This is because with resistance band exercises, you can stimulate muscle growth provided you perform resistance band workouts with proper technique and form.
So, it doesn’t matter whether you are working out in your local gym, outdoors, or indoors in your own home, you can take a crucial step in achieving your hypertrophy goals with resistance and muscle growth.
The secret to hypertrophy lies with whether or not you are effectively challenging your target muscle groups and not necessarily which gym equipment you make use of.
How Resistance Band Muscle Growth Works?
The first thing you should know when it comes to building muscle is that hypertrophy is achieved only when you consistently subject your muscles to stress through training along with proper recovery, diet, and nutrition.
With the use of resistance bands you will be able to sufficiently build up resistance all through your exercise range of motion. While gravity determines the load when it comes to the use of dumbbells, bands offer adequate resistance when you attempt to stretch them out to increase their length which then puts sufficient stress on your targeted muscles.
So, as you engage in resistance training, you tend to experience more difficulty as you reach the end of the range of motion associated with the exercise you are performing.
Lets take for example, you attempt banded biceps curl, you will notice that the resistance tends to increase when you reach the peak of your repetition creating significant tension on your contracted biceps making resistance band muscle growth one of the most realistic hypertrophy goals, especially when your training is properly structured.
Resistance Band Workouts Are For All Levels
There is a general misconception in the world of bodybuilding that resistance band exercises are for novices. The truth is, this notion is far from being accurate as advanced bodybuilders are known to make use of bands in circumstances where they are unable to use more traditional weights like barbells and dumbbells.
Intermediate and advanced level bodybuilders are known to use resistance bands while on their travels or during warm-ups, high-repetition workouts, and accessory exercises.
Resistance bands are useful to experience lifters as unlike barbells or dumbbells, they can offer lifters a much different type of resistance profile to give muscles a challenge that is both fresh and new.
Ultimately, the key question when it comes to bands is not if they are much better than traditional weights, but rather whether the bands provide sufficient resistance that challenges your muscles.
Are There Preferred Exercises For Resistance Band Muscle Growth?
The good-news is that resistance bands can be used to train virtually every part of your body and you can use resistance bands in the following way;
Chest Workout
For your chest workout you can try band flyes and band chest presses. These resistance band exercises help to train your pectoral muscles through both horizontal-adduction and pressing movements.
Back Exercises
With straight-arm pulldowns and band rows, you will be able to target both your lats and upper back to effectively challenge the muscles and stimulate growth.
Shoulder Training
To develop your upper back and deltoids, you can use resistance bands during your face pulls, front raises, and lateral raises.
Arms Exercises
You can give your arms a proper training with resistance bands when you perform triceps extensions and curls. What’s more, these exercises are easy to set up using resistance bands with minimal fuss.
Legs Workouts
For your lower body workouts, you can use resistance bands for your lateral walks, hip thrusts, split squats, Romanian deadlifts, and band squats.
Note that the most effective resistance band workouts are not those that are complex, they are those which offer a range of motion that does not compromise your form while at the same time providing you with progressive overload with bands to consistently challenge your muscles.
Progressive Overload With Bands Is Necessary For Hypertrophy
It is worth noting that many resistance band muscle growth exercises tend to fail when lifters do not incorporate progressive overload with bands in their training. It is not enough to keep doing the same workouts using the same resistance band for an extensive length of time. You need to switch things up a bit or you may plateau and not experience significant changes to your physique.
Your muscle growth needs progressive overload and by using resistance bands, you will be able to significantly raise your muscle challenge and stimulate hypertrophy when you make use of stronger or thicker bands, increase your sets and/or reps, increase the stretching length of the band, slow down the eccentric phase, include pauses, reduce the rest periods when necessary, and improve your technique as well as range of motion.
Let’s say you are able to conveniently do 12 reps of bicep curls while using one resistance band, you could move on to a thicker or stronger resistance band that would be able to provide a more challenging training to put more stress on your biceps and stimulate hypertrophy.
Controlling Your Reps Matters
The trick to achieving muscle growth with resistance bands is to maintain control throughout your repetitions. You should control the band and not the other way around. Resistance bands are great as they are known to encourage lifters to focus on the range of motion of an exercise during the entirety of the repetitions.
However, you should always try to maintain tension by gaining absolute control of the return phase instead of snapping back to the starting point. You have to be slow and deliberate with the eccentric phase, as this can even make typically light resistance seem significantly challenging.
Another thing worth remembering when you use resistance bands for muscle growth is that you need to make sure that your sets are challenging. To this end, you can use a resistance band that enables you to effectively engage in quality reps while at the same time allowing you to bring your set as close to failure as possible. Once you get stronger, you can then increase the difficulty or resistance.
Final Thought
While resistance bands are definitely great for stimulating hypertrophy by challenging your target muscles causing sufficient stress and tension leading to microtears, you still need to take your nutrition plan and recovery phase very seriously, as this is where hypertrophy is truly gained.
Make sure you eat clean with whole foods that offer your body the macro and micronutrients needed to support the repair of damaged muscles and to promote muscle growth. In addition to this, you need to get enough rest and sleep in order to encourage proper recovery and stimulate muscle growth.
Bands are beneficial to anyone wishing to get adequate training done while on-the-go during their travels or at work. Resistance bands are portable, lightweight, and inexpensive. They are not just a perfect travel companion for all levels of bodybuilders, but you can also use them to build muscle at home and in place of traditional weights that are typically more expensive to acquire.