NOT ME!!

Congratuations to all the Coaches and Players at UW-Whitewater.  Thanks for letting me be a very small part of your success.

Reactive Training.. Powerful Results

Dave Schmitz

Posted in Band Training for Coaches, Fitness Enthusiasts, Speed and Agility training | 26 Comments »

Band Tri-plane Cardio-Strength Part 3

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Band Training for Rotational Strength… Tapping into our power centerband-1blog

 

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

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Posted in Fat Loss Band Workouts, Fitness Boot Camps, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 81 Comments »

Band Tri-planer Cardio – Strength Part 2

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

band-1blog 

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.

 

 

 

 

Reactive Training… Powerful Results

Dave Schmitz

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Posted in Band Training Tips, Fat Loss Band Workouts, Fitness Boot Camps, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 2 Comments »

Best Tri-plane Band Cardio-Strength Workout – Part 1

Friday, December 11th, 2009

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.

 

 

See you with the frontal plane version on Monday.

 

Reactive Training for Powerful Results

 

Dave Schmitz

www.resistancebandtraining.com

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.

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Posted in Fat Loss Band Workouts, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 1 Comment »

Band Training for Punching Strength

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

band-3blog 

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.

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Posted in Band Training for Coaches, Band Training Tips, Fat Loss Band Workouts, Fitness Enthusiasts, Home Fitness Workouts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | No Comments »

“Kettlebell – Band Multi-vector Training to enhance hip explosiveness”

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

 

As I started to train more with resistance bands it soon became apparent to me that bands were not just a strength training tool but could also be a muscle activation tool.  

Resistance bands flat versus tubular structural charateristics allowed me  to attach bands to our body in many places.   Anytime you attach a band to the body, be it at the hip, the trunk, the wrist or the lower leg, you immediately create a tactile sensation that wakes up the muscles associated to that region.

For instances, if I attached a band  around the hips and face away from the band attachment, I immediately heighten the awareness of gluteal muscles because of the posterior  force vector being applied to the anterior hip .   

This can be very helpful if you are trying to improve hip extension which we all know is a key functional movement when it comes to creating horizontal or vector explosiveness of the body.

Now by applying another dead weight training tool that also enhance hip extension, you can train with multiple vectors and really compliment the deadweight movement.   This is what I refer to as multi-vector training.

Multi-vector training  can serve to enhance function in 2 ways:

1.  By complimenting the movement and activating key muscles  to become more active in the movement. 

2.   By creating vectors that oppose each other and cause the body to become more unstable or overloaded to one side.

I will address #2 in the near future but for today we want to use it to compliment a movement. 

Today RBT Live is all about using bands to in multi-vector training set up to increase hip extension with the kettlebell swing. 

I hope you enjoy this week RBT Live  “Kettlebell – Band Multi-vector Training to enhance hip explosiveness”

 

 

 

 

If you are looking for more ways to incorporate multi-vector training you may want to check out ResistanceBandsUnleashed DVD series.  It will provide you over 50 plus ways to implement bands independently or inconjunction with other training tools.

Training Beyond the Contraction

band-3blogDave Schmitz

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Posted in Band Training Tips, Fitness Enthusiasts, Personal Trainers, Speed and Agility training | 1 Comment »

Speed trainng with Resistance Bands

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

 

I had the pleasure this summer to work with over 180 athltetes of all ages and genders.    Of course we trained a ton with RBT and as the athletes return back to their respected teams this fall they are absolutely crushing their team workouts not to mention their speed tests.

One of the reasons why I think they do so well is because of  the amount of time we put into working on deceleration speed at the “point of transformation”.

The point of transformation is the time it takes an athlete to go from a decelerated state into an accelerated motion.

Obviously the shorter this time is, the faster they get out of their breaks or the less ground contract incurred during  a linear speed drill.

The point of transformation I feel comes down to 3 things…100_0562

 

1.  How well integrated are your decelerators.  Is the trunk  providing the glutes a stable  point for them to apply force to decelerate and than accelerate.

 

2  Are the trunk stabilizers being recruited fast enough to prevent the upper torso from getting to far outside the center of gravity and thus over loading the lower torso.

3.   Is the trunk stabilization strong enough  to allow the arms and legs to aggressive swing around to create counter balance to decelerate and than reverse that motion to create a driving force for acceleration.

 

What I see is athletes do not like to crank the arms and often position the feet incorrectly because they do not have good trunk integration with the upper and lower extremites.

 

As you watch the follow video I think you will see how that is true.  

 

Enjoy this weeks RBT Live… College Athletes Training with the Band Man

If you are wondering what is the best bands for speed development..

your Best Band package for speed training is right Here.

 

 

Training beyond the Contraction

Dave Schmitz

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Posted in Band Training for Coaches, Band Training Tips, Speed and Agility training | 4 Comments »

Resistance Band Training in the Ring

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

 

I recently did a video on training in the ring and after I completed it I realized I needed to cover more about RBT in the Ring.

Here are 5 things you need to have in place before you attempt to training in the ring

1. You must have XXL Blue Strong Bands to create the ring. My recommendation is that any ring training over 6 people should use 3-4 Blue bands or 2 Grey bands as the center ring ( Never use any type of hard structure within the ring… only large bands)

2. Your clients should have mastered all the drills you want to perform in the ring well before you attempt training in the ring. If people do not know the ring they will become intimidated and struggle with the heavier level of training which will create a unsuccessful training experience.  Also holding is done by 4-5 individuals working as a team.

3. As the trainer you must personally have trained in the ring so you can cue and lead others. Don’t just throw people in the ring because it looks cool.  

4. Map  out exactly what drills you are going to use and what your work to rest ratio will be.  My suggestion is to use exercises that allow clients to visually see each other.

5. Are you going to train in alternate groups or simulaneously?? If alternate is the choice how are you going to instruct members to hold??  Are you going to control the cadence or let them go free??

Simple Rules to follow when training in the Ring

1. Do not do blind drills. Make sure all ring members can see each other as they train.  Blind Drills are very advanced training

2. Start in small group rings first. 3 and 4 are the best. I do not recommend linking 4 bands together without a  middle ring band. This results in over stressing  the bands if you do not stay closely connected with your
campers

3. Start with simple drills that everyone knows. Don’t get fancy and over demanding. The anxiety of training in the ring will be a fatigue factor by itself.

4. As a leader you need to initally set the cadence. Don’t let campers go as they want. It will create to much uneven resistance.

5. Always use extra strong bands in the ring. Don’t go small and over tax the bands in the ring. You do not want that group of bands breaking.

6. Use linked band set ups and avoid using handles at first. This will make training easier and allow greater distance between campers.

If you are interested in knowing what it take to set up a ring  here is what you will need in bands for a 10 person ring

2 Grey Band
20  Purple or Green bands depending on exercise you are considering.

Here is a recent video I did while training a group of college athletes. We used green bands with 3 grey bands in the ring.

 

 

Training Beyond the Contraction

Dave “The Band Man” Schmitz

Posted in Band Training for Coaches, Band Training Tips, Fitness Boot Camps, Speed and Agility training | No Comments »

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