So… can’t go to the gym and waiting for the new barbell-less barbell medicine template to come out? Here some ideas for alternative lifts.
First some background: I’ve found some old 1kg dumbbells in my basement but except for curls and some high rep tempo movements they are essentially useless. Then I realized that I’ve got some bands in my gym bag that I’ve been using for overload movements, 2x 15kg and 1x 25kg. I’ve been using the latter specefically for banded deadlifts where I would lay the band on top of the barbell and then stand on the ends. So I realized that, well, I could just stand on it alone and grab the ends with my hands - essentially a banded deadlift without the barbell. Way too easy, but add the other 2 15kg bands and you’ve surely got yourself some resistance there. You can also take a wider stance (up to a sumo stance of course), effectively shortening the the parts that you can pull on and thus gain more resistance. Fold the band together so that you basically have 2 layers of band in each hand, stand on it - and I swear pulling the folded 15kg band was hard. No chance for me pulling the folded 25kg band.
Squats? Same thing basically… you stand on one or more bands, squat down, pull them over your neck and get going. Want it harder? Put each foot separately into one of the loops and pull the middle part over your neck. I could barely squat the 25kg band all the way up that way.
The press? Not much of a difference, just stand on the band, put your hand through the loops and press.
Rows? Similar to the deadlifts above obviously and much much harder than with the 10kg barbells.
It feels a bit weird sure, but it works surprisingly well and the cool thing is that except for the “overload” effect it is very similar in terms of movement and balance to the original movements and your balancing everything mid-foot.
Nice one. I have been thinking along similar lines. I have a 1” barbell with a few light plates, and also some bands from doing overload lifts previously.
I think the drawback of your method is that the lifts are too light at the bottom position of each lift, and arbitrarily heavy at the top depending on band strength and geometry.
My contribution: do one set (or several sets) as you’ve described, mostly working the upper portions of the lift. Then readjust the bands so that they feel quite heavy at the bottom, and impossible to reach the top. In this configuration, do another set (or several set) of partial range of motion in order to work the lower range of the lifts with adequate weight for strength training.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but I plan to as soon as I clean up my deck space this weekend.
Hahah yeah that’s actually how I did it two days ago for the deadlifts. I used the folded together band, which I wasn’t able to fully deadlift and did two sets up to how far I could and paused there for 1-2 counts. Then I followed by two sets of full range of motion. It worked really well… my lower back and my glutes were fried afterwards.