Using “Band Work” to Greatly Improve Any Program’s Ability to Get you Stronger, Healthier & More Explosive Results
How to use bands to improve joint health, recovery & improve muscle and explosiveness gains in any program without interfering with your schedule using a simple routine
“Performing a banded routine with a combo of these exercises in a short, efficient format can make ANY training routine simply work better than it already did”
Contents:
What *actually* makes bands unique as an exercise tool
Special benefits of volume band work
“Series Elastic Component” & Explosive Ability
How to program band work efficiently & effectively
How to perform this type of exercise in order to gain the above benefits
Preferred exercise list for every joint
Takeaways
Bands are an underrated training tool. A good set of bands that provide enough tension as well as good set ups and exercises can yield massive benefit to any active person if you know what you’re doing.
They are often used in a “rehab“ sense, and while this isn’t inherently bad, the problem is people approach bands with a “rehab mentality”.
To be truly effective, “band work” should be treated with as much intention as any other exercise.
That being said, bands do not replace formally weighted resistance exercises. This is because of the nature of a bands resistance profile.
I’m going to explain why bands are amazing by explaining to you why they are “bad”.
Bands cannot create the same amount of tension on your muscle and connective tissue during exercises simply because the tension that they produce is always when the band is stretched.
When the band is “stretched”, your muscle is “squeezed”.
This means the peak tension of a banded exercise is generally when the muscle is shortened – thus making bands a “short range dominant” training tool. (See here)
To recap one of the aspects of short range movements, let’s remember that short range movements don’t provide as strong of a stimulus for hypertrophy in the muscle or connective tissue “rep for rep”.
This is because you’re placing the *weighted tension* in the position where there is the least stretching *passive tension*.
For example: if you perform a banded bicep curl it is easy at the start and the tension gets high at the “top“.
This does not work as well for hypertrophy of a muscle or tendon per rep due to less total tension being placed on the body/muscle.
You are placing the “active” resistance tension of the movement where there is less passive tension and thus these factors don’t synergize together.
As a rule of thumb: More tension = better muscle growth
So why use bands or short range movments?
For the very reason that they don’t provide as much tension and stress on the body to stimulate it to get stronger - they also are very very gentle.
Each rep of a banded exercise is far less stimulating than a long range “stretch” exercise but also far less fatiguing on the muscle & joint.
This means we can ADD to our training a lot of short range banded work without it affecting our recovery badly & we can accumulate many high repetition sets to make up for what they lack in stimulus “lb for lb” compared to “long range reps”.
You can use bands to accumulate high volumes of work to the muscle and joint where you cannot with long range movements as they are very taxing (which is a good thing for their purposes) due to the high amounts of tension they possess.
Think of long range exercises as the “meat” of a meal & traditional short/middle range movements as the “potatoes” with banded exercises as the “veggies”. Together you get a more complete training profile.
Summary of niche benefits of high volume band work:
High blood flow and muscle/joint stimulation with low recovery cost - if you are dealing with a small bothersome pain or injury this is frequently an effective solution
The above makes it an extremely safe and easy way to begin training and healing an injured body part
Improved muscle endurance
Boost hypertrophy through metabolic stress & and improved muscle recovery + increased recoverable volume (more reps usually = more gains as long as you can recover week by week)
Increased myonuclei (Important for muscle growth and retention over a lifespan - Super high reps with banded tension work excellent for this)
Better mind-muscle connection to those who struggle coordinating the contraction of a muscle group. This is good for everybody but beginners in particular benefit.
Improved tendon and ligament elasticity and soft tissue strength (series elastic component and non-contractile tissue is targeted very well with these metabolically demanding rep sets - again only achievable with band exercise usually because it doesn’t break the body down much)
Series Elastic Component (SEC)
I speak a lot about non-muscular contractile tissue and its importance a lot. Your tendons and ligaments are super important for your health and strength/athleticism.
In between your muscle and tendon contractile tissue there are other bits of bio-matter that support your bodies structure but isn’t directly contracting to make you move.
It acts as supporting cellular tissue much like gravel & mortar do in concrete roads/buildings.
This tissue doesn’t “contract” on its own but it does allow the body to “bounce” & rebound when moving or applying force. It is an important piece of your “elastic”/reactive strength & how sturdy or strong your body is during action.
Non-contractile tissue within the muscle is called the “parallel elastic component”. This type of tissue that sits in your tendons is called the “series elastic component” or SEC. The latter is the most important for our purposes.
Individuals who are naturally more elastic & explosive likely have a higher quality SEC within their body - and like I speak about frequently - you can develop this unnoticed quality in order to mimic their body yourself and thus gain similar benefits.
In addition, because bands are “elastic” themselves, they create an “overspeed” component when the band comes back on the eccentric. This means that the muscle & tendon get a strong but low risk stretch reflex that makes you more explosive by increasing your ability to “reverse momentum”.
Very hard to not appreciate a low risk, “easy” exercise that makes your joints stronger & more powerful.
In simple terms, exercises that place higher metabolic stress on a joint without breaking it down do the best job of improving the quality and contribution of this component.
While we’ve spoken at length about applying high tension on tendons to develop them alongside your muscle mass - this aspect of a tendon responds very well to high metabolic stress with low mechanical tension.
Thus, given what every reader on this blog should now understand, the best way to produce a very high metabolic stress with very low mechanical tension onto a tendon while being as easy to recover from as possible assuming other hard training is to perform band work.
In addition, with the long list of other tremendous benefits listed above, band work is also extremely convenient as it can even be done at home.
How to Program Band Work:
Personally, I implement band work in a few main ways: