Resistance Bands are a great tool not only clinically, but for your at-home use as well!

When you come into our office, you will see some bands hanging up on the walls and, if your system’s needs calls for them, you will be using them quite a bit. So let’s get acquainted with the benefits of bands.

The first benefit is one that connects well with corrective exercises. Bands offer more planes of motion with resistance than free weights, like a dumbbell or barbell, can. This is because resistance bands don’t rely on gravity to generate resistance. Rather, they rely on the stretch of the material to produce it. This means we can play with the angle of the band (higher, lower, further to one side, etc) to produce resistance in the direction we need with your rehab or sports performance. It is simple for the bands to mimic sport-specific movements with resistance which will help you during whatever athletic endeavor you partake in!

The second benefit of resistance bands is that they provide more constant tension over the plane of motion. Think of a bicep curl. When you move the free weight up to the shoulder, at the end of the motion there is very little tension on the bicep muscle itself because gravity is no longer generating the resistance when the weight is vertical. Comparatively, a bicep curl performed with a resistance band we have tension through the entire range of motion because we continuously stretch the elastic material.

Lastly, the third benefit is that their resistance is variable throughout the motion. Using the bicep curl as an example again, you do not have the same amount of resistance at the start as you do at the end of the motion. It progressively gets greater as your hand gets closer to your shoulder. To really bring this home, it helps when we talk about the concept of the strength curve of a muscle. A muscle’s strength changes over its range of motion, with most muscles increasing in their strength capacity until a certain point. Think about a Bell Curve - more strength at a certain Range of Motion with less at the very ends.
With the bicep curl example, the weakest point of the curl is at the beginning with the arm fully extended and strongest at around mid-range. When we use free weights, we are reduced to using the weight that we can begin the curl with - making the mid-range engagement relatively easy in comparison. With resistance bands, we can increase the resistance with the range of motion, therefore recruiting muscle fibers as we go through the full range of motion and thus stimulating more of the muscle at the strongest point of the motion!

One of the biggest reasons we enjoy using resistance bands with corrective exercise is that there is no cheating involved with the motion. There is no momentum with resistance bands, which is something you can achieve with free weights. When using momentum in an exercise, you are taking resistance off the muscle fibers and not getting maximum activation. Whereas with a resistance band, the only way to continue a motion is by recruiting muscle fibers to stretch the band.

Did I mention how inexpensive they are too?!? Free weights are usually priced by the pound, which can add up fast to get a full set of dumbbells or barbells. Resistance bands are much cheaper and MUCH easier to travel with! Just another great benefit to them as you can do your exercises anywhere you go!

Source: https://homeprogym.com/pages/resistance-bands-vs-free-weights