Meet Blake Kassel from Bodylastics:

Blake is the owner of Bodylastics and runs old-school meathead workouts at LiveExercise.com that you’d swear were lifted straight out of a dusted off muscle magazine from 1983.

He recently posted some disparaging comments about me on his own website, so I figured I’d explain exactly why I decided to produce the Elite Cords as a direct competitor to his Bodylastics system.

First, Bodylastics are great resistance bands. Blake is a very old-fashioned fitness trainer, and his LiveExercise.com workouts are a nostalgic trip back to the 80′s, but his Bodylastics resistance bands are great.

I used to promote Bodylastics as an affiliate, and the outdated aerobic workout DVD included with the Bodylastics system was always an extreme source of embarrassment for me when I was recommending Bodylastics.

If I was going to continue to recommend Bodylastics, I wanted to offer modern workouts with the product instead of the outdated aerobics DVD and old-school meathead workouts offered by Blake. I asked Blake to setup drop-shipping for me where I would sell his product with my own workouts, but he declined.

So I decided to pursue some other arrangement where I sell any resistance bands with cutting-edge workouts. For me, it has always been about the workouts, not the elastic tubes. After all, resistance bands are such a basic piece of equipment that you can get amazing results with any rubber tubing, from the premium brands such as Bodylastics and Ripcords (and now Elite Cords), to the no name products available for dirt cheap on eBay.

Ultimately my desire to sell resistance bands with my own workouts led me to create my own brand of resistance bands called the Elite Cords. I designed the Elite Cords to include clips because that’s what most people on my email list asked for. Of the thousands of people I surveyed about this, the feedback almost always sounded like this:

I prefer resistance bands with clips like Bodylastics, but please, please, please include good workouts with your product because the Bodylastics workouts are atrocious.

That’s nearly an exact quote from one of the emails I received about this. Most of the feedback was very similar.

And here we are, with the Elite Cords on the market, and Bodylastics scrambling because our resistance bands match their product in features and quality, and our product offers significantly higher quality workouts.

So my goal with the Elite Cords was always just to produce a very good set of resistance bands that allow me to sell my product with the highest quality workouts. It was never my goal to one-up Bodylastics. It just kind of happened that way.

Regarding the Elite Cords resistance bands, I received the following question the other day via email:

Are the weight lbs on the clips of the Elite Cords?

My response (sent via email and reposted here):

No, because it’s impossible to accurately put poundage weight on resistance bands. The tension of the bands is based on how much you stretch them out. If you’re a 5’2″ person doing biceps curls with the red band, the weight of the band would be significantly different than if you were a 6’4″ person biceps curls with the red. Shoulder press is even more noticeable. When you’re using the door anchors, the tension will change depending on how far you are from the anchor point.

Bodylastics puts poundage weights on their resistance bands and I think it’s absurd to do that because the poundage numbers are so inaccurate.

Since the Elite Cords resistance bands system is a new product, surely many people will be comparing our product to Bodylastics, which have been around for over 10 years. The weight equivalents that are printed on Bodylastics clips are nothing more than a gimmick. The poundage numbers are completely meaningless and useless, much like the bad aerobics workout DVD included with Bodylastics, or the atrocious meathead workouts they do on their website.