Spice It Up – Resistance Bands and Kettlebells

Hi everyone,

To help me with my pull ups, I bought myself some Resistance Bands to assist me.  I then realised, why stop at pull ups, as these bands can be used in so many exercises to increase the difficulty by applying resistance through the entire movement – hence the name 🙂

The Workout

Today’s workout consists of 5 exercises, with set reps. In order to judge the length of the workout and how many rounds to do I set my Gymboss Interval Timer to stop watch mode and timed each round until I got to about 20 minutes. I completed 5 rounds in 22 minutes and 17 seconds.

It was a tough enough workout because I was adding pull ups and chin ups to the equation, which are big compound exercises using a lot of upper body strength and energy. Combined with cardio, and Kettlebells, I was in a puddle of sweat by the end.

I had to stop and start a little to reposition the camera, so I did cheat and stop the clock a few times, but I did it a quickly as I could!

Anyway, this is a great full body workout, that is a must try. The exercises are as follows:

1. 2- Sumo Squat Jump Burpees x 10 reps
2. Resistance Band Push Up x 5-8 reps (with band applying 5-35 lbs resistance)
   
3. Double KB Alternating Reverse Lunges x 10 reps (total)
4. Resistance Band (and one set of bodyweight) pull ups and chin ups (alternating each round) x 5 reps (with band taking off 10-50 lbs)
5. Double KB Thrusters x 10 reps

For those of you who don’t have bands, you can use a chair to assist your pull ups and, for the push ups, just reduce the speed of the push up eg a count of 4 seconds down and 4 back up. This will increase the time your muscles are under resistance which will act like additional weight.

As always I like to hear back from those who give the workouts a go and let me know your times and adaptations etc.  It’s nice to see how others are doing too 🙂

Until next time

Marianne