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!!
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.
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.
Resistance Band training has long been considered as a secondary option to strength training when compared to dead weight resistance like dumbbells, barbells and kettlebell. However it is really comparing apples to oranges when you evaluate the 2 from a strength curve standpoint.
Dead weight follows the traditional bell shaped curve with muscle recruitment being on the vertical vector and range of motion on the horizontal vector. Muscle recruitment increases to mid range and then slowly decreases as you complete the full range of motion.
Resistance bands are a progressive straight line that reflects a continuous increase in muscle recruitment as range of motion increases.
So the question is not which is better, the question is why not implement both types of strength training into your program or why not combine the two and make dead weight training a full range of motion muscle recruitment training tool by adding bands.
This week’s RBT Live does exactly that. It combines the best of dead weight training with band training. The results…… a tremendous total body workout that maximizes muscle recruitment.
Reactive Training … Powerful Results
Dave “The Band Man” Schmitz
With this week’s RBT Live all about getting under the bar, I have to let you in on a new program we are using at my local high school to develop absolute strength!! It was developed by an outstanding young performance coach and good friend of mine, Ryan Englebert , who used this program to get himself super strong to play for the Cincinnati Bengels and now uses it to get HS kid freakishly stronger.
I have the incredible opportunity to see first hand how Ryan does it so and I am really glad he is finally gettng this out to everyone. If you are looking for a program to develop “incredible absolute strength in your athletes the E-Test Drop 2 System is something you need to check out.
I’m a band guy but when it comes to developing “Freakish” absolute strength in my athletes, I just talk to Ryan about what we need to do under the bar.
Now I have to teach him about pricing because at $49 the E-Test Drop 2 System is a steal.
Make sure you at least take a moment to see what the excitment is all about
If you have not watched this video please do so before you continue reading. I do not know Mr. Boyle personally but I have read many of his writings. I respect him for his unwillingness to never settle for what is but always analyzing what could be. He simply never stops learning and trying to teach others.
Mike’s theory on Single legs squat drove home why I find the staggered stance to be so effective at teaching people how to integrate their lower torso with their upper torso which when all is said and done is how this body was designed to work.
Mike’s states that the low back is the limiting factor not the glutes when it comes to bilateral squats. Subsquently by going into a split stance the lower extremities, especially gluts and quads, are more effectively trained. I would say it is not just a low back but globally a trunk limiting factor.
If we are able to assist the trunk (specifically the lower abs) to stabilize the low back (specifically L5-S1) than we create less of a force leak at that point and allow the weight or vertical vector force to be dealt with using the lower torso.
Keeping the transition area of L5-S1 stable is what allows us to transfer force production to the lower torso when the load is coming from the top – down
I thought it would easier to show you than tell you so.. Here you go.
See you tomorrow to discuss why the scapula and shoulder love the split stance as well.
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.
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.
