Click the link below to listen to the full interview where I grill the band man all about resistance band training:
Or read the full transcript below:
BJ Gaddour: Hey, this is BJ Gaddour, Workout Muse co-creator and fitness director. I am just peachy this morning because I’ve got Dave Schmitz, the founder of resistance band training systems on the phone with us today and we’re going to be talking all about resistance band training in general. Dave is one of my very good friends in the industry and we’ve done a lot of cool stuff together. Specifically, we’ve found a way to really fuse the RBT system and Workout Muse to help automate these band workouts.
We’re basically bringing a new RBT product powered by Workout Muse to the table. Dave has outlined his four favorite interval templates powered by Workout Muse and he’s going to go through a lot of different applications involving the workouts both for athlete-based populations and general fitness. It’s going to be a really great opportunity to learn from the band man. I think he actually is part elastic- I’m just going to go on a limb and say that. He lives it, he loves it, and he’s one of my favorite people in the world.
Dave, please introduce yourself to the group, give us your background regarding how you got started with RBT, and then we’ll kind of outline the goals of this interview.
David Schmitz: Alright. Well Good Morning BJ and thank you very much. You know it, we could go on forever in terms of why you and I are getting really excited about this stuff. Thank you very much for bringing me on. Let me tell you a little bit about my history and we’ll take it from there.
I’m a physical therapist and so a lot of my training has been based around what I originally saw in the physical therapy clinic when people came in injured. To make a long story short, injuries aren’t fun but injuries have consistencies. I started seeing a lot of consistencies between various injuries. When you get to treat hundreds of low back, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries, you get a good chance to learn from them. So reactive resistance band training all started based on what I saw in the clinic. With that history of those injuries, the number one thing we saw, and we’re going to talk more about this in a little bit, but people just were not moving well, people were not stopping well and people were not learning how to recruit muscles well. What we had to do is we had to start establishing some ways for them to start training so they could start working on that. What I saw in the fitness and performance market was a lot of people working on things like acceleration and absolute strength. But once as we start talking about the resistance band, what you’re going to see is it’s not about lifting a resistance or pushing a resistance, it’s about teaching your body’s neuromuscular system how to respond. That in a nutshell is where this all started from.
Just recently, I started putting a lot more emphasis into the fitness and performance components because I really get excited about working with these groups. Essentially what I’m doing BJ is I’m getting people before they get injured, and what better way to help people than to go ahead and make sure they don’t get injured, keep them healthy and keep them active throughout their entire life. Right now I pulled myself out of the rehab clinic a little bit and I put myself far more aggressively into the fitness and performance entity for those reasons. Again, we could go into longer history, but that’s generally is where it all started.
BJ Gaddour: Very cool man. I think one thing I always loved about your story is how in the past you used to do more of the meat-head bodybuilding style type of workouts using only deadweight. Then everything for you changed in the way you move, the way you perform, the way you recover from workouts, etc. when you really started incorporating a lot more band training into your routines. Can you take us through that because a lot of people can relate to that type of situation where they were just using deadweight only and feeling like though they were getting stronger, they were still just a little bit slow, not really performing the way they wanted to. Take us through that.
David Schmitz: Okay. Let me take you back, everybody stay with me for the next five minutes here and you’ll understand the whole sequence. In terms of the history behind resistance bands, they initially came onto the scene around the 60’s when people were just using them as something that’s stretched to create resistance. They didn’t know really what the full spectrum of applications for bands were at the time, they just knew that if they stretch this elastic resistance they could make muscles work and got fatigued and that was cool.
As we evolved with this concept, in elastic resistance we’ve started to create tools like tubing and thera-bands that kind of just were used in the rehab market because that’s where it made the most sense- it was very portable and you can use it at home and so forth. I kind of think that where bands got their jumpstart was with the Westside Barbell Concept, and how they started using resistance bands to help develop absolute strength and max speed for powerlifting.
The reason I bring this up is because in the 80’s what we started looking at in the rehab market was implementing this concept of functional training. With functional training, what happened was we started seeing that what we really wanted to train were things like momentum, ground reaction forces and gravity.
Now going back to your original question BJ, you asked me about deadweight training. I trained with tons of deadweight, body part split workouts. When you look at deadweight training, the number one thing deadweight training impacts is gravity because gravity is a vertical force vector concept. The problem is momentum and ground reaction forces are two other strong entities that functional training talked about and that deadweight training only doesn’t full address.
When I started looking at resistance band training and the things that resistance bands did for me, what I found was that deadweight training gave me one component of performance, that being absolute strength. But it did nothing to improve my neuromuscular system in order to become more athletic, quicker, and more explosive and give me what I like to call a little “pop.” I wanted to always have that little burst, that little explosion because I always felt that was the difference maker for being a good athlete versus a great athlete.
I started training with resistance bands because it trained momentum and it trained me to be able to handle force vectors in all planes of movement and all diagonals. Plus, it caused me to have to learn how to efficiently handle ground reaction forces, which meant that when my foot hit the ground I had to be able to respond quickly and get out of there and do whatever I wanted to do from a movement standpoint. A lot of that makes sense when you start looking at change of direction and performance enhancement. But in reality BJ, a lot of times when I’m walking down the street or I’m doing something at home in the backyard, ground reaction forces become a huge entity as well.
As we evolve to this conversation, please people, think about performance in terms of both as daily activities like work and play as well the more competitive environments on the field and court so to speak. They’re basically the same, the only difference is one is being handled at a little bit higher velocity than the other. To kind of summarize all that, the reason I got away from deadweight training was because I was not training the other two aspects of function, momentum and ground reaction forces, the way it needed to be trained. What was happening was I was getting strong but I was getting slow at the expense of my strength. I didn’t want to be slow, I wanted to be explosive, quick and agile along with being strong, and so I had to start looking at different ways of accomplishing this.
BJ Gaddour: Very cool. This is what I love about Dave in the sense that there are lot of so-called fitness experts out there that market some resistance band of sorts for general fitness workouts. Again, they tend to approach it as simply just a tool to make your muscles burn and get tired. Dave’s approach is entirely based on improving the whole performance spectrum involved with movement. That’s really the cool thing about his band training system, not only his unique approach to its many applications in athletic-based settings but also in a general fitness setting like bootcamps as well. One thing that I’m always like blown away by Dave – I believe you’re 46, right Dave?
David Schmitz: Actually I’m 47 years old BJ.
BJ Gaddour: Dave is probably in better shape than many professional athletes you’ll see. He’s ripped, he’s got a six-pack, he’s extremely quick. He’s a guy that can compete with these kids he trains, these really high-end high school and college athletes he trains, because of his approach to using bands. So not only is he going to make you an incredible athlete but you’ll get into ridiculous shape, you’re going to burn a ton of calories. You’re going to get simultaneous strength and cardiovascular benefits, improve your flexibility, and your reaction time. It’s just a phenomenal total fitness experience, and that’s what Dave brings to the table.
So that’s kind of the goal with this whole thing, we want to make sure that whether you train athletes primarily, whether you train more general fitness adult clientele, whether you you train both, bands have immediate and lasting applications in each instance. For someone who really specializes in bootcamps like myself, adding bands into our metabolic circuit training format has been a really cool addition that our campers love. They’re safe to implement, they’re fun, they’re very low cost, and they’re portable. They’re the most portable piece of equipment that really exists in my mind, probably along with the TRX suspension trainer. You can fit it in your bag, you can fit it in your purse- just tons of amazing applications. So whether you want to add bands into you current camps or whether you want to actually end up making a niche band bootcamp which actually is a great add-on to your current offerings, you can truly build your bootcamp business with bands. This is what we’re going to touch on today all the way through for fitness professionals. In addition, we’ll hammer how to use bands for your own personal home workouts for fitness consumers.
So let’s get into general guidelines with resistance band training. The safety recommendations you have for the bands, choosing the right band tension. I think like anything Dave, I’m sure you wince when you see people using the bands improperly as I would wince when I see people using Workout Muse improperly. So that’s why we do what we do in terms of continuing education so that the system itself isn’t bastardized. So let’s go through that because obviously we deal with this on a regular basis.
David Schmitz: Sure. Well let’s talk about safety guidelines first of all. The number one safety guideline is this, resistance band lengthens and they stretch but they don’t stretch unlimitedly. Each resistance band is 41 inches long with a continuous loop. So therefore it has the power and the ability to stretch two yards. You need to follow those guidelines not because if you go two and half yards the band is going to self-destruct, but over time you’ll start tethering and wearing out the band. So to me that is the biggest safety guideline. Most people mistakenly think the easiest way to get more resistance with the resistance band is simply to stretch it out more- take it further. You really have to kind of clue in on that, you have to make sure that you’re only stretching the band appropriate to its appropriate length, which brings us to the next guideline…
What band to use? How to choose the correct band resistance for your current fitness level? Well, first and foremost if you’re over-stretching the band, then you need to go up to another resistance level. That’s the first thing. The second thing is if you’re not going through a full range of motion with each exercise. You’ve got be able to push all the way through the end range of motion and that’s the benefit of resistance bands that you’ve got to take advantage of when compared to deadweight only training. If you see people not going through full ranges of the motion, early on in a set, you know two, three, four reps into the set, they are clearly using a band with too much tension for their current fitness level and need to drop down a level.
Another safety concern is regarding the actual completion of a perfect rep of an exercise. After they’ve completed the concentric component of a movement and they’re going back into the deceleration or the eccentric component of it, if they’re letting the band snap them back, they’re asking for tendon and soft tissue trauma to start occurring. You don’t want that. So again, you want to make sure you’re handling the tension of the band both all the way out and all the way back. In other words, you need to be able to effectively control the movement from start to finish with the current band tension that you are using.
Lastly, another thing you want to look for with safety or choosing the right band is you always have to have some degree of tension on the band, both at the start point and at the end point of the range of motion. You’ve got to adjust things accordingly there. So range of motion really dictates the type of band you’re going to use. Those are couple big things with regards to stretch guidelines and with regards to choosing the right band.
Let’s talk about attachment. Where are you going to attach your band? Are you going to do partner-based training or you’re going to attach it to a wall or post? Let’s talk about attaching it first. If you’re going to attach your band, you need to attach it to something that is circular in nature, a pole for example. Playground equipment a lot of times has a round pole, that is by and far what I recommend you attach the bands to. Anything else outside of that, what you’re going to do is you’re going to create unwanted tensions on the band as you’re training. Those tensions will start to wear on your band and will ultimately start to damage it. My suggestion is either attach it to a pole or you attach it to a device that we developed several years ago called the band utility strap which basically allows you to now attach your band onto anything. You can check that out on my site if you need more information on that. But that’s what you want to be attaching your bands to.
Outside of that, the only other thing you will need to watch for is when you do free-band training where the band is attached, especially when you attach it down at your feet. You need to understand that where you want the tension is between your foot and your hands, not between your feet. A lot of people as they’re working free-band exercises, what they do in order to get more tension is they widen their feet out. All you’re doing is stretching the band between your feet, you’re not stretching the band between your foot and your upper body. So therefore, you overstretch the band between your feet and subsequently damage the band there.
So that’s the last attachment safety guideline I want people to clue in on, free-band training is awesome because you can go anywhere with it. But you’ve got to understand where you want the tension- you want the tension between your upper body and your lower body, not between your feet. So in general I think outside of that, the only other thing that you want to watch for with band training is this: it is a latex product. Therefore people could have a latex reaction. To be totally honest with you, I have never had anybody have a latex reaction in any of my camps or in any of my high school training facilities. However it is a latex product and you need to be conscious of that.
Lastly, make sure your training surfaces are good which you would do anyway, but especially with band training you want to make sure your training surfaces are good because you’re going to be doing a lot of deceleration stop-and-go work. You need to have good traction and good stabilization when people are decelerating. So that’s about it right there BJ.
BJ Gaddour: Again, it’s all great stuff. Dave has an awesome show called RBT Live where basically he just fields his valued customer questions and concerns, and Dave just answers them in a really cool video format. Again, a lot of this stuff, a lot of fitness in general, you have to see in action for yourself to comprehend it and Dave does a phenomenal job of showing this type stuff via video and audio and that type of thing. So make sure you reference that, and we’ll touch on this more towards the end of the call where you can find out how to learn all of this killer stuff through Dave in person. Again, he’s a very dynamic guy and I think that you’ll find that watching him will really make this even better and a lot easier to kind of see exactly what he’s talking about.
So let’s talk about the benefits of RBT. We’ve touched on that a little bit., but there are so many benefits, I think it’s kind of cool just to outline them for the listener so they can start to see the applications that go far beyond what anyone would probably think of. Most people think of just bands, “Okay, this is the way for me to do my rows if I don’t have access to weights when I’m on the road or at home,” just kind of a makeshift personal workout. Take us through that Dave, the benefits of RBT.
David Schmitz: Okay. Well you’re right about that BJ, bands when they first came out were kind of looked upon as your last alternative to training. I am working really hard to change that misconception, to making bands a necessity that you need to have in your training if you’re truly going to make your body be fully ready to handle anything in life.
First of all, the general benefits, obviously portability. I say portability with power and strength, not just because it’s a portable structure or it’s nice you can take anywhere, not that at all. What I refer to as portable power is I can create any resistance that will challenge anybody in this world because bands have unlimited resistance, therefore you’re not looking at this portable training device as just something that you can get a workout in. You could actually create enough resistance with it to go ahead and train anybody, which brings me to the next thing.
The next thing about bands is it is applicable to training anybody, it could train anytime, you could train at any intensity, you can train anywhere, and even train anything. So let me just touch on all those. Obviously anywhere, you can easily train outside, you can train at your bootcamps, you can train high school kids in performance camps on the track, in the gym, in hallways, in a cafeteria. The thing is you can go where they go, so being able to training anywhere is one of the major benefits.
Anytime- what I mean by that is you could always get a workout in, always get a workout in no matter where you are because you can always attach it to the doors, you can attach in to hotel room area, do free band workouts. You and I, BJ, have done tons of workouts in our traveling together, we’ve gotten tons of workouts in and we’ve done it in a lot of different places.
Anybody- resistance bands adapt to any level of strength. I’ve got guys that are some of the strongest guys in the world training with my resistance bands and I’ve also got senior citizens training with them. So that’s the whole gamut. Any intensity, we’ve already touched on that. I carry seven levels of bands, my strongest band generates well over 350 pounds of resistance, my weakest band generates about 5 to 10 pounds of resistance, and anywhere in between there I can create resistance for you.
The last thing is anything, what do we mean by anything? Anything means I can train flexibility, I can train cardiovascular strength, I can obviously create incredible metabolic workouts which we’re going to talk about in a little bit. I can go ahead and create performance enhancement drills that help work on deceleration control and acceleration and first step explosiveness. We can also take and create incredible band training circuits that help supplement your primary limbs that you use for sports performance like power clean and back squat and front squat and those type of things, I can create auxiliary or complimentary exercises that help you become more explosive with those exercises. So when I say anything, I can literally impact any component of fitness or performance that you want me to.
So, those are the huge benefits. Here’s a couple of functional-based benefits of bands and why you need to have them in your workout. Number one, they impact function, the ability to handle momentum, gravity, and ground reaction forces differently than any other training tool. You can try it with tubing, you can try it with bungee cords, you can try it with other things that stretch, the fact is they all have significant limitations to be able to impact those three big keys of function. You need to be training those three keys because if you’re not, you’re going to do like I did; you’re going to get slow and you’re going to start getting injured because all you’re doing is training that impacts gravity and absolute strength, and you’re not getting fast, explosive and flexible.
Being able to attach bands to different aspects of your body, you can turn on muscles you’ve never turned on before. BJ, you and I both know we trained a ton of people in bootcamps. People have a lot of dysfunctional, poor muscle recruitment patterns. As a fitness professional who’s training in bootcamps, I would like to go around and work with everybody but sometimes it’s almost impossible to do that in a large group setting. What would work better is to have a tool that when you attach it onto the person or have them grip it or hold on to it or hook it around their hips, that it neuromuscularly activates things right away. That is a huge benefit of resistance band training that nobody looks at.
But I’ll tell you right now, if you have a weak posterior chain, that’s the muscles on the backside of your body like your glutes, hamstrings, and spinal erectors, and I need to turn it on, I’m going to put you in a band hip-attachment set up. What I’m going to have you do something simple like maybe power skips or reaches or lunges. I guarantee you, I will activate your glutes in a heartbeat, you won’t even have to do anything but just the movement pattern I ask you to do. That is a huge benefit of band training that again you can’t stimulate with any deadweight device.
BJ Gaddour: Dave, just to add a couple of points too… What I always look at- the majority of my clientele, they’re trying to burn fat, get in the best shape of their life, they only have 30 minutes to exercise three days per week. So I’ve got to make sure that the exercise selection that we incorporate in our circuits, in our workouts, and everything is metabolic. We’re going to touch on a bunch of metabolic based workouts using bands. By metabolic, as Coach Dos refers to as cardio strength training, what we mean is that it combines the benefits of cardiovascular exercise with strength training into one total fitness package, and there’s a clear impact on metabolism for up to 48 hours after the workouts.
One of the ways you do that is the integration concept. What bands do is they allow you integrate multiple planes of movement at once, in addition to working the horizontal force vector in a standing position. Nothing else can allow you to do that besides cable setups. Now cable setups are on often times prohibitively expensive, not very space efficient, and you can’t take it outdoors unless like you – I don’t know how you do that, but I guess it’s possible but not feasible. That is a huge component. We talked about athletes, lot of people like the bench press. Again, it’s one of those exercises that I don’t think will ever leave just because it’s such a staple of the strength training mantra.
But in reality, a more functional approach to that horizontal push is going to be in standing position, a split stance position. It’s going to be going from a squat to a press, a squat to a chest press. That’s the cool thing about the bands is that you can integrate multiple movement patterns as well. We basically take what was typically just an upper body movement moving on your back with the bench press, not pretty functional at all, and now we’re standing and we’ve got the legs involved, we’ve got the core involved, we are in an athletic position. We can rotate into the press and we can get so many different things going on our feet that we can’t do on our backs, and that’s something the bands allow for.
So you can integrate by combining different movement patterns and upper body and lower body movements and you can integrate by combining multiple planes of movements. So where most exercises are just sagittally based, up and down and front and back, bands really provide just an amazing amount of application in the frontal plane which is side to side and the transverse plane which is more rotationally-based movements. So you are ready to rock for anything that you will possibly experience in life, on the field, on the court, wherever.
David Schmitz: Exactly BJ, thank you for bringing that up. Multi-vector force production AND force reduction. The cool thing is, in resistance bands because you’re training in horizontal vectors, rotational vectors and frontal plane vectors, that you literally have to control the force reduction component as much as the production component. Therefore your calorie expenditure goes way up.
The other thing with resistance bands is you can use them to compliment other tools as well. For example, I know you just did a whole month on kettlebell training. Let’s take the traditional kettlebell swing, but now attach a resistance band to your hips, and then perform multidirectional or different types of kettlebell swings. Now you’re using not only the kettlebell vertical force vector, but you’ve also got a horizontal force vector at your hips. Can you imagine, when you have two to three vectors coming at your body from different directions what the calorie expenditure is, not to mention the functional impact and the ability to create a much more functionally based training exercise program so that you’re recruiting the right things at the right times. But put all that aside, it’s just flat out more work, It’s flat out more work and you’re getting a lot more calories burnt. So thank you for brining that up. There’s another benefit as well, combining tools with bands and getting all the vector training that you’re looking for.
BJ Gaddour: I always like to say, total body exercises within a total body workout. But that’s level three, that’s advanced, that’s how we approach our camps. You don’t have to involve any extra loading. If you only have a certain number of bands, going from a band front squat to band front squat to press, that an integration progression by combining an upper and lower body movement into one. We’re now involving more muscles. It’s a cool way to look at it, and that’s why I’m such a huge fan of the bands for all these reasons.
Let’s get into the yummy stuff, if you will, Dave. Dave and I have done a bunch of really awesome workouts together. We’ve done a bunch of really cool, kind of fusion workouts with people like Pam and Jason of Kettlebell Athletics, using kettlebells and the bands, powering the workouts with Workout Muse. Really the best part of when we get together at these fitness events is we get 50-100 fitness professionals in one room. They do this for a living and a lot of them are in good shape, and they leave with a life-changing experience where at least one or two times during in that workout they see God’s face. I always have a lot of fun doing that, and I know Dave does as well.
Let’s go through these, what we like to call “life-changer workouts” that Dave is famous for. Let’s start with Dave kind of talking about the use of each workout template, kind of a sample workout that you would set up, and what’s the best band set up for a lot of these workouts. The first one in our list is the classic 20/10 Tabata Station Workout that goes for 20 minutes.
Dave Schmitz: Let’s talk about that one first. That’s a great place to start for a lot of different reasons. But let’s just go ahead and let’s just use bands in a free-band set up, which is what we’re going to do with this 20-10 tabata workout. Typically what I will do is I will take two exercises that compliment each other. For example, a front squat followed by an overhead press. I’ll put those exercises together doing one for 20 seconds and then taking the 10-second break and then coming back and doing the other. So you end up doing four sets of each or eight total rounds. That’s one way you can go ahead and do it.
The other way that eventually you can use 20-10 Tabatas is you could use it in partner-based training if you wanted to because you had the 10-second ability to transfer from Partner A to Partner B. My suggestion is though when we look at the 20/10 Tabatas for the resistance bands that we’re going to do, you just start implementing either a station-based workout or a free-band workout, pair up two complimentary exercises, and start there. That’s the best way to get your group, your fitness group or you athletes, to start buying into how to go ahead and utilize resistance bands.
Trust me, we do a Friday chaos conditioning at our high school for my athletes and we do 20/10 Tabatas. We go through actually two 20-minute bouts, so we actually go through eight stations instead of just four stations The kids love it. Essentially it’s just plug and play, the kids know the workout. It’s total band training and they really enjoy it. So, that’s how I do it, free-band training 20/10 Tabatas on that one. BJ, do you want me to go right in to the next one?
BJ Gaddour: To touch on just one thing too, I think it’s important because again Tabatas are like a craze now and a lot of people don’t really know how to use the protocol appropriately. One thing I think that’s important and I think Dave you’ll probably agree with me on is that ideally in these 20-second work periods, these are metabolic workouts, we’re trying to get a lot of fast, powerful contractions in that 20 seconds. Ideally, we’re looking for about 10 fast, powerful reps in those 20 seconds.
If you’re getting a lot less than that, then most likely your band tension is a little bit too high. If you’re getting a lot more than 10 reps in that 20 seconds, then most likely the band tension is too light. So, you want to find a band tension that really makes it challenging to perform about 10 explosive reps in those 20 seconds. That really is that sweet spot for that metabolic workout, we’re getting both strength and cardiovascular benefits at the same time, a lot of good endurance as well.
Again, these short sets are really cool, especially for kids, because a 60-second work period for a lot kids in the youth format, it’s mental torture where with these short burst, high-intensity efforts you get the benefits of really working on strength and power, but getting your endurance going at the same time with a lot of short recovery periods and repeat bouts.
Dave Schmitz: Exactly. Also, you choose the bands that fit your weakest exercise. I know you just recently talked about that BJ, but for instance if you’re doing a front squat and an overhead press, the overhead press is obviously going to be more challenging than a front squat. The way I will go ahead and adjust that a little bit is I will say on front squats I want to make it high rep metabolic. I will go ahead and say I really need 20 reps in 20 seconds, as close as you can. Then I’ll flip flop it when they go to overhead presses, knowing that’s their weak link I’m shooting for 10 reps. So you can tweak it a little bit that way.
Now because you have this 10-second rest period, literally I will have people who have three different levels of bands – and if you’re blessed with having multiple bands, they’ll literally have enough time to take a stronger band, so they’re pushing a heavy band for both front squats and overhead presses. You can do that. As people start to get really into this, what you’ll see is they’ll just go ahead and pick up two or three different levels of bands when you say we’re doing a Tabata workout today, and my group typically does. The way I set it up now in my bootcamp just helps people out. I have enough bands, I line up piles of bands at various stations where I’ll have three different levels of bands, a red, a black and a purple or a black, purple and green. I’ll set it down and people will go ahead pick up their piles, they’ll go to their area and we’re going to knock out a Tabata free-band workout without any problem, and they’ll flip flop band tension.
BJ Gaddour: Beautiful. Again, I think that’s a great point you made Dave in the sense that when it comes to exercise selection the lower body inherently has just a lot more endurance. An example like the band front squat, trying to get a rep per second in that 20-second time frame, getting 20 reps in 20 seconds, that definitely is a great protocol to use as well. The key is just knowing what you’re trying to accomplish in that workout. If you’re not someone who has a lot of heavy bands in your arsenal, let’s try to really intensify it by just getting as many possible reps in those 20 seconds as well. If we’re doing really fast 20-rep front squats with good band tension and the fact that the band really forces you to accelerate through the top position, where the resistance is at its peak, you’re going to really jack things up in a good way.
Dave Schmitz: Exactly. That’s what people won’t know until they try it. Until they try it they’ll say, “Wait a minute, I got to work through the full range of motions,” which is one of the fundamental things about resistance bands that we didn’t cover earlier is that you have to work to the full range of motion, and especially at your weaker points. So, that’s very important and again will be a big metabolic expenditure.
BJ Gaddour: Very cool. So Dave, take us to the next one.
Dave Schmitz: Okay, 45/15. I like the 45/15 Circuit because what it allows me to do is it allows me to really start teaching people how to start getting very neuromuscularly strong using resistance bands. What we’ll do with the 45/15 Circuit is we’re going to do 10 exercises, so basically what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an exercise for 45 seconds and then go to a new exercise after a 15-second break. We’re going to go through 10 total exercises, and then we’re going to take a two-minute break after that. What I would typically try to do is I’ll try to template out a workout that goes – I like to train an upper body exercise, typically a push, followed by a lower body exercise, followed by an upper body pull. Then I go to a core exercise, and then I go to a cardio exercise if I can. So that’s one of the templates I like to use.
Another template I like to use is I like to go ahead and do an upper body exercise, again I’ll go with the push, I like to then go with a unilateral lower body exercise where now they have to do right side and then left side, then come back with an upper body push or pull, and then finish up with a core. So, they have to have a little bit of recovery and then repeat that five exercise circuit again.
Sometimes as you’re teaching people with the different sequences, you can choose 10 exercises. But if you’re getting people acclimated into the workout, you may want to go ahead choose five exercises, have them repeat it and then take the break. That allows me to do two things, one is it allows me to do is really watch people for five exercises to make sure they’re doing well with those five first before adding more movements. Then as they’re going through it the second time or going in to the second round, I can go ahead and show them a simple, little progression that makes it a little bit more challenging. As an example, if they’re doing a high-pull, I can now do a high-pull step or I can do a high-pull hold or a high-pull pull apart.
So there’s a lot of different variations. 45/15 allows me to watch people do free-band exercises and get them adjusted very easily that way. That’s how we use the 45/15, either as a sequence of 10 total exercises or two groups of five where they go ahead and repeat it in that sequence.
BJ Gaddour: I think what we really have to stress to everybody Dave is it’s important to understand exercise recall. For most people, when they’re rested, remembering more than five exercises is difficult, especially if they’re not a fitness professional or they don’t do it for a living. Now let’s add on to the fact that these workouts are very lactic acid and anaerobic based and a lot of oxygen is not going through the brain as it normally would and exercise recall is at its lowest during these workouts. So going into ten exercise circuits for a non-advance group is probably not a good idea.
As Dave outlines, let’s keep it simple, let’s go with five exercises, still hit kind of a whole body based format, then just repeat it again and get the full 10 exercise sequence, let people get more skill rehearsal on the movements in general as well. So, that’s very important because you want your workouts to run smoothly, and less is more when it comes to exercise selection across the board.
Dave Schmitz: Yes. I promise you, if you do this, if you a five exercise circuit and you do that just for one workout, you just double it up in your 45/15 ten exercise sequence and then you go through three total rounds of that, then the next workout do a different five, by the third time you come in to do another 45/15 band workout, they will have remembered the first five and the second five. Now, bring them together and you got your 10 exercise circuit action. Literally, when you have the opportunity to repeat an exercise four times or five times, the muscle memory and the mental memory of that exercise really kicks in pretty quick. It’s really interesting to see, within a couple of weeks you can have people really getting after it. So, I build on success, give them success for five exercises, give them a new five and then go ahead and start playing with that a little bit from there.
BJ Gaddour: Awesome. Let’s go to the next one, I’m excited for the next one here.
Dave Schmitz: The next one is the ultimate. The reason I like it and the reason I said we need to do this 120 on / 120 off sequence is this- I love partner training. I love having people have to attach to each other using bands, either by holding at your hands or holding at your waist or however we have them attached. But the key with band partner training is this, it takes a little bit of training and a little bit of learning. Most importantly, it takes time to learn how to hold and it takes time to learn how to go ahead and transition from Partner A to Partner B.
Well, 120 is perfect because the way we’re going to do a 120 on / 120 off is this, we’re going to follow an I-go-you-go sequence. Basically you can go five reps or you can go 10 reps if you choose. I find that somewhere between five and six reps is very good to have Partner A go ahead do five reps, and then Partner B does five reps, and then back to Partner A. You go for a total of 120 seconds and see how many total rounds you can get done of that one specific exercise in two minutes, and then you’ve got a 120-second recovery.
Now what do you do during the recovery? A couple of different things. I like to implement going ahead and doing some simple body weight exercises for trunk stability. Get out of the bands a little bit and let them do something like that. You could do a simple stationary jog. You can go ahead and eventually having them doing band running drills if they get effective at it. So I think from a recovery standpoint BJ, mostly everybody out there can up with some different things to for the recovery. But the cool thing is what this sequence allows you to do is it allows you to start really incorporating partner-based training and not have to feel like there’s a lot of pressure when it comes to transition and when it comes to holding. You could teach people very easily in that.
I can take a group, take one exercise like let’s say partner horizontal push, hook them up and get set. Now literally you’re only training half the group at one time, so you can go ahead and queue people easily in this sequence, and they’re just going back and forth communicating. You also create that partner communication which is an incredible chemistry builder for your bootcamps. I’m telling you right now, you want to get chemistry in your bootcamps because when you get chemistry you got a great bootcamp going and people start to spread the word real quickly.
BJ Gaddour: Two things I really love about this template is that it’s very smart. What Dave focuses on doing is instead of getting 10-20 reps with a movement, and usually the last 5-10 reps you’re going to feel the fatigue and the quality of the movements start to suffer. You’re not as explosive, you’re not getting as full a range of motion. Dave’s concept is let’s cut the reps in half, so to speak, per set and just get a lot more sets of these sub-maximal efforts in terms of number of repetitions. But every single rep is done with a maximal effort, so the quality of movement is better.
If you’re doing 20 reps, let’s compare 20 reps straight, a 20 rep set, and the quality of movement in that as you start to fatigue and you start to slow down in the movement pattern, and then let’s look at four sets of five done really fast. Since you’re alternating between your partner, you’re getting the right amount of rest to be able to go for the next bout of five reps, that’s a great way actually to get more total work done and more explosiveness, more muscles activated by making sure every rep is of the highest quality.
Again the second component that’s really cool is that this two-minute transition allows for multiple things. You can have them do corrective self massage with foam rolling during the rest period, or do some dynamic stretching with the band, hit the ground do give reps on each hamstring just to open it up and get that in, get that flexibility training actually during your workout so that you can kind of get everything done at once. At the same time, Dave can actually coach a new movement pattern during that two-minute time while campers are resting and getting water, stretching or foam rolling, maybe doing some active recovery stuff like a lunge matrix. It’s a really cool protocol, and I can see why Dave loves it.
Dave Schmitz: It is, it works out awesome and people really like it. The other thing is as your group becomes more advanced, because they’re only doing five reps they start to do ahead and say “I’m going to try the bigger resistance today, I’m going to step myself up from a red to a black band because we’re only doing five reps, and I think I’m ready for it.” So you start getting people to start going after just a little bit more resistance. What that equates into obviously besides strength gain is bigger calorie expenditure, bigger workload and all of that. With quality, you get better recruitment. As you said, better recruitment means more calorie expenditure because you got more muscles working in the same sequence of activity, and it’s all integrated real well.
BJ Gaddour: Beautiful. We’ve got our last template on here, so take us through that.
Dave Schmitz: Now that you have your continuous partner exercises going, why not put five of them together? When you get to the 30-5 sequence, what you’re really now ready to do, what I’d like to do, is pure partner training. What I mean by that is we’re going to do five exercises, and after each exercise Partner A is going to go, Partner B is going to go for 30 seconds, and then you’ll literally going to transition to a second exercise, and then a third exercise, a fourth exercise and then a fifth exercise. Then you’re going to get a one-minute recovery and you’re going to repeat that for five more rounds. What’s really cool is now you start getting total body metabolic training because you can hit a push followed by a pull, then go ahead and hit a lower body, and then you can transition right into a trunk or a core stabilization exercise, all of these are partner-based. So, you’re helping each other out, you’re pushing each other, but you’re attached in one partner set-up.
Plus when it’s really needed, you can always finish it off with a high octane cardio exercise like a backpedal shuffle, things like that. But 30-5 Parter Training is a great way to start really rocking and rolling with partner-based training. Literally you got two people working together and getting after it, and the five seconds that it takes is perfect to transition from one exercise to the next one. It’s really all you need. When people start getting experienced with your continuous work, then take five exercises that they can transition for very easily and go ahead and knock a 30-5 Partner Circuits. When you get to that, you have arrived when it comes to resistance band training. You are doing it because partner-based training allows you to absolutely go anywhere to train, anywhere. No attachments needed, and you can crank up some serious resistance because it really doesn’t take much to hold for your partner once you’ve taught holding applications correctly.
So that’s where we go BJ, when you get to this, it’s a lot of partner-based training. Yes, you could still do free-band training, and yes you could still do the other things we talked about, but I really like to use this for pure partner training.
BJ Gaddour: Again, the coolest thing is no matter what group it is, an athletic team, a community bootcamp, the team building component of this workout is phenomenal. It’s great to just sit back sometimes and just see it unfold like it’s an autopilot. They’re pushing each other, they’re screaming, they’re sweating. People that normally don’t work that hard are really pushing because they’ve got their buddy keeping them accountable. At the same time, what you never want especially in a kind of youth-based environment is allowing dead time to kind of distract people. The cool thing about this is the short transition times are all that’s needed to get to the next exercise, to kind of switch from Partner 1 to Partner 2, and at the same time you’re coaching one another – Dave does a great job of making sure that the partners coach each other. If they’re doing a shuffle drill, he’s emphasizing that they keep that wide foot base throughout to make sure we’re not crossing the feet over, and they’re keeping each other accountable. Basically you have all these mini coaches throughout the whole session assisting you so you crank up 50-100 people at once to best leverage your time and all that good stuff.
Dave Schmitz: Exactly. You’re right about keeping everybody busy at all times. Downtime in adult camps or more importantly even in youth camps, you don’t want downtime. You want everybody to be accountable for everybody and be totally involved in the process. When you get that, time flies and kids really get great workouts. The other thing about holding is this, one of the major things that we lack as a society is stability. You are going to work some tremendous stabilization control with holding, which is one of the benefits of partner band training that you just can’t get with any other tool. I get really excited about partner band training because I just think it’s a concept of resistance band training that nobody looks at, and yet from a fitness standpoint and a performance standpoint it’s the ultimate way to train when you’re working with groups or teams and so forth.
BJ Gaddour: You got it. Again this brings us to kind of closing up this interview. Awesome content. Dave, thanks so much again for doing this with us. The big thing, the month of May 2010 is band month at Workout Muse. Each week we’ll release one of these soundtracks plus a bunch of cool done for you follow-along workouts that Dave has created using the soundtracks. You’re literally going to have an automated turnkey band training system that is digitally based that you can roll out anywhere. It’s very exciting stuff.
The number one thing I want to make sure you guys do is get with Dave, find a way to get more information from what Dave does on a regular basis whether it be his newsletter or actually the most exciting part in my mind is Dave is rolling out a killer resistance band training certification. So let’s let Dave talk on that a little bit and explain that. Again, if you are professional, you need to be a professional, you need to be certified, you need to do this stuff for probably a couple of weeks if not a couple of months before you bring the more advanced stuff to your camps. The biggest mistake people make whether be kettlebells, bands, the TRX, is that they get these cool new toys and they just want to throw it right away to the camps for them to get so giddy and excited, but they don’t know how to use it, and they don’t use it themselves. A lot of the learning comes from your personal experience with the equipment, with the workouts themselves.
So Dave has a certification that will teach exactly how to do this stuff. So from day one using the bands, you are a top notch professional. So Dave, talk to us about that.
Dave Schmitz: I’ve done a couple of live certifications, and one of the things that I’ve learned is people enjoyed it and really want the information. Travel and time is always difficult, you and I are both busy guys and you know what we mean by that. So what we’re doing with the certification is we’re going to roll it back and we’re going to create a mail order certification, complete with DVDs that are being obviously taught by me. Also what we’re going to do is create a manual and everything that you need to get up to speed with a level one certification in resistance band training. Now, that we hope to have out by approximately September 1st if not sooner.
Now the other thing that people can do, here’s how I recommend you get connected with RBT. On my website, ResistanceBandTraining.com, I have a newsletter opt-in. That newsletter opt-in gives you a nine session mini course that will get you up to speed on several of the highlights of what the certification will be about. Obviously it’s not the certification, but what I’ll do is I’ll give you a few sessions free to kind of get you acclimated so at least you can start playing it with yourself and get yourself going with it. BJ, it’s like always, you got to train yourself and then you start training others. That’s where I set these nine session mini course stuff, so that you start to learn for yourself.
So what you need to do is go to ResistanceBandTraining.com, go to the newsletter, it’s right there in front, it says “RBT Live,” it’s me jumping out of a TV. Go down, subscribe, get that nine session mini course, get started with that. Now when the certification is ready to be launched and when there’s updates on it, you will hear about it immediately. So that’s where the certification is at and that’s what I’ve got out there right now to kind of get you moving forward so that you don’t have to wait for the certification. You can get going right now on some stuff so by the time it comes out and everything is ready to go, you’re good to go in getting that information. So that’s the other thing.
The other thing is in regards to the shopping cart and the products that are available, please take a look at those and make sure also that you’re always clueing in to my weekly videos series. I keep giving tips and techniques every week and I don’t think there is a website out there especially involving with resistance band training that does that. So please, I really recommend that, please get on that and get going because it’s the fastest way to learn and it’s right there for you. All it takes is opting in and it comes right to your mailbox.
BJ Gaddour: I love it man. Again, Dave is one of those guys as I said at the beginning, he’s one of my favorite people in the world. I can consider him to be a friend for life and we’ve built a great relationship over the last couple of years. He is just an authentic guy. He loves it, he’s all about bringing more to what you’re currently doing and taking your currents camps to the next level, taking your athletes to the next level, and that’s exactly what these bands can do. I just can’t recommend Dave and his services highly enough. Then there’s that personal component where I don’t think you can find a better guy. His intensity, his loyalty, his drive is unmatched in this industry, and everything that Dave has gotten his life is well deserved. There’s just a ton of more cool stuff coming for Dave in the very near future that I’m very excited about because he deserves it. I’m just proud that he can work with us and share all his cool knowledge about bands and everything else he brings to the table with our Workout Muse followers.
My goal and I think Dave’s goal as well is that our respective list become one. Both systems combined, have an exponential return in the sense that it just amplifies each experience. If you’re just doing Workout Muse’s bodyweight workouts, that can get boring over time. You’ve got to mix things up, and bands allow you to really do that in a safe and effective manner that you can go anywhere with. At the same time, if you’re using Dave’s bands and you’re trying to look at the clock and you’re holding the bands, it’s very difficult. So the whole concept is we’re trying to automate that band workout, so you can focus on the workout itself and not the annoying task of looking at your clock and being a rep counter.
Dave, thank you so much my friend. We’re going to do a lot of cool stuff together, I’m looking forward it. I’m very excited about this month. Look forward to some killer information about band training powered by Workout Muse all month of May here at Workout Muse. Everybody have a phenomenal day. Dave, thank you so much. Any closing words?
Dave Schmitz: Just that when we brought Workout Muse – and BJ you know I told you this many times – into the bootcamps and the training groups, it completely made the workout go up to a completely new level, not just from an intensity standpoint but people now could focus in on other aspects that were far more important than having to look at the clock. I know when this came out I said “there’s something right about this,” that Workout Muse has just been a huge advantage to resistance band training in regards to the bootcamps and how we use it. Frankly, there isn’t a day that goes by, a workout that goes by that I won’t use it. You know that, I know that, that’s why we keep making all these new templates.
So, thanks a lot for doing this. I’m excited about the month of May and I think it’s going to be an incredible experience for the people that want to jump on board and just see what we’re about to show them and get them started on.
BJ Gaddour: Very cool man. Well, this is BJ Gaddour co-creator and fitness director of Workout Muse with my very good friend Dave Schmitz, the owner of ResistanceBandTraining.com. Look forward to some great stuff for May and crank it. We’ll see you later.
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Tags: bj gaddour, boot camp workouts with bands, dave schmitz, fitness bootcamps, interval training workout music, resistance band exercises, resistance band training, resistance band workouts, workout muse
I thought there were going to be 4 interval templates using bands when clicking on the link too?