Can You ACTUALLY Build Muscle with Resistance Bands? (What the Science Says)

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Can you actually build muscle with resistance bands? In this video, we'll discuss the mechanisms of muscle growth and whether or not resistance bands fit into them.
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The process of muscle growth is known as hypertrophy. There are three main mechanisms for hypertrophy: mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress.

Mechanical tension is the process of loading the muscle in some way and creating tension. Out of the three mechanisms for muscle growth, mechanical tension is by far the most well-established and clearly the biggest contributor. Resistance bands certainly offer a form of mechanical tension. It’s not caused by the force of gravity as we see with free weights, but they do offer a mechanism for loading our muscles through the elastic properties of the band. Progressive overload is a little more difficult with bands because we can’t necessarily quantify the tension.

Muscle damage is the second mechanism. Muscle damage refers to the small muscle fiber tears that sometimes occur when lifting weights. They are more associated with the eccentric part of lifting- which is when your muscle is lengthening under tension. Unlike free weights, the tension on a band increases as you move through the range. This means that you have peak tension when the muscle is fully contracted. Like we said earlier, muscle damage is highly correlated to the lowering portion on the rep, and having peak tension just before this lowering may provide some benefit to muscle damage.

Finally, we have metabolic stress. Metabolic stress refers to when your muscles get really low on energy which leads to the accumulation of things called metabolites. Metabolic stress is most often seen when you “chase the pump” and perform tons of reps over and over until the muscle is pumped up and exhausted. One way to infer metabolic stress is through muscle activation. A 2018 study set out to find the difference in muscle activation between resistance bands and free weights. The study found that some muscles were activated slightly less with resistance bands than free weights, but others were activated much more. They concluded that “elastic resistance bands can be considered a feasible alternative to dumbbells” in the exercises that they tested.

So, what’s the conclusion on resistance bands? Well, if you can overcome the challenge of progressive overload, they are a fantastic option- especially for people who want to get into resistance training, or don’t want to go to or pay for a gym membership, or just want the ability to take their workouts with them anywhere they go!

Research:
https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fu...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...