Band setup made easy

The video is above, for the description read on.

First the video was shot one take, no editing, no script, all improv.  That said I think we did a good job getting the video up.  Thanks to Big Steve on assisting me here, and thanks to Dan at the World Gym Dunellen for his camera work.

I have been doing straight weight speed bench for the past several months and I have grown tired of it.  I wanted to incorporate bands to my speed bench.  When it came time to do this it was harder than I imagined.  Our first power rack is an old very shallow power rack, and it doesn't give you adequate room to move plates with a full range of motion without hitting the posts.  Our second power rack would be ideal, except for the fact that it isn't bolted down.  (For those of you who don't know if you choke bands from the bottom of a power rack that isn't bolted, when the weight moves up so does the power rack.  I learned this at Skiba's Gym in Carteret doing rack pulls vs average bands.  I did not know at the time the rack wasn't bolted down.  I soon learned.)

We proceeded to the benches, where none of the benches had anything we could use to set up the bands.  (I know this is a problem at a lot of Commercial Gyms, improper benches.  Don't get me wrong the bench at World Gym is adequate to bench in, but inadequate for band set up.  The guys at Apollon used to have this issue before Irina got them a Metal Militia bench.  They used to do all of their benching in the power rack.)  I knew there had to be a solution, I thought for about 5 minutes and came up with what you see in the above video.  We have found it to work really well, the band tension is even on both sides, the plates do not move during the bench workout.  So far this has been a huge success for us, and we wanted to share it with everyone else who has the same issues.

 For those of you who have never seen a legitimate bench I wanted to include a picture above.  This is the Heavy duty bench available from Elite fts.  If you notice on the bottom there are pegs coming out from the legs.  The purpose of those pegs is to incorporate bands.  If your bench does not look like the one above, then the method in our video is for you.


WARNING:  Make sure that the bench you choose to do this set up from has a solid lip on the uprights so that the bands don't propel the bar off of the uprights.  Only safety issue we have found thus far.

 

As far as training goes, I already foam rolled after work today, and did some foam roller sit ups.  When my son gets up from his nap we have a 3 plus mile walk ahead of us.