Intensify your weightlifting sessions with this easy hack: Increase resistance for tougher workouts
In the quest for muscle growth and strength, progressive overload is a fundamental principle that cannot be ignored. For home gym enthusiasts who may be limited by the weights they have, adding resistance bands to light dumbbells can be a game-changer.
Fitness trainer Danica Osborn recommends this combination, particularly for a full shoulder and rotator workout. She suggests using 5lb dumbbells and holding the ends of the resistance band in each hand. This simple setup offers several benefits, making workouts more challenging and diverse.
One such benefit is the variable resistance that resistance bands provide through the range of motion. Unlike free weights, which mainly offer resistance in the vertical direction, bands increase tension as they stretch, creating greater resistance at the end of the movement. This ensures muscles work harder throughout the entire motion, enhancing muscle tension and improving hypertrophy stimuli.
Moreover, bands can add resistance in different planes and directions beyond gravity's pull. This multi-directional resistance enables engaging muscles differently and more effectively, such as applying horizontal or diagonal resistance when combined with dumbbell exercises.
The constant tension from bands keeps muscles under load throughout the set, making exercises more challenging. As the hands move apart during the workout, the resistance band adds extra resistance, providing a progressive loading option. You can progressively overload by increasing dumbbell weight, using thicker or additional bands, increasing band stretch, or combining these methods.
This combination is particularly useful for breaking plateaus, improving muscle activation, and diversifying strength training stimuli beyond what dumbbells alone provide. It also offers a joint-friendly strength loading option, with the elastic nature of bands allowing a controlled, often smoother resistance curve, reducing joint stress during progressive overload compared to abrupt increases in dumbbell weight.
If the combination of 5lb dumbbells and the resistance band is not enough to challenge, Danica Osborn suggests taking longer to complete the movements. For those seeking a more affordable solution, the Fit Simplify Resistance Bands are Amazon's best-selling set, with over 100,000 ratings. Currently, Amazon offers a 50% discount on these bands, making them available for just $9.98.
In conclusion, incorporating resistance bands into home workouts can significantly enhance progressive overload by providing variable, multi-directional resistance, maintaining constant muscle tension, and offering multiple avenues to increase load safely and effectively. Every home should have a set of resistance bands for workouts, as they can help avoid muscle adaptation and plateau in workouts, making exercises more challenging, and causing muscle fibers to break down and grow back stronger.
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Fitness trainer Danica Osborn's recommended setup of using 5lb dumbbells with resistance bands can provide a more challenging workout, offering benefits such as variable resistance and multi-directional resistance that free weights may lack. This setup can also help maintain muscle tension throughout the entire motion, improving hypertrophy stimuli and providing a progressive loading option.
