This article is part of TechRadar’s Get Fit For ’25 series. All week long, we’re publishing articles relating to fitness, health and the tech we’re using to improve in 2025. You can view all the other articles in this series here.
I enjoy taking part in a variety of different active disciplines, such as yoga, surfing and hiking, but my two mainstays (like many people) are running and going to the gym. Long, slow, steady-state runs deliver mind space, clarity, and time to listen to audiobooks and podcasts uninterrupted, while short, sharp 5Ks offer welcome lunchtime breaks and quick morning workouts. It’s the reason why I’m able to test the running functions so thoroughly on the best smartwatches.
However, the gym, weightlifting in particular, hits different. I was swapping the sultry tones of my Audible library for my heavy metal-filled gym playlist (despite my slight frame and nerdish demeanor, I’m partial to a bit of Five Finger Death Punch in my Jabra Elite 8 Actives), and I used to look forward to lacing up my gym shoes and hitting the mats a few times a week.
I enjoy compound lifts such as pull-ups, deadlifts and squats, working back to isolation exercises such as bicep curls and tricep extensions. I’d be in the gym for around 50 minutes each time, hitting five-to-six exercises in total – and unless I was training for an event such as a marathon, I would go two to three times a week with a couple of runs in between, plus a yoga class if I could manage it. The end result was that I became pretty well-rounded physically, and it felt like a sustainable way of working out.
All that changed six months ago, when I moved out of London to a new city, and my wife and I cut down on unnecessary expenses as we saved for a new home. The gym was one of the first things to go, as I thought I knew enough about home workouts to stay fit without it. I had everything I needed: a few sets of the best running shoes, a park with cast-iron monkey bars perfect for pull-up training in the early hours, and a set of resistance bands.
Resistance bands: the most underrated fitness kit
I bought a set of FitBeast resistance bands in five different thicknesses from Amazon during this year’s Prime Day in July, for around £25 ($30 / AU$40). It comes with handles, a door hook, and a guidebook. While resistance bands are generally considered a rehabilitation tool, rather than an effective strength-training solution, they’re incredibly beneficial for building and maintaining muscle.
In combination with the bars at my local park for pull-up and assisted pull-up training, I was soon finding that I could replicate almost all of my usual gym movements without issue.
I could do deadlifts with the thickest band by standing on it in the deadlift position and executing the move. I could do bicep curls. I could do shrugs. I could do flys to train my chest, and wrap the thinner bands around my back to make push-ups more difficult. I could do reverse-flys and bent-over rows to train my back, and wrap the thicker bands around my arms, while standing on the other end, to execute front squats.
When paired with a pole in the park, I could treat a resistance band like a cable machine, or execute assisted pull-ups when I overdid it on unassisted ones. Check out our guide on how to use resistance bands to build muscle for more on this.
I used resistance bands for six months, on and off, mixing it up with regular runs, core work and calisthenics exercises. Here are three things I learned.
1. Resistance bands and weights are not the same
The way resistance bands and weights work is fundamentally different, despite being able to achieve similar results in theory. A 2019 study found elastic resistance can provide similar strength gains to conventional resistance training, but it requires you to take a different approach, focusing more on contracting the muscle.
When you stretch a resistance band, it’s constantly straining to pull itself back to shape, and as you lower it, that strain decreases. Therefore, its pull is more powerful at the top of a lift than it is at the bottom, compared to a weight that’s exerting the same force all throughout the exercise. Therefore, sometimes I would find I needed to grip the band in such a way that it was stretching from the very start of my lift, as opposed to just gripping a barbell and lifting it.
Also, you have to prepare for the resistance to exert itself in a slightly different way. When doing a bicep curl, the force working against your arms is tied to the band, not gravity. Ensuring all your moves are done slowly, with control, and working against that force all the way up and all the way down, is the best way to use resistance bands for muscle gain.
However, resistance bands offer their own benefits, too, the biggest being that they’re cheap and super easy to store. You can take them and use them anywhere you have a few feet of space, although I found I needed something to do pull-ups on in order to fully complete my workout. I use a local park, but you may have the space or facilities to invest in a pull-up bar. Resistance bands are also much safer than weights, with less likelihood of injury, making them great for rehab, older exercisers, or for those getting used to new movement patterns.
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2. I improved in unexpected ways
In many ways, my new routine was a big downgrade from a professionally kitted-out gym. For example, I’m pretty sure that my maximum deadlift weight has gone down: I’d be an idiot to assume I haven’t lost some measurement of brute strength over the past six months.
However, I’ve improved in other ways. The increase in core work and all that time spent fighting against the bands’ elasticity means my balance and core is still pretty strong, perhaps stronger than ever. While my overall strength may have decreased, training my core strength, balance and learning new movement patterns has meant that I’m finally able to execute a one-handed push-up on either arm – something I’ve never been able to achieve before!
As a result of being able to squeeze a complete resistance training workout in my back garden, I’ve been able to train less intensely but more often, resulting in these overall increases in performance but with much less soreness. I’ve also had to get creative with my workouts, trying new moves to make the most of resistance bands and paying more attention to my muscle contractions. This has given me more options when (or if) I finally return to the gym.
3. I’ve missed having a dedicated “third space”
Like so many people who start exercising at home after a spell at the gym, I did find that it wasn’t long before I began to miss my “third space”. The concept of a third space, a location encouraging social interaction that isn’t work or home, could be a library, a coffee shop, or (you’ve guessed it) a gym. Having moved cities, I’d lost the community of regular gym-goers I’d say a quick hello to in the venue, and hadn’t established another such community in my new location.
Having a dedicated space can also put us in the mindset of working out, much like an office can do so with our regular work. Without that third space, I had to dedicate a space in my garden (in summer) and a small square of carpet in my living room (in winter) to exercise, which was less ideal. My home workouts tended to be shorter and more full of distractions than my gym sessions.
It’s this psychological aspect, rather than the performance, which makes me want to return to the gym in the future. In all other ways, this experiment was a roaring success: if you prefer working out at home and outside rather than using a dedicated gym and dealing with the general public, I can certainly recommend picking up a set of resistance bands for a song and getting rid of the gym on a trial basis in 2025.
