Training with resistance bands

Going out of town for business or pleasure and still want to get your workouts in? Then you might want to pick up some resistance bands. They’re extremely portable, fairly inexpensive and easy to use. Plus, you can find quite a few exercise tutorials on YouTube to help you put a workout together.

What’s interesting about using resistance bands is that they appear to provide similar muscle activation when performing comparable exercises while using the same relative loads. An example of this would be the write up I did on a study (not too long ago) that showed push ups with resistance bands using a six-rep load stimulates similar muscle activity in the pecs and front delts when compared to smith machine bench press (also using a six-rep load). I mention this as some people may think that resistance bands are a step down from free weights, but that’s not the case.