[00:01]: Hi, Jeff Reinardy, Winona State University Strength Conditioning coach. Today we’re going to talk about resistance bands. I’m here to tell you don’t resist the band. A little bit of pun there. But it took me a while to kind of get on board with these things and I know they’ve been around a long time but I’m telling you what, they really help us with our workout. They help us become more efficient, more effective. And that’s really what it’s about at the end of the day.
[00:24]: What I’m really going to look at today is just kind of give you a couple of different things that we do. It’ll just be really the scratching the surface as far as the vast variety of things that you can do when you’re using a band. We use it as resistance as well as an assistance when we’re doing a lot of our movements.
Pairing Exercises
[00:41]: One thing we do with our workouts is we pair a lot of items and when our facility is packed and we’re asking for multiple pairings, we need to keep those pairings as close as we can, make them as efficient as we can. We can’t have a lot of our athletes moving throughout the entire building trying to get our pairings done. Just does not work for us time wise. And so we find that the resistance bands work out really well for us.
[01:03]: And again, I’ll show you some examples when it’s our heavy upper body day per se. I like to do some resistance stuff or some pairing things that have to do with our lower body simply because often I’m using it as a recovery from the day before. But it really kind of helps us. And in reverse on our heavy lower body day or leg day.
[01:22]: I really like to do some upper body things with our resistance bands, and I’ll just give you a couple of examples.
Reverse Band Bench
[0:27]: The first thing we’re going to look at is the reverse band bench is what we call this. And what this helps with, I really like this when we’re in season because the guys, particularly for football and some of those heavy contact sports the guys’ shoulders really tend to bother them. We have to do a lot of our lifting literally less than 24 hours after one of our games. So we’ll come in off of a game. Their bodies are still beat up, really trying to still get some work done in the weight room, but there’s aspects of the shoulder that we’re really trying to protect. So what I like to do is a reverse band. And what this simply does is it assists that when you’re at its lowest point.
[02:03]: So when are the bar’s down on my chest when the shoulders are probably the most vulnerable, it gives us a little bit of assistance to help get it off the chest. And by the time we’re back in full extension, we’re basically back to the regular weight. So as that transition point moves through, and I’ll show that real quickly, it really makes it a lot smoother. And the guys really like it. It’s not beating their shoulders up nearly so badly.
[02:25]: So very quickly, very quickly bring the bar off, bring it down and soon you’re in a regular, typical bench. But again at this lowest point it helps it give some assistance and it gets you off the chest. Again, that transition for that shoulder, it’s working out really well for them. A couple of other movements that we like to do that are again our shoulder based movement. We do these in the in season and the off season.
Three D’s
[02:49]: Shoulders are critical for us and they’ve really kind of been our biggest problem. And so the first thing that we like to do, we call this the three D so we’re just going to bring it up so you’re getting a little deltoid work this way and then we extend the band this way. So again, something really simple, really quick. We use this with some of our pairings that we do usually again on a lower body day. But again, we call that three D and it works out pretty well.
Band Row
[03:12]: Another movement that we might pair with something is just a simple band rope. Instead of having to go through, grab a dumbbell that’s on the other side of our facility, we just quickly have a band paired up right next to the rack so they can just get a nice long stretch here and again, it depends on the type of band they’re using is going to increase or decrease the resistance.
[03:31]: The beauty of that is it’s really simple to switch your mound, so you just got a nice one pull pulled back. Again, nice simple row and all I have to do to increase the resistance back myself up a little bit. Again, good resistance that way. A simple rowing movement.
Abduction Work
[03:46]: A couple of other things that we like to do from the lower body is some abduction. Not adduction – abduction. Just simply right here. Again, I use this as a recovery movement, post leg day, but we’re usually on an upper body day, throw this in early on cause they’re still recovering from the day before from our leg day. A little abduction work and again, a wide variety, a lot of different ways that you can do that.
Tricep Movements
[04:10]: The last thing I’m going to show you is the simple little tricep movement here. You get hooked up here. We pair these things up. Just get a simple tricep workout in. Again, all you have to do, creep my hands up, increases the resistance, makes that more challenging.
[04:27]: And again, just absolutely phenomenal. Makes it simple, keeps these bands really close to us, keeps our workout flowing along, which is really essential for us. So if you haven’t got yourselves a good number of different sized bands, different varieties, different strength levels, make sure you go pick some up today.
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