Band training can be a great way to both boost your competitive performance in a broad variety of sports, and take your fitness and calorie burn to the next level.

When you train with resistance bands to add additional challenge to a movement, you are increasing your strength throughout that range of motion, so that when you are doing the motion without that added resistance you will have faster, more explosive power. This is enormously beneficial to athletes who need to make quick vertical jumps from an assortment of starting positions, sudden direction changes, and explosive sprints down the field or court.

Even if you aren’t training competitively for a sport, you can diversify your workouts and push yourself further (helping you avoid plateaus and boredom in your routines) by incorporating speed training band workouts. You recruit muscles in a different and more thorough way and it also boosts the calorie burn of a routine. Band training will help you get your heart rate up faster, it will challenge your muscles more dynamically, and it can help you tone up and lose weight faster.

The most effective speed training with bands is going to involve relevant movements to your sport, increasing your power, your bodily control and your agility.

The exercises in this workout for speed involve jumps, sprints, lateral movement, and fast movements of the feet – movements that are important in almost literally every sport.

Because of the short intervals of activity (15 and 20 seconds) and the time that it takes to switch between using the resistance of the bands and going without, this is essentially a HIIT workout structure, which means that if you really push yourself during those short active intervals, you can end up burning a lot of calories and giving yourself the benefit of the afterburn effect, where you will burn calories at a slightly higher rate for up to 24-28 hours later while your body normalizes itself.

Workout Structure
4 Different Speed Training Drills
15 Seconds of an exercise with bands on
(Short rest while you transition and secure the bands so that you are without resistance)
20 Seconds of the same exercise, this time without the added resistance
Repeat twice, then move onto the next exercise
9 Minutes Total

Printable Workout
Wall Sprints
Power Skip to Lunge with Floor Touch (Do 1 repetition of resistance and no resistance on each leg)
Lateral Jumps
Knee Up and Out Hops (Do 1 repetition of resistance and no resistance on each leg)

There is no warm up or cool down for this routine but both are highly recommended.


How often should I do this?
Because this is a relatively high impact routine, we recommend that you do it no more than four times a week, possibly just 1-2 times if you are in the middle of a regular athletic season (doing this in additional to your regular training sessions).

How many calories does this burn?
We estimate that this routine burns 8-12 calories per minute, or 72-108 calories total.