Buckling Down on Bands and Tubing

Giant rubber bands and rubber tubes provide a muscle resistance workout for just pennies. These inexpensive items can’t make you as strong or measure your progress as precisely as machines and free weights, but bands do challenge your muscles in different and effective ways. For example, because bands don’t rely on weight or gravity for resistance, bands provide a challenge during both the up and down motions of an exercise. With most free weight and weight machine exercises, on the other hand, you typically feel most of the resistance during the lifting portion of the exercise, because gravity assists in the lowering portion. Rubber bands and tubes are also convenient and portable. (You can’t exactly pack dumbbells in your overnight bag.) If you don’t have access to machines, bands are a great supplement to free weights because they allow you to do exercises that aren’t possible with dumbbells and bars.