Resistance Bands for Sports-Specific Training

By: Jason Lewis

For some time now, athletes have been using resistance-training bands as a part of both strength and rehabilitation programs. You’ve probably seen them lying around your gym, different colors for different tensions, and if you’ve used them you know that they’re a challenging, versatile training tool for everything from overall strength and explosion to speed, agility and flexibility. There’s only one problem: to this point, in some way, every band system has restricted natural movement, thus making it difficult for athletes to replicate sports-specific motions.

But True Form is changing that.

While many bands limit an athlete to running in a straight line, or limit functional movement by attaching either the ankles or thighs together, True Form allows for a natural range of motion by attaching bands both in front and behind the legs, connecting from a waist belt to the heel, and toe, of the shoe. It’s the brainchild of Chris Cranke. A former Hofstra University football player, Cranke was looking for a way to add resistance to his workouts while still being able to perform the sports-specific movements he would be doing on any field of play, and he realized there wasn’t a product on the market that allowed for that.

“The band follows your movements,” Cranke said. “If you’re doing full-out sprints or cone drills, the bands are following you every step of the way. The bands go where you tell them to go. They’re designed to follow the natural leg movements.”

While bungee cords, pulling-sleds, and parachutes are great for training straight-line speed, those type of workouts are still limited.

“Sports don’t just incorporate straight-line movements. You’re all over the place,” Cranke said.

With True Form, an athlete can run forward, backward, side-to-side, and perhaps most importantly, you change direction at any point. Because a person has free movement of their legs, they can perform movements that they would do in their sport.

“There are other band products out there that you can attach to your legs and ankles, but they don’t give you true freedom of movement, and they don’t give you true functional training either because the exercises themselves do not mimic the way that you’re moving in a natural way,” said Daniel Schreiber, co-founder of True Form and a former football player at Duke University. “Any movement that you can do without True Form on, you can do with it on as well. That really makes the sports-specific training limitless.”

With True Form, the athlete is adding resistance to the leg muscle in the exact way that those muscles would be used while playing the sport, and with this product there is no need to add extra exercises to an already long and intense workout.

“We wanted to minimize training time by combining [exercises],” Cranke said. “You can combine your lunges with this product. You can work with the medicine ball, you can do squat jumps and things of that nature. It just cuts down and combines exercises. This way you can maximize your time while you’re training.”

This product is great for anybody that plays just about any sport, but it is also great for people who are just looking to get in shape by adding more intensity to their workout. In fact, a number of people are switching from long endurance runs to high intensity interval training (HIIT), and True Form works great with HIIT programs by adding resistance to what a person is already doing. It can also be used while walking, or doing popular workouts such as Zumba.

Whether a person is training to be an elite athlete, or just looking for a tougher workout, True Form is one tool that will greatly enhance a workout program.

For more information about True Form check out their website.

Check Also

Barholics: The Advanced Calisthenics Movement

Athletes everywhere are dropping the weights and hopping up on the bar -- and then they're raising it.

design and development by CCreativeDesign.com