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I used to promote Bodylastics as an affiliate, and the outdated aerobic workout DVD included with the Bodylastics system was always an extreme source of embarrassment for me when I was recommending Bodylastics.

If I was going to continue to recommend Bodylastics, I wanted to offer modern workouts with the product instead of the outdated aerobics DVD and old-school meathead workouts offered by Blake.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.

Visit our Elite Cords website for more information or to order the best resistance bands for P90X.

For more information, visit our Elite Cords website.

• five resistance bands of varying levels of tension
• custom designed quick-clip carabiners
• two sets of padded handles
• two padded door anchors
• one pair of padded ankle straps
• travel bag

Visit our Elite Cords website for more information and to sign up to our email list and ensure you’re among the first to know when the Elite Cords become available.

Here’s how GoFit explains this technology on their website:

On the surface the “inner cord” seemed like a cool feature, but I wanted to make sure that it didn’t reduce the functionality of the resistance bands themselves, so I decided to check out the GoFit bands to see for myself.

The verdict: inner cord technology is terrible and is not included in the Elite Cords because it makes the resistance bands pretty much useless. A few of my outdoor boot camp customers have GoFit bands and they can’t even do shoulder presses with their bands because the string inside the band prevents them from fully extending their arms at the top of the shoulder press.

A good set of resistance bands such as the Elite Cords will provide you with the the smoothest and most comfortable resistance you’ve ever used. The GoFit resistance bands featuring inner tube technology feel stiff and uncomfortable.

Perhaps in the future this type of technology might improve to the point that it improves the resistance bands without taking away any of the functionality, but as of right now, inner cord technology is not ready for prime time and is therefore not included in the Elite Cords.

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.

For resistance squats, I used all five bands, and for reverse flys I used just the orange band for the first set, and orange plus yellow for the second set.

Having two sets of handles saved me a ton of time and hassle switching bands during the the workout. If I had only had one set of handles, I would have had to unclip 4 bands before doing the reverse flys. So having the extra set of handles cut my adjustment time in more than half.

Having the extra set of handles is a really big perk that cuts down on your exercise time and makes the workout much more enjoyable because you’re not constantly fiddling around clipping and unclipping bands. That is why we include two sets of handles with every Elite Cords system.

My invention relates to exercising devices; and the invention consists in an exercising device made of elastic material and designed to be used to exercise the arms and all parts of the body, substantially as shown and described, and particularly pointed out in the claim.

Gustav’s invention was issued a United States patent in 1896, and looks similar to modern day resistance bands such as my Elite Cords exercise system. One of my main competitors in the resistance bands market claims his product is “the original exercise bands system”. He launched his product in 1998, over a century after Gustav Gossweiler patented his own resistance bands exercise device.

So let it be said that a set of resistance bands created in 1998 is not “the original exercise bands system”.

The answer is simple, I don’t like kettlebells. Don’t get me wrong, they’re unquestionably an awesome piece of exercise equipment that’s sure to produce fantastic results for anyone who uses them, but I personally hate using them.

I did a “Kettlebell 101″ workout back in the summer of 2008 because I was interested in learning more about kettlebells in order to see if I could introduce them into the workouts I run for my clients in Vancouver. It was an intense workout where we ran through many of the most common kettlebell exercises. Despite the workout clearly being incredibly effective, I found the workout (i.e. exercising with kettlebells) to be a miserable experience and not something I would remotely enjoy doing again, much less on a regular basis.

I believe that exercise should be fun, and since I didn’t remotely enjoy exercising with kettlebells, I don’t exercise with them. I use exercise tools that I do enjoy, such as resistance bands and the suspension gym.

But don’t avoid kettlebells just because I don’t like them. Maybe you’ll love them. So if you’re interested in exercising with kettlebells, I encourage you to try a kettlebell workout and then decide for yourself whether exercising with kettlebells something you enjoy and want to do on a regular basis.

Behold the Cardio Twister:

What an incredibly stupid product.

Please do yourself a favour and never buy the Cardio Twister. You’ll get better results and save a ton of money with a set of resistance bands, or a suspension gym, or even just by doing bodyweight workouts.