Muscle-Building With Bands And Straps

I received the following question today via email:

Do you think a male can build a significant amount of muscle just using resistance bands and suspension straps?

My answer:

Yes, males can build significant amounts of muscle using resistance bands and suspension straps. The reason is very simple. Building muscle requires that you overload your muscles with progressively more challenging amounts of resistance from workout to workout. As you increase the demand on your body by adding resistance to the exercises, your body adapts by building bigger and stronger muscles. The type of resistance you use it irrelevant. You could lift barbells and dumbbells at your local health club, or you could flip tires in a junk yard, or you could use elastic resistance in the form of resistance bands, or you could use your own bodyweight as resistance with suspension straps. Certain bodyweight exercises are difficult to add more resistance as you get stronger (pushups are a good example), but most suspension strap exercises have progressions that should be challenging enough for you to keep putting the demands on your body necessary to build muscle. And for things like pushups where you’re likely not going to be extremely challenged, you can either use pre-exhaustion (tire out the chest muscles before doing pushups), or use the resistance bands for your chest exercises.

Keep in mind that not all sets of resistance bands are equal. If building muscle is your goal, then you’ll need an adjustable set that let you clip multiple bands onto the same set of handles for a really challenging amount of resistance. It’s simply not possible to get that from resistance bands that have the handles permanently attached to the bands.