You have many equipment options if you want to make your workouts more effective. Find out what benefits resistance bands offer.
These include more specific aspects of the resistance bands themselves and more general benefits of adding resistance to your workouts that definitely deserve a mention.
1. Resistance bands can help you build more muscle
The way you grow and strengthen muscles is by pressuring them with enough resistance, doing enough reps and sets, and giving your body the nutrients and rest needed.
Bodyweight exercises offer many benefits, especially for resistance training beginners.
However, at some point, you will miss out on training progress or stop seeing any results at all because the bodyweight exercises are not challenging enough.
By adding resistance bands to your exercises at this point, you can grow and strengthen your muscles faster.
Resistance bands are especially helpful in exercises like squats that focus on strong muscles like your quadriceps. These tend to require a lot of pressure to see results.
2. Resistance bands can help you lose more weight
If you want to lose weight, you need to make it so your body requires more energy than is coming in.
While this is not the number one benefit of resistance bands, you can definitely say they help in this process.
First of all, doing movements with more resistance tends to require more energy from your body.
As an example, a 155-pound (70 kg) person burns around 110 calories doing squats for 15 minutes.
On the other hand, a 185-pound (83 kg) person burns around 131 calories doing squats for 15 minutes.
Resistance bands will likely not have the same effect as extra body weight but this does make this concept clearer.
Besides that, using resistance bands allows you to build more muscle mass.
As you can see from the numbers above, having more muscle mass tends to benefit calorie-burning too.
Something to note is that your habits in other areas like your diet still need to be good enough to lose weight with resistance band workouts.
3. You may prefer the tension trajectory of bands
Resistance bands are relatively unique in that they get harder as you stretch them out more.
This is very different from resistance band alternatives like dumbbells where the points of difficulty in an exercise are at different moments.
The different tension trajectory is not necessarily better or worse for everyone. Whether this is actually a benefit of resistance bands depends on things like your personal preferences.
One thing you can say is that resistance band versions of exercises tend to put more focus on different muscle fibers in the same muscle groups.
In some situations, this different engagement can help you get over a lifting plateau.
4. Resistance bands can improve your bone density
Interestingly enough, your bones are similar to other areas of your body in that you can strengthen them by putting enough but safe amounts of pressure on them (1, 2, 3).
Since resistance bands add more of this pressure, they can also help you improve your bone density more than bodyweight exercises.
In turn, having thicker bones can help you avoid breaking them.
Even if you are somewhat younger and not that worried about this yet, it can be worth implementing resistance bands or other weights.
This is because as you get older, it becomes harder to strengthen your bones.
By implementing more heavy resistance band exercises today, you can save yourself from a lot of issues in the future.
5. Resistance bands are relatively budget-friendly
Investing in your health can be very worth it but sometimes you can get similar benefits for the same or even lower price.
Resistance bands are one of these equipment examples where you can get a lot of health benefits from only a relatively small investment.
This leaves you with a bigger budget for investing in other areas of your health (or other things).
6. Resistance bands make your workouts more time-efficient
Many people think they have to spend endless amounts of time running on a treadmill to get tiny health benefits. Luckily, this is not the case.
Especially in resistance training exercises, the main goal is just pressuring your muscles with enough weight and repetitions.
While this does take some time, you can often see great effects from relatively short workouts. Especially if you add resistance bands to the mix.
The extra pressure these offer allows you to work your muscles enough in a shorter amount of time.
7. Resistance bands could improve your balance
This will not apply to all resistance band exercises equally but there are a variety of movements that could improve your balance.
One review of relevant studies concluded that resistance band exercises can do this for elderly individuals (4).
Having better balance can help reduce your risk of accidents in your daily life.
If you are interested in getting this benefit, you likely want to go for more challenging movements in this area like certain resistance band calf exercises.
8. Resistance bands are easy to store
While they can offer a lot of resistance, bands are still relatively compact and easy to store.
This can be especially helpful for people with smaller living spaces like an apartment.
In a situation like that, you can take out your resistance bands, do your workouts, and store the bands away again.
Even if you have the room for a home gym, this compact aspect of resistance bands enables you to have more space for other equipment options and workouts.
9. Resistance bands are versatile
This next benefit applies to many other free weights too but it is definitely worth mentioning that resistance bands are very versatile.
Often even to a larger extent than these other free weight options since you can create resistance in all directions if you have a good resistance band anchor.
In turn, you can work basically all of the important muscles with resistance bands.
10. You can use resistance bands basically anywhere
Gym workouts and fun sports have their unique benefits too but it is worth mentioning that these require extra transport time.
Even if this is just a 10-minute car ride, the amount of time you spend on the road really adds up after multiple workouts.
In turn, you can definitely say that being able to use resistance bands almost anywhere, including at home, is a big positive point.
Additionally, if you combine this aspect with the compact storage, it becomes clear that resistance bands can be great to take with you when traveling.
