BJ Gaddour: Hey, this is BJ Gaddour, Workout Muse co-creator and fitness

director. I am just peachy this morning because I’ve got Dave Schmitz,

the founder of resistance band training systems on the phone with us

today and we’re going to be talking all about resistance band training in

general. Dave is one of my very good friends in the industry and we’ve

done a lot of cool stuff together. Specifically, we've found a way to really

fuse the RBT system and Workout Muse to help automate these band

workouts.

We're basically bringing a new RBT product powered by

Workout Muse to the table. Dave has outlined his four favorite interval

templates powered by Workout Muse and he’s going to go through a lot

of different applications involving the workouts both for athlete-based

populations and general fitness. It’s going to be a really great

opportunity to learn from the band man. I think he actually is part elastic-

I’m just going to go on a limb and say that. He lives it, he loves it, and he's

one of my favorite people in the world.

Dave, please introduce yourself to the group, give us your

background regarding how you got started with RBT, and then we’ll kind

of outline the goals of this interview.

David Schmitz: Alright. Well Good Morning BJ and thank you very much. You know it,

we could go on forever in terms of why you and I are getting really excited

about this stuff. Thank you very much for bringing me on. Let me tell

you a little bit about my history and we'll take it from there.

I’m a physical therapist and so a lot of my training has

been based around what I originally saw in the physical therapy clinic

when people came in injured. To make a long story short, injuries aren’t

fun but injuries have consistencies. I started seeing a lot of

consistencies between various injuries. When you get to treat hundreds

of low back, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries, you get a good chance to

learn from them. So reactive resistance band training all started based

on what I saw in the clinic. With that history of those injuries, the number

one thing we saw, and we’re going to talk more about this in a little bit, but

people just were not moving well, people were not stopping well and

people were not learning how to recruit muscles well. What we had to do

is we had to start establishing some ways for them to start training so

they could start working on that. What I saw in the fitness and

performance market was a lot of people working on things like

acceleration and absolute strength. But once as we start talking about

the resistance band, what you’re going to see is it's not about lifting a

resistance or pushing a resistance, it’s about teaching your body's

neuromuscular system how to respond. That in a nutshell is where this

all started from.

Just recently, I started putting a lot more emphasis into the

fitness and performance components because I really get excited about

working with these groups. Essentially what I’m doing BJ is I’m getting

people before they get injured, and what better way to help people than to

go ahead and make sure they don’t get injured, keep them healthy and

keep them active throughout their entire life. Right now I pulled myself

out of the rehab clinic a little bit and I put myself far more aggressively

into the fitness and performance entity for those reasons. Again, we

could go into longer history, but that’s generally is where it all started.

BJ Gaddour: Very cool man. I think one thing I always loved about your story

is how in the past you used to do more of the meat-head bodybuilding

style type of workouts using only deadweight. Then everything for you

changed in the way you move, the way you perform, the way you recover

from workouts, etc. when you really started incorporating a lot more band

training into your routines. Can you take us through that because a lot of

people can relate to that type of situation where they were just using

deadweight only and feeling like though they were getting stronger, they

were still just a little bit slow, not really performing the way they wanted to.

Take us through that.

David Schmitz: Okay. Let me take you back, everybody stay with me for the next five

minutes here and you’ll understand the whole sequence. In terms of the

history behind resistance bands, they initially came onto the scene

around the 60’s when people were just using them as something that’s

stretched to create resistance. They didn’t know really what the full

spectrum of applications for bands were at the time, they just knew that if

they stretch this elastic resistance they could make muscles work and got

fatigued and that was cool.

As we evolved with this concept, in elastic resistance

we’ve started to create tools like tubing and thera-bands that kind of just

were used in the rehab market because that’s where it made the most

sense- it was very portable and you can use it at home and so forth. I

kind of think that where bands got their jumpstart was with the Westside

Barbell Concept, and how they started using resistance bands to help

develop absolute strength and max speed for powerlifting.

The reason I bring this up is because in the 80’s what we

started looking at in the rehab market was implementing this concept of

functional training. With functional training, what happened was we

started seeing that what we really wanted to train were things like

momentum, ground reaction forces and gravity.

Now going back to your original question BJ, you asked

me about deadweight training. I trained with tons of deadweight, body

part split workouts. When you look at deadweight training, the number

one thing deadweight training impacts is gravity because gravity is a

vertical force vector concept. The problem is momentum and ground

reaction forces are two other strong entities that functional training talked

about and that deadweight training only doesn't full address.

When I started looking at resistance band training and the

things that resistance bands did for me, what I found was that deadweight

training gave me one component of performance, that being absolute

strength. But it did nothing to improve my neuromuscular system in

order to become more athletic, quicker, and more explosive and give me

what I like to call a little "pop." I wanted to always have that little burst,

that little explosion because I always felt that was the difference maker for

being a good athlete versus a great athlete.

I started training with resistance bands because it trained

momentum and it trained me to be able to handle force vectors in all

planes of movement and all diagonals. Plus, it caused me to have to learn

how to efficiently handle ground reaction forces, which meant that when

my foot hit the ground I had to be able to respond quickly and get out of

there and do whatever I wanted to do from a movement standpoint. A lot

of that makes sense when you start looking at change of direction and

performance enhancement. But in reality BJ, a lot of times when I’m

walking down the street or I’m doing something at home in the backyard,

ground reaction forces become a huge entity as well.

As we evolve to this conversation, please people, think about

performance in terms of both as daily activities like work and play as well

the more competitive environments on the field and court so to speak.

They’re basically the same, the only difference is one is being handled at

a little bit higher velocity than the other. To kind of summarize all that,

the reason I got away from deadweight training was because I was not

training the other two aspects of function, momentum and ground reaction

forces, the way it needed to be trained. What was happening was I was

getting strong but I was getting slow at the expense of my strength. I

didn’t want to be slow, I wanted to be explosive, quick and agile along

with being strong, and so I had to start looking at different ways of

accomplishing this.

BJ Gaddour: Very cool. This is what I love about Dave in the sense that there

are lot of so-called fitness experts out there that market some resistance

band of sorts for general fitness workouts. Again, they tend to approach

it as simply just a tool to make your muscles burn and get tired. Dave’s

approach is entirely based on improving the whole performance spectrum

involved with movement. That’s really the cool thing about his band

training system, not only his unique approach to its many applications in

athletic-based settings but also in a general fitness setting like bootcamps

as well. One thing that I’m always like blown away by Dave - I believe

you're 46, right Dave?

David Schmitz: Actually I'm 47 years old BJ.

BJ Gaddour: Dave is probably in better shape than many professional athletes

you’ll see. He’s ripped, he’s got a six-pack, he’s extremely quick. He’s

a guy that can compete with these kids he trains, these really high-end

high school and college athletes he trains, because of his approach to

using bands. So not only is he going to make you an incredible athlete

but you’ll get into ridiculous shape, you’re going to burn a ton of calories.

You’re going to get simultaneous strength and cardiovascular benefits,

improve your flexibility, and your reaction time. It’s just a phenomenal

total fitness experience, and that’s what Dave brings to the table.

So that’s kind of the goal with this whole thing, we want to

make sure that whether you train athletes primarily, whether you train

more general fitness adult clientele, whether you you train both, bands

have immediate and lasting applications in each instance. For someone

who really specializes in bootcamps like myself, adding bands into our

metabolic circuit training format has been a really cool addition that our

campers love. They’re safe to implement, they’re fun, they’re very low

cost, and they’re portable. They’re the most portable piece of equipment

that really exists in my mind, probably along with the TRX suspension

trainer. You can fit it in your bag, you can fit it in your purse- just tons of

amazing applications. So whether you want to add bands into you

current camps or whether you want to actually end up making a niche

band bootcamp which actually is a great add-on to your current

offerings, you can truly build your bootcamp business with bands. This is

what we’re going to touch on today all the way through for fitness

professionals. In addition, we'll hammer how to use bands for your own

personal home workouts for fitness consumers.

So let’s get into general guidelines with resistance band

training. The safety recommendations you have for the bands, choosing

the right band tension. I think like anything Dave, I’m sure you wince

when you see people using the bands improperly as I would wince when I

see people using Workout Muse improperly. So that’s why we do what

we do in terms of continuing education so that the system itself isn’t

bastardized. So let’s go through that because obviously we deal with

this on a regular basis.

David Schmitz: Sure. Well let’s talk about safety guidelines first of all. The number one

safety guideline is this, resistance band lengthens and they stretch but

they don’t stretch unlimitedly. Each resistance band is 41 inches long

with a continuous loop. So therefore it has the power and the ability to

stretch two yards. You need to follow those guidelines not because if

you go two and half yards the band is going to self-destruct, but over time

you’ll start tethering and wearing out the band. So to me that is the

biggest safety guideline. Most people mistakenly think the easiest way

to get more resistance with the resistance band is simply to stretch it out

more- take it further. You really have to kind of clue in on that, you have

to make sure that you’re only stretching the band appropriate to its

appropriate length, which brings us to the next guideline...

What band to use? How to choose the correct band

resistance for your current fitness level? Well, first and foremost if you’re

over-stretching the band, then you need to go up to another resistance

level. That’s the first thing. The second thing is if you’re not going

through a full range of motion with each exercise. You’ve got be able to

push all the way through the end range of motion and that’s the benefit of

resistance bands that you’ve got to take advantage of when compared to

deadweight only training. If you see people not going through full ranges

of the motion, early on in a set, you know two, three, four reps into the

set, they are clearly using a band with too much tension for their current

fitness level and need to drop down a level.

Another safety concern is regarding the actual completion

of a perfect rep of an exercise. After they’ve completed the concentric

component of a movement and they’re going back into the deceleration or

the eccentric component of it, if they’re letting the band snap them back,

they’re asking for tendon and soft tissue trauma to start occurring. You

don’t want that. So again, you want to make sure you’re handling the

tension of the band both all the way out and all the way back. In other

words, you need to be able to effectively control the movement from start

to finish with the current band tension that you are using.

Lastly, another thing you want to look for with safety or

choosing the right band is you always have to have some degree of

tension on the band, both at the start point and at the end point of the

range of motion. You’ve got to adjust things accordingly there. So

range of motion really dictates the type of band you’re going to use.

Those are couple big things with regards to stretch guidelines and with

regards to choosing the right band.

Let’s talk about attachment. Where are you going to

attach your band? Are you going to do partner-based training or you’re

going to attach it to a wall or post? Let’s talk about attaching it first. If

you’re going to attach your band, you need to attach it to something that

is circular in nature, a pole for example. Playground equipment a lot of

times has a round pole, that is by and far what I recommend you attach

the bands to. Anything else outside of that, what you’re going to do is

you’re going to create unwanted tensions on the band as you’re training.

Those tensions will start to wear on your band and will ultimately start to

damage it. My suggestion is either attach it to a pole or you attach it to a

device that we developed several years ago called the band utility strap

which basically allows you to now attach your band onto anything. You

can check that out on my site if you need more information on that. But

that’s what you want to be attaching your bands to.

Outside of that, the only other thing you will need to watch

for is when you do free-band training where the band is attached,

especially when you attach it down at your feet. You need to understand

that where you want the tension is between your foot and your hands, not

between your feet. A lot of people as they’re working free-band

exercises, what they do in order to get more tension is they widen their

feet out. All you’re doing is stretching the band between your feet, you’re

not stretching the band between your foot and your upper body. So

therefore, you overstretch the band between your feet and subsequently

damage the band there.

So that’s the last attachment safety guideline I want people

to clue in on, free-band training is awesome because you can go

anywhere with it. But you've got to understand where you want the

tension- you want the tension between your upper body and your lower

body, not between your feet. So in general I think outside of that, the

only other thing that you want to watch for with band training is this: it is a

latex product. Therefore people could have a latex reaction. To be

totally honest with you, I have never had anybody have a latex reaction in

any of my camps or in any of my high school training facilities. However

it is a latex product and you need to be conscious of that.

Lastly, make sure your training surfaces are good which

you would do anyway, but especially with band training you want to make

sure your training surfaces are good because you’re going to be doing a

lot of deceleration stop-and-go work. You need to have good traction

and good stabilization when people are decelerating. So that’s about it

right there BJ.

BJ Gaddour: Again, it’s all great stuff. Dave has an awesome show called RBT

Live where basically he just fields his valued customer questions and

concerns, and Dave just answers them in a really cool video format.

Again, a lot of this stuff, a lot of fitness in general, you have to see in

action for yourself to comprehend it and Dave does a phenomenal job of

showing this type stuff via video and audio and that type of thing. So

make sure you reference that, and we’ll touch on this more towards the

end of the call where you can find out how to learn all of this killer stuff

through Dave in person. Again, he’s a very dynamic guy and I think that

you’ll find that watching him will really make this even better and a lot

easier to kind of see exactly what he’s talking about.

So let’s talk about the benefits of RBT. We’ve touched on

that a little bit., but there are so many benefits, I think it’s kind of cool just

to outline them for the listener so they can start to see the applications

that go far beyond what anyone would probably think of. Most people

think of just bands, “Okay, this is the way for me to do my rows if I don’t

have access to weights when I’m on the road or at home,” just kind of a

makeshift personal workout. Take us through that Dave, the benefits of

RBT.

David Schmitz: Okay. Well you’re right about that BJ, bands when they first came out

were kind of looked upon as your last alternative to training. I am

working really hard to change that misconception, to making bands a

necessity that you need to have in your training if you’re truly going to

make your body be fully ready to handle anything in life.

First of all, the general benefits, obviously portability. I

say portability with power and strength, not just because it’s a portable

structure or it’s nice you can take anywhere, not that at all. What I refer

to as portable power is I can create any resistance that will challenge

anybody in this world because bands have unlimited resistance, therefore

you’re not looking at this portable training device as just something that

you can get a workout in. You could actually create enough resistance

with it to go ahead and train anybody, which brings me to the next thing.

The next thing about bands is it is applicable to training

anybody, it could train anytime, you could train at any intensity, you can

train anywhere, and even train anything. So let me just touch on all

those. Obviously anywhere, you can easily train outside, you can train at

your bootcamps, you can train high school kids in performance camps on

the track, in the gym, in hallways, in a cafeteria. The thing is you can go

where they go, so being able to training anywhere is one of the major

benefits.

Anytime- what I mean by that is you could always get a

workout in, always get a workout in no matter where you are because you

can always attach it to the doors, you can attach in to hotel room area, do

free band workouts. You and I, BJ, have done tons of workouts in our

traveling together, we’ve gotten tons of workouts in and we’ve done it in a

lot of different places.

Anybody- resistance bands adapt to any level of strength.

I’ve got guys that are some of the strongest guys in the world training with

my resistance bands and I’ve also got senior citizens training with them.

So that’s the whole gamut. Any intensity, we’ve already touched on that.

I carry seven levels of bands, my strongest band generates well over 350

pounds of resistance, my weakest band generates about 5 to 10 pounds

of resistance, and anywhere in between there I can create resistance for

you.

The last thing is anything, what do we mean by anything?

Anything means I can train flexibility, I can train cardiovascular strength, I

can obviously create incredible metabolic workouts which we’re going to

talk about in a little bit. I can go ahead and create performance

enhancement drills that help work on deceleration control and

acceleration and first step explosiveness. We can also take and create

incredible band training circuits that help supplement your primary limbs

that you use for sports performance like power clean and back squat and

front squat and those type of things, I can create auxiliary or

complimentary exercises that help you become more explosive with those

exercises. So when I say anything, I can literally impact any component

of fitness or performance that you want me to.

So, those are the huge benefits. Here’s a couple of

functional-based benefits of bands and why you need to have them in

your workout. Number one, they impact function, the ability to handle

momentum, gravity, and ground reaction forces differently than any other

training tool. You can try it with tubing, you can try it with bungee cords,

you can try it with other things that stretch, the fact is they all have

significant limitations to be able to impact those three big keys of function.

You need to be training those three keys because if you’re not, you’re

going to do like I did; you’re going to get slow and you’re going to start

getting injured because all you’re doing is training that impacts gravity

and absolute strength, and you’re not getting fast, explosive and flexible.

Being able to attach bands to different aspects of your

body, you can turn on muscles you've never turned on before. BJ, you

and I both know we trained a ton of people in bootcamps. People have a

lot of dysfunctional, poor muscle recruitment patterns. As a fitness

professional who’s training in bootcamps, I would like to go around and

work with everybody but sometimes it’s almost impossible to do that in a

large group setting. What would work better is to have a tool that when

you attach it onto the person or have them grip it or hold on to it or hook it

around their hips, that it neuromuscularly activates things right away.

That is a huge benefit of resistance band training that nobody looks at.

But I’ll tell you right now, if you have a weak posterior

chain, that's the muscles on the backside of your body like your glutes,

hamstrings, and spinal erectors, and I need to turn it on, I’m going to put

you in a band hip-attachment set up. What I’m going to have you do

something simple like maybe power skips or reaches or lunges. I

guarantee you, I will activate your glutes in a heartbeat, you won’t even

have to do anything but just the movement pattern I ask you to do. That

is a huge benefit of band training that again you can’t stimulate with any

deadweight device.

BJ Gaddour: Dave, just to add a couple of points too… What I always look at-

the majority of my clientele, they’re trying to burn fat, get in the best

shape of their life, they only have 30 minutes to exercise three days per

week. So I’ve got to make sure that the exercise selection that we

incorporate in our circuits, in our workouts, and everything is metabolic.

We’re going to touch on a bunch of metabolic based workouts using

bands. By metabolic, as Coach Dos refers to as cardio strength

training, what we mean is that it combines the benefits of cardiovascular

exercise with strength training into one total fitness package, and there’s

a clear impact on metabolism for up to 48 hours after the workouts.

One of the ways you do that is the integration concept.

What bands do is they allow you integrate multiple planes of movement at

once, in addition to working the horizontal force vector in a standing

position. Nothing else can allow you to do that besides cable setups.

Now cable setups are on often times prohibitively expensive, not very

space efficient, and you can’t take it outdoors unless like you - I don’t

know how you do that, but I guess it’s possible but not feasible. That is a

huge component. We talked about athletes, lot of people like the bench

press. Again, it’s one of those exercises that I don’t think will ever leave

just because it’s such a staple of the strength training mantra.

But in reality, a more functional approach to that horizontal

push is going to be in standing position, a split stance position. It’s going

to be going from a squat to a press, a squat to a chest press. That’s the

cool thing about the bands is that you can integrate multiple movement

patterns as well. We basically take what was typically just an upper body

movement moving on your back with the bench press, not pretty

functional at all, and now we’re standing and we've got the legs involved,

we’ve got the core involved, we are in an athletic position. We can rotate

into the press and we can get so many different things going on our feet

that we can’t do on our backs, and that’s something the bands allow for.

So you can integrate by combining different movement

patterns and upper body and lower body movements and you can

integrate by combining multiple planes of movements. So where most

exercises are just sagittally based, up and down and front and back,

bands really provide just an amazing amount of application in the frontal

plane which is side to side and the transverse plane which is more

rotationally-based movements. So you are ready to rock for anything

that you will possibly experience in life, on the field, on the court,

wherever.

David Schmitz: Exactly BJ, thank you for bringing that up. Multi-vector force production

AND force reduction. The cool thing is, in resistance bands because

you’re training in horizontal vectors, rotational vectors and frontal plane

vectors, that you literally have to control the force reduction component as

much as the production component. Therefore your calorie expenditure

goes way up.

The other thing with resistance bands is you can use them

to compliment other tools as well. For example, I know you just did a

whole month on kettlebell training. Let's take the traditional kettlebell

swing, but now attach a resistance band to your hips, and then perform

multidirectional or different types of kettlebell swings. Now you're using

not only the kettlebell vertical force vector, but you've also got a horizontal

force vector at your hips. Can you imagine, when you have two to three

vectors coming at your body from different directions what the calorie

expenditure is, not to mention the functional impact and the ability to

create a much more functionally based training exercise program so that

you’re recruiting the right things at the right times. But put all that aside,

it’s just flat out more work, It’s flat out more work and you’re getting a lot

more calories burnt. So thank you for brining that up. There’s another

benefit as well, combining tools with bands and getting all the vector

training that you’re looking for.

BJ Gaddour: I always like to say, total body exercises within a total body

workout. But that’s level three, that’s advanced, that’s how we approach

our camps. You don’t have to involve any extra loading. If you only

have a certain number of bands, going from a band front squat to band

front squat to press, that an integration progression by combining an

upper and lower body movement into one. We’re now involving more

muscles. It’s a cool way to look at it, and that’s why I’m such a huge fan

of the bands for all these reasons.

Let’s get into the yummy stuff, if you will, Dave. Dave and

I have done a bunch of really awesome workouts together. We’ve done

a bunch of really cool, kind of fusion workouts with people like Pam and

Jason of Kettlebell Athletics, using kettlebells and the bands, powering

the workouts with Workout Muse. Really the best part of when we get

together at these fitness events is we get 50-100 fitness professionals in

one room. They do this for a living and a lot of them are in good shape,

and they leave with a life-changing experience where at least one or two

times during in that workout they see God’s face. I always have a lot of

fun doing that, and I know Dave does as well.

Let’s go through these, what we like to call "life-changer

workouts" that Dave is famous for. Let’s start with Dave kind of talking

about the use of each workout template, kind of a sample workout that

you would set up, and what’s the best band set up for a lot of these

workouts. The first one in our list is the classic 20/10 Tabata Station

Workout that goes for 20 minutes.

Dave Schmitz: Let’s talk about that one first. That’s a great place to start for a lot of

different reasons. But let’s just go ahead and let’s just use bands in a

free-band set up, which is what we’re going to do with this 20-10 tabata

workout. Typically what I will do is I will take two exercises that

compliment each other. For example, a front squat followed by an

overhead press. I’ll put those exercises together doing one for 20

seconds and then taking the 10-second break and then coming back and

doing the other. So you end up doing four sets of each or eight total

rounds. That’s one way you can go ahead and do it.

The other way that eventually you can use 20-10 Tabatas

is you could use it in partner-based training if you wanted to because you

had the 10-second ability to transfer from Partner A to Partner B. My

suggestion is though when we look at the 20/10 Tabatas for the

resistance bands that we’re going to do, you just start implementing either

a station-based workout or a free-band workout, pair up two

complimentary exercises, and start there. That’s the best way to get

your group, your fitness group or you athletes, to start buying into how to

go ahead and utilize resistance bands.

Trust me, we do a Friday chaos conditioning at our high

school for my athletes and we do 20/10 Tabatas. We go through actually

two 20-minute bouts, so we actually go through eight stations instead of

just four stations The kids love it. Essentially it’s just plug and play, the

kids know the workout. It’s total band training and they really enjoy it.

So, that’s how I do it, free-band training 20/10 Tabatas on that one. BJ,

do you want me to go right in to the next one?

BJ Gaddour: To touch on just one thing too, I think it’s important because again

Tabatas are like a craze now and a lot of people don’t really know how to

use the protocol appropriately. One thing I think that’s important and I

think Dave you’ll probably agree with me on is that ideally in these

20-second work periods, these are metabolic workouts, we’re trying to get

a lot of fast, powerful contractions in that 20 seconds. Ideally, we’re

looking for about 10 fast, powerful reps in those 20 seconds.

If you’re getting a lot less than that, then most likely your

band tension is a little bit too high. If you’re getting a lot more than 10

reps in that 20 seconds, then most likely the band tension is too light.

So, you want to find a band tension that really makes it challenging to

perform about 10 explosive reps in those 20 seconds. That really is that

sweet spot for that metabolic workout, we’re getting both strength and

cardiovascular benefits at the same time, a lot of good endurance as well.

Again, these short sets are really cool, especially for kids,

because a 60-second work period for a lot kids in the youth format, it’s

mental torture where with these short burst, high-intensity efforts you get

the benefits of really working on strength and power, but getting your

endurance going at the same time with a lot of short recovery periods and

repeat bouts.

Dave Schmitz: Exactly. Also, you choose the bands that fit your weakest exercise. I

know you just recently talked about that BJ, but for instance if you’re

doing a front squat and an overhead press, the overhead press is

obviously going to be more challenging than a front squat. The way I will

go ahead and adjust that a little bit is I will say on front squats I want to

make it high rep metabolic. I will go ahead and say I really need 20 reps

in 20 seconds, as close as you can. Then I’ll flip flop it when they go to

overhead presses, knowing that’s their weak link I’m shooting for 10 reps.

So you can tweak it a little bit that way.

Now because you have this 10-second rest period, literally

I will have people who have three different levels of bands – and if you’re

blessed with having multiple bands, they’ll literally have enough time to

take a stronger band, so they’re pushing a heavy band for both front

squats and overhead presses. You can do that. As people start to get

really into this, what you’ll see is they’ll just go ahead and pick up two or

three different levels of bands when you say we’re doing a Tabata

workout today, and my group typically does. The way I set it up now in

my bootcamp just helps people out. I have enough bands, I line up piles

of bands at various stations where I’ll have three different levels of bands,

a red, a black and a purple or a black, purple and green. I’ll set it down

and people will go ahead pick up their piles, they’ll go to their area and

we’re going to knock out a Tabata free-band workout without any

problem, and they’ll flip flop band tension.

BJ Gaddour: Beautiful. Again, I think that’s a great point you made Dave in the

sense that when it comes to exercise selection the lower body inherently

has just a lot more endurance. An example like the band front squat,

trying to get a rep per second in that 20-second time frame, getting 20

reps in 20 seconds, that definitely is a great protocol to use as well. The

key is just knowing what you’re trying to accomplish in that workout. If

you’re not someone who has a lot of heavy bands in your arsenal, let’s try

to really intensify it by just getting as many possible reps in those 20

seconds as well. If we’re doing really fast 20-rep front squats with good

band tension and the fact that the band really forces you to accelerate

through the top position, where the resistance is at its peak, you’re going

to really jack things up in a good way.

Dave Schmitz: Exactly. That’s what people won’t know until they try it. Until they try it

they’ll say, “Wait a minute, I got to work through the full range of motions,”

which is one of the fundamental things about resistance bands that we

didn’t cover earlier is that you have to work to the full range of motion,

and especially at your weaker points. So, that’s very important and

again will be a big metabolic expenditure.

BJ Gaddour: Very cool. So Dave, take us to the next one.

Dave Schmitz: Okay, 45/15. I like the 45/15 Circuit because what it allows me to do is

it allows me to really start teaching people how to start getting very

neuromuscularly strong using resistance bands. What we’ll do with the

45/15 Circuit is we’re going to do 10 exercises, so basically what we’re

going to do is we’re going to do an exercise for 45 seconds and then go

to a new exercise after a 15-second break. We’re going to go through 10

total exercises, and then we’re going to take a two-minute break after

that. What I would typically try to do is I’ll try to template out a workout

that goes – I like to train an upper body exercise, typically a push,

followed by a lower body exercise, followed by an upper body pull. Then

I go to a core exercise, and then I go to a cardio exercise if I can. So

that’s one of the templates I like to use.

Another template I like to use is I like to go ahead and do

an upper body exercise, again I’ll go with the push, I like to then go with a

unilateral lower body exercise where now they have to do right side and

then left side, then come back with an upper body push or pull, and then

finish up with a core. So, they have to have a little bit of recovery and

then repeat that five exercise circuit again.

Sometimes as you’re teaching people with the different

sequences, you can choose 10 exercises. But if you’re getting people

acclimated into the workout, you may want to go ahead choose five

exercises, have them repeat it and then take the break. That allows me

to do two things, one is it allows me to do is really watch people for five

exercises to make sure they’re doing well with those five first before

adding more movements. Then as they’re going through it the second

time or going in to the second round, I can go ahead and show them a

simple, little progression that makes it a little bit more challenging. As an

example, if they’re doing a high-pull, I can now do a high-pull step or I can

do a high-pull hold or a high-pull pull apart.

So there’s a lot of different variations. 45/15 allows me to

watch people do free-band exercises and get them adjusted very easily

that way. That’s how we use the 45/15, either as a sequence of 10 total

exercises or two groups of five where they go ahead and repeat it in that

sequence.

BJ Gaddour: I think what we really have to stress to everybody Dave is it’s

important to understand exercise recall. For most people, when they’re

rested, remembering more than five exercises is difficult, especially if

they’re not a fitness professional or they don’t do it for a living. Now let’s

add on to the fact that these workouts are very lactic acid and anaerobic

based and a lot of oxygen is not going through the brain as it normally

would and exercise recall is at its lowest during these workouts. So

going into ten exercise circuits for a non-advance group is probably not a

good idea.

As Dave outlines, let’s keep it simple, let’s go with five

exercises, still hit kind of a whole body based format, then just repeat it

again and get the full 10 exercise sequence, let people get more skill

rehearsal on the movements in general as well. So, that’s very important

because you want your workouts to run smoothly, and less is more when

it comes to exercise selection across the board.

Dave Schmitz: Yes. I promise you, if you do this, if you a five exercise circuit and you

do that just for one workout, you just double it up in your 45/15 ten

exercise sequence and then you go through three total rounds of that,

then the next workout do a different five, by the third time you come in to

do another 45/15 band workout, they will have remembered the first five

and the second five. Now, bring them together and you got your 10

exercise circuit action. Literally, when you have the opportunity to repeat

an exercise four times or five times, the muscle memory and the mental

memory of that exercise really kicks in pretty quick. It’s really interesting

to see, within a couple of weeks you can have people really getting after

it. So, I build on success, give them success for five exercises, give

them a new five and then go ahead and start playing with that a little bit

from there.

BJ Gaddour: Awesome. Let’s go to the next one, I’m excited for the next one

here.

Dave Schmitz: The next one is the ultimate. The reason I like it and the reason I said

we need to do this 120 on / 120 off sequence is this- I love partner

training. I love having people have to attach to each other using bands,

either by holding at your hands or holding at your waist or however we

have them attached. But the key with band partner training is this, it

takes a little bit of training and a little bit of learning. Most importantly, it

takes time to learn how to hold and it takes time to learn how to go ahead

and transition from Partner A to Partner B.

Well, 120 is perfect because the way we’re going to do a

120 on / 120 off is this, we’re going to follow an I-go-you-go sequence.

Basically you can go five reps or you can go 10 reps if you choose. I find

that somewhere between five and six reps is very good to have Partner A

go ahead do five reps, and then Partner B does five reps, and then back

to Partner A. You go for a total of 120 seconds and see how many total

rounds you can get done of that one specific exercise in two minutes, and

then you've got a 120-second recovery.

Now what do you do during the recovery? A couple of

different things. I like to implement going ahead and doing some simple

body weight exercises for trunk stability. Get out of the bands a little bit

and let them do something like that. You could do a simple stationary

jog. You can go ahead and eventually having them doing band running

drills if they get effective at it. So I think from a recovery standpoint BJ,

mostly everybody out there can up with some different things to for the

recovery. But the cool thing is what this sequence allows you to do is it

allows you to start really incorporating partner-based training and not

have to feel like there’s a lot of pressure when it comes to transition and

when it comes to holding. You could teach people very easily in that.

I can take a group, take one exercise like let’s say partner

horizontal push, hook them up and get set. Now literally you’re only

training half the group at one time, so you can go ahead and queue

people easily in this sequence, and they’re just going back and forth

communicating. You also create that partner communication which is an

incredible chemistry builder for your bootcamps. I’m telling you right

now, you want to get chemistry in your bootcamps because when you get

chemistry you got a great bootcamp going and people start to spread the

word real quickly.

BJ Gaddour: Two things I really love about this template is that it’s very smart.

What Dave focuses on doing is instead of getting 10-20 reps with a

movement, and usually the last 5-10 reps you’re going to feel the fatigue

and the quality of the movements start to suffer. You’re not as explosive,

you’re not getting as full a range of motion. Dave’s concept is let’s cut

the reps in half, so to speak, per set and just get a lot more sets of these

sub-maximal efforts in terms of number of repetitions. But every single

rep is done with a maximal effort, so the quality of movement is better.

If you’re doing 20 reps, let’s compare 20 reps straight, a 20

rep set, and the quality of movement in that as you start to fatigue and

you start to slow down in the movement pattern, and then let’s look at four

sets of five done really fast. Since you’re alternating between your

partner, you’re getting the right amount of rest to be able to go for the

next bout of five reps, that’s a great way actually to get more total work

done and more explosiveness, more muscles activated by making sure

every rep is of the highest quality.

Again the second component that’s really cool is that this

two-minute transition allows for multiple things. You can have them do

corrective self massage with foam rolling during the rest period, or do

some dynamic stretching with the band, hit the ground do give reps on

each hamstring just to open it up and get that in, get that flexibility training

actually during your workout so that you can kind of get everything done

at once. At the same time, Dave can actually coach a new movement

pattern during that two-minute time while campers are resting and getting

water, stretching or foam rolling, maybe doing some active recovery stuff

like a lunge matrix. It’s a really cool protocol, and I can see why Dave

loves it.

Dave Schmitz: It is, it works out awesome and people really like it. The other thing is as

your group becomes more advanced, because they’re only doing five

reps they start to do ahead and say “I’m going to try the bigger resistance

today, I’m going to step myself up from a red to a black band because

we’re only doing five reps, and I think I’m ready for it.” So you start

getting people to start going after just a little bit more resistance. What

that equates into obviously besides strength gain is bigger calorie

expenditure, bigger workload and all of that. With quality, you get better

recruitment. As you said, better recruitment means more calorie

expenditure because you got more muscles working in the same

sequence of activity, and it’s all integrated real well.

BJ Gaddour: Beautiful. We've got our last template on here, so take us

through that.

Dave Schmitz: Now that you have your continuous partner exercises going, why not put

five of them together? When you get to the 30-5 sequence, what you’re

really now ready to do, what I’d like to do, is pure partner training. What I

mean by that is we’re going to do five exercises, and after each exercise

Partner A is going to go, Partner B is going to go for 30 seconds, and

then you’ll literally going to transition to a second exercise, and then a

third exercise, a fourth exercise and then a fifth exercise. Then you’re

going to get a one-minute recovery and you’re going to repeat that for five

more rounds. What’s really cool is now you start getting total body

metabolic training because you can hit a push followed by a pull, then go

ahead and hit a lower body, and then you can transition right into a trunk

or a core stabilization exercise, all of these are partner-based. So,

you’re helping each other out, you’re pushing each other, but you’re

attached in one partner set-up.

Plus when it's really needed, you can always finish it off

with a high octane cardio exercise like a backpedal shuffle, things like

that. But 30-5 Parter Training is a great way to start really rocking and

rolling with partner-based training. Literally you got two people working

together and getting after it, and the five seconds that it takes is perfect to

transition from one exercise to the next one. It’s really all you need.

When people start getting experienced with your continuous work, then

take five exercises that they can transition for very easily and go ahead

and knock a 30-5 Partner Circuits. When you get to that, you have

arrived when it comes to resistance band training. You are doing it

because partner-based training allows you to absolutely go anywhere to

train, anywhere. No attachments needed, and you can crank up some

serious resistance because it really doesn’t take much to hold for your

partner once you’ve taught holding applications correctly.

So that’s where we go BJ, when you get to this, it’s a lot of

partner-based training. Yes, you could still do free-band training, and

yes you could still do the other things we talked about, but I really like to

use this for pure partner training.

BJ Gaddour: Again, the coolest thing is no matter what group it is, an athletic

team, a community bootcamp, the team building component of this

workout is phenomenal. It’s great to just sit back sometimes and just see

it unfold like it’s an autopilot. They’re pushing each other, they’re

screaming, they’re sweating. People that normally don’t work that hard

are really pushing because they’ve got their buddy keeping them

accountable. At the same time, what you never want especially in a kind

of youth-based environment is allowing dead time to kind of distract

people. The cool thing about this is the short transition times are all

that’s needed to get to the next exercise, to kind of switch from Partner 1

to Partner 2, and at the same time you're coaching one another – Dave

does a great job of making sure that the partners coach each other. If

they’re doing a shuffle drill, he’s emphasizing that they keep that wide foot

base throughout to make sure we’re not crossing the feet over, and

they’re keeping each other accountable. Basically you have all these

mini coaches throughout the whole session assisting you so you crank up

50-100 people at once to best leverage your time and all that good stuff.

Dave Schmitz: Exactly. You’re right about keeping everybody busy at all times.

Downtime in adult camps or more importantly even in youth camps, you

don’t want downtime. You want everybody to be accountable for

everybody and be totally involved in the process. When you get that,

time flies and kids really get great workouts. The other thing about

holding is this, one of the major things that we lack as a society is

stability. You are going to work some tremendous stabilization control

with holding, which is one of the benefits of partner band training that you

just can’t get with any other tool. I get really excited about partner band

training because I just think it’s a concept of resistance band training that

nobody looks at, and yet from a fitness standpoint and a performance

standpoint it’s the ultimate way to train when you’re working with groups

or teams and so forth.

BJ Gaddour: You got it. Again this brings us to kind of closing up this

interview. Awesome content. Dave, thanks so much again for doing

this with us. The big thing, the month of May 2010 is band month at

Workout Muse. Each week we’ll release one of these soundtracks plus a

bunch of cool done for you follow-along workouts that Dave has created

using the soundtracks. You’re literally going to have an automated

turnkey band training system that is digitally based that you can roll out

anywhere. It’s very exciting stuff.

The number one thing I want to make sure you guys do is

get with Dave, find a way to get more information from what Dave does

on a regular basis whether it be his newsletter or actually the most

exciting part in my mind is Dave is rolling out a killer resistance band

training certification. So let’s let Dave talk on that a little bit and explain

that. Again, if you are professional, you need to be a professional, you

need to be certified, you need to do this stuff for probably a couple of

weeks if not a couple of months before you bring the more advanced stuff

to your camps. The biggest mistake people make whether be kettlebells,

bands, the TRX, is that they get these cool new toys and they just want to

throw it right away to the camps for them to get so giddy and excited, but

they don’t know how to use it, and they don’t use it themselves. A lot of

the learning comes from your personal experience with the equipment,

with the workouts themselves.

So Dave has a certification that will teach exactly how to

do this stuff. So from day one using the bands, you are a top notch

professional. So Dave, talk to us about that.

Dave Schmitz: I’ve done a couple of live certifications, and one of the things that I’ve

learned is people enjoyed it and really want the information. Travel and

time is always difficult, you and I are both busy guys and you know what

we mean by that. So what we’re doing with the certification is we’re

going to roll it back and we’re going to create a mail order certification,

complete with DVDs that are being obviously taught by me. Also what

we’re going to do is create a manual and everything that you need to get

up to speed with a level one certification in resistance band training.

Now, that we hope to have out by approximately September 1st if not

sooner.

Now the other thing that people can do, here’s how I

recommend you get connected with RBT. On my website,

ResistanceBandTraining.com, I have a newsletter opt-in. That

newsletter opt-in gives you a nine session mini course that will get you up

to speed on several of the highlights of what the certification will be about.

Obviously it’s not the certification, but what I’ll do is I’ll give you a few

sessions free to kind of get you acclimated so at least you can start

playing it with yourself and get yourself going with it. BJ, it’s like always,

you got to train yourself and then you start training others. That’s where

I set these nine session mini course stuff, so that you start to learn for

yourself.

So what you need to do is go to

ResistanceBandTraining.com, go to the newsletter, it’s right there in front,

it says “RBT Live,” it’s me jumping out of a TV. Go down, subscribe, get

that nine session mini course, get started with that. Now when the

certification is ready to be launched and when there’s updates on it, you

will hear about it immediately. So that’s where the certification is at and

that’s what I’ve got out there right now to kind of get you moving forward

so that you don’t have to wait for the certification. You can get going

right now on some stuff so by the time it comes out and everything is

ready to go, you’re good to go in getting that information. So that’s the

other thing.

The other thing is in regards to the shopping cart and the

products that are available, please take a look at those and make sure

also that you’re always clueing in to my weekly videos series. I keep

giving tips and techniques every week and I don’t think there is a website

out there especially involving with resistance band training that does that.

So please, I really recommend that, please get on that and get going

because it’s the fastest way to learn and it’s right there for you. All it

takes is opting in and it comes right to your mailbox.

BJ Gaddour: I love it man. Again, Dave is one of those guys as I said at the

beginning, he’s one of my favorite people in the world. I can consider

him to be a friend for life and we’ve built a great relationship over the last

couple of years. He is just an authentic guy. He loves it, he’s all about

bringing more to what you're currently doing and taking your currents

camps to the next level, taking your athletes to the next level, and that’s

exactly what these bands can do. I just can’t recommend Dave and his

services highly enough. Then there’s that personal component where I

don’t think you can find a better guy. His intensity, his loyalty, his drive is

unmatched in this industry, and everything that Dave has gotten his life is

well deserved. There’s just a ton of more cool stuff coming for Dave in

the very near future that I’m very excited about because he deserves it.

I’m just proud that he can work with us and share all his cool knowledge

about bands and everything else he brings to the table with our Workout

Muse followers.

My goal and I think Dave’s goal as well is that our

respective list become one. Both systems combined, have an

exponential return in the sense that it just amplifies each experience. If

you’re just doing Workout Muse’s bodyweight workouts, that can get

boring over time. You’ve got to mix things up, and bands allow you to

really do that in a safe and effective manner that you can go anywhere

with. At the same time, if you’re using Dave’s bands and you’re trying to

look at the clock and you’re holding the bands, it’s very difficult. So the

whole concept is we’re trying to automate that band workout, so you can

focus on the workout itself and not the annoying task of looking at your

clock and being a rep counter.

Dave, thank you so much my friend. We’re going to do a

lot of cool stuff together, I’m looking forward it. I’m very excited about

this month. Look forward to some killer information about band training

powered by Workout Muse all month of May here at Workout Muse.

Everybody have a phenomenal day. Dave, thank you so much. Any

closing words?

Dave Schmitz: Just that when we brought Workout Muse – and BJ you know I told you

this many times - into the bootcamps and the training groups, it

completely made the workout go up to a completely new level, not just

from an intensity standpoint but people now could focus in on other

aspects that were far more important than having to look at the clock. I

know when this came out I said “there’s something right about this,” that

Workout Muse has just been a huge advantage to resistance band

training in regards to the bootcamps and how we use it. Frankly, there

isn’t a day that goes by, a workout that goes by that I won’t use it. You

know that, I know that, that’s why we keep making all these new

templates.

So, thanks a lot for doing this. I’m excited about the

month of May and I think it’s going to be an incredible experience for the

people that want to jump on board and just see what we’re about to show

them and get them started on.

BJ Gaddour: Very cool man. Well, this is BJ Gaddour co-creator and fitness

director of Workout Muse with my very good friend Dave Schmitz, the

owner of ResistanceBandTraining.com. Look forward to some great stuff

for May and crank it. We’ll see you later.

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