How To Use Resistance Bands To Get The Most From Your Workouts.

Resistance bands – we’ve all heard of them, but how many of you actually use them?

Maybe you’ve dismissed them for being only for beginners. Maybe you used them so much over lockdown you simply can’t face the sight of them anymore. But it’s time to brush the dust off your resistance band and start using it.

There are several ways to use resistance bands in your training – and no, we’re not just talking about the banded ‘booty building’ exercises here. In fact, resistance bands can be used to perform almost any exercise – bicep curls, face pulls, good mornings – you name it!

We’re going to show you how you can use a resistance band throughout your workout, from warm-up, all the way to cool-down. If you’re a beginner, then listen up. We’ll be covering how to scale challenging bodyweight exercises (such as pull-ups) using a resistance band. For more advanced gym-goers, we’ll show you how to take exercises to the next level, adding a resistance band to your ordinary workout routine to challenge your muscles even more.

So, grab your resistance band and let’s get going.

What Are Resistance Bands?

When we talk about resistance bands (or workout bands or exercise bands), we’re referring to those bands of elastic that are used to provide resistance during exercises – They come in two sizes: mini bands (or ‘booty bands’) and long bands as well as in varying weights, from light to strong. Today we are focusing the latter, that can be used for a range of upper and lower body exercises to improve muscle strength, stability, and flexibility. They may look light and inconspicuous, but these bands are tougher than you think!

5 Benefits Of Resistance Band Exercises

So why would you use resistance bands anyway?

Here are the 5 benefits of adding resistance band training to your workouts:

They Can Be Used During Warm-Up And Cool-Down: Resistance bands allow you to hone in on specific muscle groups, firing them up with light resistance before your main session. Post-session, exercise bands can help you reach deeper into those stretches and improve flexibility over time.
Affordable & Portable: Whether you’re stashing them in your gym bag for your workout or popping them in your suitcase for your next escape, exercise bands are a small, inexpensive piece of equipment that you can take with you anywhere.
Can help progress or modify an exercise: Whether you need a tricky exercise made a little easier, or an easy exercise taken up a notch, resistance bands will help you get there, for example, supporting your weight so you can do a pull up, or adding extra resistance to increase the difficulty of push ups.
Helpful during injury recovery: If you’re rehabbing an injury, resistance bands are an effective solution to rebuild strength and restore mobility [1]. Varying resistance levels allow for progressive rehab as the injury improves and muscles strengthen.4
Can build strength in the weakest portion of movements: Take the barbell bench press: The strongest part of the movement is at the top, with arms extended, whereas the hardest part is at to the bottom of the lift, where the bar is closest to your chest. If you added a band to the barbell, you are adding more resistance to the strongest point of the lift (the top), making your body work harder through the whole range of motion, which leads to greater strength improvements.

How To Choose The Best Resistance Bands

So you’ve got your exercises covered, now it’s time to select a band. To pick the right workout band for you, you’ll want to consider the following options:

Weight/Resistance: Resistance bands vary in resistance from extra light to extra heavy. Choose the right resistance for your ability and exercise(s), keeping in mind the number of reps you plan to do. You may wish to buy a range of resistance levels if you intend to do a variety of exercises.
Material: Resistance bands usually come in either rubber latex or elastic fabric. Which you choose is down to personal preference, but if you’re using a mini band for squats we recommend going for the fabric band as these don’t tend to roll up or slide as you use them.
Size: Resistance bands come as mini bands or long bands. The size you choose will depend on the exercises you intend on doing e.g. mini bands are more targeted at squats and glute exercises, whereas long bands work both the upper and lower body and can be used to assist with mobility, and movements such as pull ups.

How To Use Resistance Bands

We’re going to cover how you can use a resistance band through each stage to benefit your workout and improve performance.

To do so, we’ve broken the workout into three main stages:

Warm Up
Main Workout
Cool Down

1. Resistance Bands For Warm Ups

Granted, warming up isn’t the most exciting part of a workout – but we bet you’d think twice about skipping it if you knew that it could improve your workout performance by as much as 79% [4]. Using a resistance band at this stage of your workout is a great way to prime your muscles for your main session and maximise your performance.

But what weight resistance band should you use to warm up? Choosing a light band is essential – we’re just warming up here! This should be enough to get the blood flowing through the muscles and take them through the full range of motion to prepare for your session.

There are many resistance band exercises you can use for warm-ups. Here are a couple of our favorites:

Resistance Bands Upper Body Warm Up

Back & Shoulders: Band Pull Aparts

Band pull aparts are performed with a lightweight long resistance band, targeting the muscles of your upper back (rhomboids, traps, and rear delts) and shoulders. If your workout includes any overhead pressing or compound movements such as the bench press, this movement will build shoulder stability and help to warm up the muscles before heavy lifting.

How To Do Band Pull Aparts:

Extend your arms out in front of you and hold the band in an underhand grip, shoulder width apart. (Note: Taking a narrower grip makes the exercise harder, whilst taking a wider grip makes it easier. You can also hold both sides of the band, or just one. Holding both sides will be harder as the resistance is heavier.)
Stand tall, with your feet directly below your hips, keeping a soft bend in your knees. Roll your shoulders back and down to engage your lats and upper back.
Keeping hold of the band, move both arms horizontally out to the side until they are in line with your torso. The band should be almost touching your chest.
Pause, then slowly bring your arms back to the starting position, fully extending in front of you.
Repeat exercise, keeping reps slow and controlled, and focusing on engaging the shoulders and back muscles throughout.

Resistance Bands For Arms: Banded Bicep Curls & Banded Tricep Press Down

If arm day is on the cards, you can use resistance bands to isolate the specific muscle groups you’ll be training in your workout, warming them up with some light resistance before moving on to heavier free-weight exercises.

Our top resistance band arm exercises to warm up are:

Banded Bicep Curls:

How To Do Banded Bicep Curls

This one is similar to a classic dumbbell bicep curl but challenges your biceps in a slightly different way by providing more resistance at the top of the exercise.

Select a long resistance band and stand both feet on one edge of it, hip-width apart. Take the other end of the band in both hands with an overhand grip, shoulder width apart.
Stand with arms fully extended, in the same setup as you would when performing a dumbbell bicep curl. Brace your core.
Curl your arms up, bringing your hands up to your shoulders, keeping your elbows close to your side.
Pause, then slowly extend your arms back to the starting position.
Repeat.

Banded Tricep Press Down:

Banded press downs isolate the tricep muscle and build stability in elbow extension and flexion. This makes it not only a great primer for the triceps, but any movement that involves a strong arm lockout, e.g. bench press, overhead press, or jerks.

How To Do Banded Tricep Press Down

Loop a light-medium weight long resistance band securely around the rig. To do this, throw one end of the band over the bar. Pull it down and then loop the other end through. Pull it tight to create a knot around the bar.
Stand facing the band, taking the end of it in both hands in an underhand grip, just closer than shoulder width. At this point, your elbows should be bent with wrists in front of your chest and knuckles facing up.
With your elbows tucked into your sides, take a breath into your belly and brace your core. Press down on the band, extending your arms until they are fully extended, with your palms at your thighs.
Pause, squeezing your triceps, and then return to the starting position, controlling the band and you bend your arms up.
Repeat.

Read our 8 Best Resistance Band Arm Exercises for more movements to add to your warm up.

Resistance Bands For Legs Warm Up: Banded Good Mornings & Banded Squats

You’re probably no stranger to the booty band warm up (banded squats, glute bridges, fire hydrants – you know the ones), but did you know you can also use a long workout band to fire up your lower body muscles before your leg session?

Here our are top resistance band leg exercises, using the long resistance band:

Banded Good Mornings

This resistance band exercise will fire up your hamstrings – and all of your posterior chain, including your glutes and back. This makes them an extremely good primer for deadlifts.

How To Do Banded Good Mornings

Take a medium-weight long resistance band. Stand both feet on one side of it, hip-width apart, toes facing forward. Duck your head into the loop of the band, resting it on your upper back (traps), and stand up.
Place your hands on the band, just in front of your shoulders. Take a breath in and brace your core.
Push your hips back, keeping a neutral spine as your chest comes forward. Maintain a slight bend in your knees. Bring your torso as close to parallel to the floor as possible without your back rounding. You should feel the load in your hamstrings. (Note: If your back rounds, don’t bring your chest as low.)
Extend your hips back up, squeezing your glutes at the top.

Coaches Tip: The concentric portion of the movement (hips extending) should be faster and more powerful. Try to work to a tempo of 2-0-1-0 (2 seconds lowering, 1-second hip extending, with no pause at the top or bottom).

Banded Squats:

The mini band squat focuses on firing up the glutes and abductors, but using a long exercise band works the glutes, quads, back, and core, with the positioning closer to that of a barbell back squat. This not only makes it a great warm-up for your back squat but is ideally suited to beginners adjusting to the back-rack load placement. Banded squats are a learning step to understanding the positioning of a back squat, before progressing to using a barbell.

How To Do Banded Squats:

Take a medium-weight long resistance band. Stand both feet on one side of it in a squat stance, hip-width apart, toes slightly out. Duck your head into the loop of the band, resting it on your upper back (traps), and stand up.
Place your hands out in front of you for balance. Take a breath in and brace your core.
Squat down, pushing your glutes back, keeping your chest up, knees tracking in line with toes. Stop when your thighs are parallel to the floor.
Drive out of the squat, pressing through your heels and extending your legs. Squeeze your glutes at the top.
Repeat.

For more bodyweight exercises to warm up your legs, explore our Leg Day Warm-Up Routine.

2. Resistance Bands During Workout

Using resistance bands for warming up is great, but there’s no need to leave it there. Resistance bands can help you along the way during your workout, making exercises easier or harder.

Using Resistance Bands To Make Exercises Easier

Band Assisted Pull Ups:

If you find yourself squirming to the top of a pull-up, or you can’t pull yourself up at all, using a workout band is a great way to build up strength in your upper body. Banded pull-ups strengthen the lats, traps, shoulders delts, and biceps, as well as getting you used to the movement pattern and position, without impacting form. The thicker the band, the more bodyweight it will hold and the easier the pull-up becomes.

How To Do Band Assisted Pull Ups:

Pick an appropriate thickness of band that will allow you to complete the desired rep range unbroken. Loop the band over the rig, securing it in place. To do this, throw one end of the band over the bar. Pull it down and then loop the other end through. Pull it tight to create a knot around the bar.
You can either now step one foot into the band if you feel comfortable jumping up from the floor to the bar, or, place a box under the rig behind the band. Stand on the box and loop one foot into the band.
Take hold of the bar, placing hands slightly wider than shoulders, knuckles facing up.
Step off the box so you are hanging on the bar. Retract your scapula, squeezing your shoulder blades together.
Pull your body up to the rig, bending your arms and driving your elbows down. Aim to get your chin above the bar, keeping your head in a neutral position.
Lower yourself back down in a controlled manner, until your arms are fully extended.
Repeat for the desired rep range.

Coaches Tip: If building pull-up strength is your goal, aim to keep your reps between 3 to 8 reps, as this is the optimum range for strength gains. Over time, you can decrease the thickness of the band to implement progressive overload (making the exercise progressively harder), to ensure you continue to build strength.

Using Resistance Bands To Make Exercises Harder

Resistance bands aren’t just for beginners – they can be used to make exercises harder too, adding increased resistance to body weight or free weight exercises. As mentioned, resistance bands reverse the strength curve, so adding them to dumbbell exercises (such as a bench press or meadows row) increases the muscles’ time under tension to challenge them equally through the full range of motion.

Banded Push Ups

Are you a pro at push-ups? Using an exercise band can take the movement to the next level. By wrapping a band over your back and securing it with your hands, the top of the press up with your arm outstretched (usually the easiest portion of the movement), will become more challenging, leading to greater muscle activation in the chest, shoulders, triceps, and upper back.

How To Do Banded Push Ups:

Select a long resistance band of a suitable weight that will allow you to complete the reps unbroken. Kneel down and hold one end of the hand in one hand. Loop the band over your upper back, grabbing the other hand with the other hand. It should sit on your shoulder blades.
Position both hands on the floor as you would for a press up, directly under your shoulders. The band should be held securely in place under your palms.
Extend your legs, taking your knees off the floor to come into a high plank. Squeeze your core and glutes.
Lower your chest towards the ground, keeping your elbows tight into your side. Make sure to not drop your hips and to keep a neutral spine. Bring your chest as close to the floor as you can.
Pause briefly, then explosively push away from the floor, extending your arms to come back to the high plank position.
Repeat.

Banded Bench Press

Here’s one to really strengthen your weaknesses: Adding some bands to either side of the barbell during a bench press means that the resistance will get stronger as you get closer to the top of the movement. This will increase strength in the lockout portion of the bench press, which many lifters find hardest. Using an exercise band, you’ll be challenging your muscles through their full range of motion, increasing the time under tension and leading to greater strength gains in target muscles (the pecs, but also the delts and triceps).

How To Do Banded Bench Press:

Set up the barbell in the rack at the appropriate height you would use when benching. Load up the weight plates (go lighter at first to get a feel for it, or even just use the bar – remember this exercise will feel harder with resistance bands). Attach the resistance bands around each end of the barbell (outside of the plates), using two heavy dumbbells to anchor them to the floor.
Lie down on the bench, bringing your eyes in line with the barbell. Place your hands on the bar, just wider than shoulder width apart (or a thumb width off the edge of the knurl). Keep your feet on the ground.
Breath in, bracing your abs. Unrack the bar by pressing it up, extending your arms fully (using a spotter if required). Bring the bar forward slightly, so your wrists are stacked directly over your shoulders.
Slowly lower the bar down to your mid-lower chest, pausing just before the bar touches you.
Pause for a second, then press the bar up, extending your arms back to starting position. Repeat.

3. Resistance Bands For Stretching

Stretching may be the less glamorous side of training, but trust us when we say it’s worth it. Whether you find yourself struggling to touch your toes, or you want to take your stretches a bit deeper, using a resistance band can help you get there [5].

Here are a couple of our top-rated resistance band stretches:

Lying hamstring stretch:

Using a workout band for this movement can increase the stretch in the hamstrings and calves, as you push your foot into the resistance band, whilst simultaneously pulling it towards you with your hands, increasing tension through the muscles.

Lie down on the floor with both knees bent and feet flat on the floor.
Loop a towel around the arch of one foot, holding one end in each hand.
Lift the working leg up to the ceiling. Straighten your leg as much as possible, pushing your heel towards the ceiling. At the same time, gently pull on the strap to provide resistance. (If you have tight hamstrings, you may find you need to bend your knee slightly.)
Hold the stretch for 10-30 seconds. You should feel it in your hamstrings, but it should be comfortable, not painful.
Bring the working leg back down. Switch legs to repeat the stretch on the other side.

Banded Tricep Stretch:

This stretch is great to release tension in your triceps after an arm workout. It’s also a great movement to use during warm up to mobilize your shoulder, opening up your front rack position before front squats or clean and jerks.

Select a long band of light to medium weight. Step one leg back, placing your mid-foot onto the band to secure it onto the ground. Keep the other leg out in front, with a slight bend in the knee for stability.
With the hand on the same side as the back leg, take hold of the end of the band. Flip your hand so it sits behind your head, knuckles resting on your shoulder blades or traps, elbow fully bent, facing up towards the ceiling.
Lean forward slightly, relaxing your neck and keeping your shoulders down. Press your chest open whilst deepening the stretch in your tricep.
Hold for 30 seconds, then change the leg that is standing on the band and stretch out the other arm.

Looking to improve your front rack positioning? Check out our Top 6 Front Rack Mobility Exercises

FAQs

We wouldn’t blame you for thinking that barbells, dumbbells and machines are better for building strength than resistance bands. However, resistance bands are still a very good strength training method, putting the muscles under tension which elicits growth. In fact, if used efficiently (by selecting the right resistance and implementing progressive overload), resistance bands have been found to lead to similar strength gains to dumbbells or weight machines [2, 3].
That being said, free weights still hold a very important place in the fitness space, and you probably wouldn’t want to replace your whole gym routine with resistance bands if you had a choice. Free weights allow for heavier and more precise weight loading, with the ability to increase in small increments, to progressively overload your muscles. By combining your use of resistance bands with free weights, you can
Instead of using resistance bands and weights separately, you can use them together to benefit your session (we’ll get onto how to do that in a moment).
All levels of gym-goers can benefit from incorporating resistance bands into their workouts, but they are particularly suited to beginners who are new to strength training.
There are a number of reasons for this:
- Resistance bands are very safe and easy to use.
- Exercise bands come in varying sizes and strengths, meaning you can adjust them to your ability and progress the weight as you become more experienced.
- They are a great way to build up initial muscle and strength, before challenging your body by adding dumbbells, kettlebells, and barbells into your routine.
- They are extremely versatile and can be used for a range of exercises.
- They help learn mind-muscle connection (the process of consciously thinking about contracting the specific muscle you are working to increase strength and hypertrophy) by forcing you to focus on the muscle being worked as you take it through the full range of motion [6, 7].
Pick a couple of lower and upper body resistance band exercises, using a lightweight band initially. As you build strength and experience, you can increase the weight of the band and the number of exercises you are doing. When you feel confident, you could start to incorporate free weights into your routine and use exercise bands alongside free weights, as discussed in this article.
Lots of people assume you need to lift loaded barbells or bench heavy dumbbells to build muscle – but resistance bands can build muscle too.
For muscles to grow, they need to be placed under tension, which can be achieved with workout bands or free weights (and bodyweight exercises, too!). You then need to ensure you are progressively overloading your muscles. This means you need to continually challenge them, increasing the weight, reps, time under tension, or reducing rest periods.
The downside of resistance bands is that sometimes it is unclear exactly how much weight you are using. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where even the heaviest exercise band is not challenging enough. Whilst you can employ other strategies to challenge your muscles (i.e. increasing the reps or adding a pause in the concentric phase of the movement), if you’ve been training with bands for a while you would likely benefit from incorporating free weights into your training to prevent reaching a plateau.

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WRITTEN BY: Alex Kirkup-Lee

Alex is an inhouse Content Writer for Gymshark’s Health & Conditioning categories. A qualified Personal Trainer, CrossFit Level 1 and Functional Fitness Coach, Alex is experienced in training clients from a range of sporting backgrounds. With a passion for functional training, her favorite workout is anything that includes deadlifts, rowing, or wallballs.