Video:Learn Resistance Band Arm Exercises

Transcript:Learn Resistance Band Arm Exercises

Hi! I'm Margie Weiss from BODY BY WEISS. Today, for About.com, we're going to use a resistance band to do some toning exercises for your arms.

Basics for Resistance Band Arm Exercises

A resistance band is a simple machine, just a tube with two handles. And the nice thing about them is that you can different muscle groups, different muscle actions on a tube, than you can with a weight.

First, let's talk safety. You're going to put the tubes, put it underneath your feet. You want to have it in the middle of your foot, because you don't want the tube to come up to the front.

My friend Louisa is going to help me today. She is going to work as if she were a beginner, so she is going to just put one foot under the tube. A more advanced person can put two feet. You can also go wider to make your resistance harder. Bending your knees just slightly, and making sure your belly button is into your backbone, your shoulders are down, and your chest is up.

Resistance Band Arm Exercises for the Bicep

We're going to work the bicep and the tricep. They're opposing muscles, and so, with a tube, you can work both of them at the same time. Louisa is going to have her arms coming forward. She is not going to have any angle at the wrist. She is going to pretend like she has no wrist joint. She is just going to crawl up, and come down.

When she comes down, you want to be careful not to allow the tube to snap down really fast. You want to let it come up, maybe two counts, come down maybe four counts. So it's controlled on the way down, because you're working a lot on the return, just like you're working on the way up. Shoulders are low, breathe out on the rise, and you breathe in on the down. This is a basic bicep curl. Her elbows are in nice and close, and her core is stable.

Resistance Band Arm Exercises for the Tricep

If we want to switch to triceps, we don't have to do anything different, except come out the backside. So she can have her palms forwards on the rise, and they're also forwards on the back. So by just combining one, and then the other, she has got both actions.

Now all she has to do to change the muscle group just slightly, is to turn her palms instead of being up. Let's turn them down. So she is at a 180-degree difference. Now she has got what's called a reverse curl.

As she does the triceps at the back, she is getting a slightly different part of the tricep. Tricep has three parts. That's why it's called a tricep. So bicep has two parts. So you can move the wrist to accent different parts of the same muscle group.

Hammer Position for both Bicep and Tricep

You can also do an angle. It's called a hammer position, where your hand is like this as if you're going to hammer. You can come up the front, and same thing you can come up the back. Little bit different feel on the tubes, because you'll notice the tubes come in, and touches the front of her hand, and then it touches the back of her knuckles.

So these are just a few of the exercises you can use to tone your arms using resistance bands. To learn more, visit About.com.