How to Get Bigger and Stronger with Bands
I am going to start having more guest posts on the blog, featuring people who know more than I do. It’s a good way for me to provide quality information to my readers on subjects that I don’t consider myself an expert in. Luckily, I have a lot of really smart friends.
To kick things off, I asked my boy Shane Reuter to contribute. Shane is an absolute beast, both in the gym and with his brain. He’s getting a PhD in Neuroscience and Psychology for crying out loud! We actually both went to the University of Evansville and lifted together on occasion in the famed Carson Center.
When I saw he had opened a gym (Strength School in Martinsville, Indiana), I was pumped. It’s always great to see people you know doing big things. It was a no-brainer for me to ask him to drop some knowledge here.
Today, Shane is going to talk to you about using resistance bands with your training. This is a subject that typically carries a lot of confusion and a stigma that only powerlifters can use them, but really, ANYONE can receive benefits from bands. That is, anyone who wants to be a beast.
Which should be everyone…
Enjoy!
Benefits of Band Training
Resistance bands are an incredibly useful training tool for all types of athletes and anyone else looking to increase their strength and speed. There are all types of resistance bands, but the ones I’m talking about are built as a loop and vary in tension, such as the ones below:
I’ll just call these ‘bands’ from here on out, and this article will explain some of the ways I use bands with the athletes at my gym in Martinsville, Indiana – Strength School – and how they can help your training too.
At Strength School, we have variety of athletes including sprinters, long jumpers, basketball players, football players, powerlifters, and soccer players, among others. All of my athletes in college and many of my high schoolers use bands in a variety of ways in their training. We split up the use of bands into three broad categories:
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Reverse bands
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Bands over the bar
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Bands used for everything else
Briefly, reverse band refers to looping a pair of bands around a barbell such that the bands pull the bar upward. Bands on the bar is just the opposite – a pair of bands looped around the bar such that they pull the bar downward. And the third category refers to the use of bands in all other contexts not involving a bar. I’ll go through each category in detail, starting with reverse bands.
Reverse Bands
Reverse bands provide a variety of benefits. First, they don’t make my athletes as sore as normal barbell work. With reverse bands, the eccentric load on the athlete is lower than that with normal barbell work – on the eccentric phase of a bench press, for example, the reverse bands help more and more as the athlete brings the bar down. Muscular soreness comes in large part from the eccentric phases of lifts. Thus, because reverse bands have less eccentric load, they induce less soreness (typically).
Of course, soreness is not a huge issue when athletes are in the off-season. But it is important to limit soreness for athletes in-season – they simply won’t perform as well if muscle groups are hurting before and during their events. So reverse band training can be particularly useful for in-season athletes.
The second, and primary, benefit of reverse bands is that they allow you to handle supra-maximal loads while still working through a full range of motion on any given movement. A supra-maximal load is anything over your 1RM. If you can bench press 300, 301 and greater is supra-maximal.
Setting Up Bands for Reverse Band Bench Press
Setting Up Bands for Reverse Band Squats
Using supra-maximal loads is incredibly beneficial for improving maximum strength.
Why?
The short answer is that you can stimulate your muscular and nervous system, along with your ligaments and tendons, in a way not possible with maximal and supra-maximal loads – at the bottom, it’s just a new way to load your body, which will result in you getting stronger.
Now, the use of supra-maximal loads in training can be achieved in a variety of ways. For example, you might unrack 105% of your bench press 1RM – but instead of trying to press it, you could just hold it for 5-10 seconds at the top, then just re-rack the bar. Or you could do quarter squats with something like 105% of your best deep squat. Basically, you just perform part of the lift – the part or parts where you are at a mechanical advantage compared to the full range of the lift, such as the lockout of a bench or squat.
Reverse bands are another way to use supra-maximal loads in your training. However, reverse bands are a unique method in that you can handle supra-maximal loads while still moving through the full range of the lift. For example, my training partner and the other owner of Strength School, Harry (in the videos for this article) can squat just over 500 lbs. He can quarter squat well over 550 (110% of his squat 1RM) – but if he descends farther than a quarter squat with 550 lbs on his back, he’ll fail (probably big time!).
Note from Kasey: That would have been great if there had been a video of that, entitled, “Harry’s Ass to Grass Quarter Squat”
However, Harry can reverse band squat 585 (117% of his squat 1RM). With the reverse bands, he doesn’t have 585 lbs of resistance on his back the entire lift – the bands kick in and help as he descends. But with the way we set up our reverse bands, he does have all 585 lbs on his back for the first (when he unracks the bar and begins to descend) and last (as he’s coming up and finishing the lift, just before racking the bar) 3-4 inches of the squat. So he gets the supra-maximal load. But, unlike partial reps and holding the bar at the top of the lift, Harry also experiences a full range of motion in the squat while feeling the 585 at the very beginning and very end of that range of motion. This is a HUGE confidence builder with our athletes, and a big advantage over other supra-maximal loading methods. Let’s now go through bands over the bar.
Reverse Band Squats
Reverse Band Bench Press
Reverse Band Deadlift
Bands over the Bar
Bands over the bar are totally different than reverse bands, both in how they feel, how they work, and their benefits. There are two primary benefits of using bands over the bar.
First, the bands increase the eccentric speed of the lift. With the bands over the bar, they are actively pulling the barbell down in a way that is different than having only weight plates on the bar. With bands over the bar, you will always come down faster – whether on bench press, squat, or any other movement. And having a faster eccentric phase of the lift is helpful because it creates more kinetic energy, allowing you to have a greater stretch reflex in the muscles being used. In other words, your muscles will contract to a greater degree with a faster eccentric. And if your muscles contract more forcefully, you’ll be able to lift more weight.
The second major benefit of using bands over the bar concerns what happens on the concentric phase of the lift you’re doing (be it bench, squat, whatever). With bands over the bar, the bands will stretch more and more the farther up you press or squat. As the bands stretch, they provide greater resistance. That means you have to continue pushing hard throughout the entire lift.
With a regular barbell movement, the last few inches or so are often the easiest. Think about where you typically miss on your heavy squats - for most people, it’s not at the very top of the squat. Conversely, with bands over the bar, the last few inches of the movement are the hardest!
Because the band is stretched most at the top, you have to continue pushing incredibly hard to finish the lift. And that’s good for a variety of reasons – you’ll learn to push very fast so you have a lot of bar speed when you hit the top of the lift, and you have to continue applying lots of force to the bar, meaning you get more work done on each rep with bands over the bar, compared to a regular bar movement.
Setting Up Bands for Bench Press Resistance
Unfortunately, with those benefits comes some downsides. The major issue with bands over the bar is that they can beat you down and tear you up. Train too long and with too much volume using bands over the bar, and your joints will likely feel pretty rough. You’ll also get much more soreness using bands over the bar, compared to both reverse bands and no bands at all.
So beware and be careful in programming bands over the bar. We will use them on a max effort movement no longer than 1 week. For our speed work (that is, benching, squatting, or deadlift with light weight and high speed), we’ll use bands over the bar for 3 weeks in a row, tops. For my non-powerlifting athletes at Strength School, I often alternate 1 week of speed work with bands over the bar with 1 week of speed work with the bar weight only. Let’s now go to our last category of band work: everything else.
Everything Else You Can Do with Bands
Bands are ridiculously versatile and effective. In addition to reverse bands and bands over the bar, we use bands in a variety of ways. Bands can be used to aid in stretching. They can also be used for accessory movements to build strength and add mass. We’ll do good mornings standing on one end of a band with the other end looped over our necks. And virtually anything you can do with dumbbells, you can do with bands. Except that the stimulus is different. Front raises, face pulls, tricep pushdowns, curls, 1-arm rows, pull aparts, and many other movements can all be done with bands to add variety to your training.
Back Extensions with Band Tension
Another favorite use of bands at Strength School is for traction. Our athletes experience compression of the joints and muscular system all the time – if they’re sprinting or jumping, they’re compressing they’re ankles, knees, and hips. If they’re pushing an opponent or bracing themselves for a fall, they’re compressing their wrists, elbows, and shoulders.
Plus, almost everything in the weight room for most athletes is compression! With bands, we can easily counteract some of that compressive force by tractioning out the joints. An incredibly economical traction movement involves choking a band around a power rack, weight machine, or any other sturdy column at about shoulder height, grabbing the band and pulling out until you have a decent amount of tension, then rotating your entire arm – at the shoulder, at the elbow, and at the wrist – back and forth as much as possible.
With the band tension, all three joints are being tractioned at the same time while you rotate your arm. 20 rotations on each arm before upper body work can dramatically reduce most wrist, elbow, and shoulder pain. Our favorite lower body traction with bands involves tying a thick band to the top of a power rack, tying in another band to the band, then tying the other end of the band into the athlete’s foot while they’re lying on their back on the ground. You need to wrap the band around the athlete’s Achilles tendon (near the heel – below the ankle), then criss-cross it once or twice of the athlete’s foot. They can then move away from the power rack until they feel tension in the band. As the tension increases, they will feel decompression at the ankle, knee, and hip. We have most of our athletes with a history of lower body issues traction each leg for 2-3 minutes after their lower body workouts.
So there are my three categories of band use: reverse bands, bands over the bar, and everything else. Bands come in different strengths, so regardless of where your strength is now at, you can find a set of bands to suit your needs. We get our bands from EliteFTS.com – they’re affordable and durable.
Psychological Benefits
I tried to explain the reasons why bands can help you get stronger. But even if bands provided no real physiological benefit, I would still use them in my gym – they can help make training a bit more fun than usual! I like using reverse bands. And lots of people like using bands over the bar, too. (I hate using bands over the bar, but I still use them because they’re so effective.) When people like training more, they’re
a) more likely to continue
b) more likely to exert greater effort and
c) more likely to have a generally better attitude and presence in the gym.
Those three things, in large enough amounts, can have a tremendous impact on a person’s progress in the gym, the progress of those around them, and the general atmosphere of the training facility. Those are HUGE benefits! So even if bands didn’t work (they do), I would still use them for the psychological benefits they typically confer to lifters.
I think many coaches and trainers tend to overlook the fact that most people actually do NOT enjoy going to the gym. Especially non-strength athletes, such as people who play football, basketball, volleyball, etc. Those athletes care about their performance in their sport. They go to the weight room primarily to get better at their sport, not because they enjoy the activity itself.
The athletes don’t ‘buy’ the weight program – they ‘buy’ improved sport performance.
(That’s a general principle in sales – people don’t buy products; they buy products of products. No one has ever ‘bought’ braces. At least, not in their own mind. They ‘bought’ straight teeth – the product of the product. In the same way, I don’t buy vitamins and minerals – I buy better health.) So for a coach or trainer to get the most out of their athletes, a bit of ‘selling’ needs to occur. Whatever coaches and trainers can do to keep their athletes motivated, they should do. And I think bands are a great way to do that!
Dominate All Life,
Kasey, CSCS
Shane Reuter is 25-year old PhD candidate in Neuroscience & Psychology. His research has appeared in places such as the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, Cognition, and the Society for Neuroscience. Shane is also a state champion powerlifter, founder of FTA Supplements, and co-owner of Strength School, a private training center in Martinsville, Indiana. Shane enjoys helping people get bigger and stronger. You can contact him through his website: shanereuter.com
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