Picture the scene. It’s Wednesday evening. You’re working late. A slew of curveballs from colleagues has left you mentally drained. A sink full of dirty dishes and an overflowing laundry basket await you at home.
And now it’s time for the gym – followed by a healthy home-cooked meal, of course.
For many of us, myself included, this scenario feels all too familiar. In reality, though, we’re far more likely to grab a sandwich and crash on the sofa than stick to our fitness plans.
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The problem is that a workout plan is only as good as your ability to follow it. In other words, the perfect workout is useless if you never do it. That’s why, especially for beginners, fitness routines need to be as friction-free as possible.
And that is the theme of this week’s newsletter.
A few weeks ago, we had a special kettlebell edition of this newsletter, sharing a five-step plan for overhauling your fitness fortunes at home using just a couple of weights. This week, it’s the turn of the resistance band.
With this relatively inexpensive training tool, you can exercise whenever and wherever you like, working your whole body in just 20 minutes – a far more manageable approach than commuting to and from hour-long gym sessions.
Particularly if you’re new to strength training, doing two or three of these workouts per week can have a transformative effect on your health and fitness, provided you regularly meet two criteria.
Number one: work every major muscle group. Number two: do something that challenges you. Over the years, I’ve found the simplest way to ensure you’re working every major muscle group – broadly speaking, the chest, back, arms, shoulders, legs and core – is to cover a handful of fundamental movement patterns in each workout.
These include any variation of a squat, hip hinge, press and pull. If you have time, a lunge is also an excellent addition.
These compound movements recruit several muscles at once and work multiple joints through a wide range of motion, offering fabulous bang for your buck if you’re after the greatest return on investment from your workouts.
You can find a sample five-move resistance band workout from personal trainers and Strong Band co-founders Cyan Koay and Matt Van Mol in the workout below. I’d recommend doing a full-body session like this every two, three or four days, depending on the time and energy you have available.
Now, on to making sure your workouts are appropriately challenging.
Resistance band workout
This workout from Strong Band co-founders Cyan Koay and Matt Van Mol ticks all of these boxes, and weaves in bonus core-strengthening exercise to boot.
Here’s how to do it (you can also find video demonstrations of each exercise below).
Complete the below sequence for two rounds in total, resting for 20-30 seconds between exercises:
Exercise one: Banded squat x10-15
Exercise two: Banded Romanian deadlift x10-15
Exercise three: Banded shoulder press x10-15
Exercise four: Banded seated row x10-15
Exercise five: Banded roll-ups x10-15
Before diving in, it’s important to note that challenge is a relative term. An Olympian might squat a 200kg barbell for 10 repetitions, while someone who has never touched a weight before might sit down in a chair and stand up again 10 times.
In both cases, provided the person is working close to the upper limit of their physical capabilities, their body will likely respond by strengthening the tissues in their legs – not just muscles, but also bones, ligaments and tendons.
These are the adaptations we’re seeking through strength training, and there is a remarkably simple test to check whether you’re providing the stimulus needed to trigger them. I’ll use a set of 12 to 15 resistance band squats as an example.
When you perform this exercise, the first eight or so repetitions should feel fairly manageable.
Then, as the working muscles tire, the exercise should gradually become more difficult.
If, during the final few repetitions, your technique remains sound but your movements involuntarily slow down – despite your best effort – you’ve nailed the brief.
However, if this doesn’t happen, the exercise is too easy to prompt your body to adapt and become stronger. Conversely, if it feels so difficult that your technique breaks down, it is too challenging and could do more harm than good.
In both cases, you are unlikely to achieve the physiological adaptations you’re after. To remedy this, tweak the variables in your workout. That might mean using a heavier or lighter resistance band, performing more or fewer repetitions, or switching to an easier or harder exercise variation.
That brings us to this week’s conclusion. Frictionless workouts are more likely to become part of your regular routine, and training at home with a few resistance bands is one of the most accessible introductions to strength training available. If you can do these workouts consistently and make them sufficiently challenging, excellent results will follow.
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