The Cheap Resistance Bands That Earned a Spot in My Gym Bag

My hips used to announce softball season about a week early. Not with pain, exactly. More like a warning. I would squat down to scoop a ground ball at the first practice and everything from my lower back to my knees would file a complaint. I am 46 now. I caught four years of college baseball, and my body has kept the receipts.

I am the assistant athletic director at a public high school outside Fort Worth. I still play men's league basketball on Tuesday nights, pickup on some Saturday mornings, and softball in the spring and fall. I lift in my garage two or three mornings a week. A set of Fit Simplify loop bands rides in my gym bag and has been to all of it. That is not a lot by the standards of the kids I work around, but it is enough that a bad warmup turns into a bad week.

The rough stretch started last winter. Every Tuesday basketball game left me sore for two or three days. Nothing torn, nothing I had to go see anybody about. Just stiff. My hips felt locked up for the first ten minutes of everything, and by the time they loosened up the game was half over. I was playing bad basketball and then paying for it until Thursday.

So I did what most guys my age do. I stretched more. I held a hamstring stretch for a full minute on each side and told myself that was the answer. It was not. Static stretching before you play does not do much for a hip that has been folded into the seat of a pickup for forty minutes.

A teammate let me use his massage stick in the dugout one afternoon last spring. It felt good on my calf and did nothing for the way I moved. That is the thing about most recovery gear. It works on a muscle that is already tired. Almost none of it warms you up before you go.

Two years ago I bought a set of Fit Simplify loop bands on a whim after a bad warmup, and it is the only piece of gear in my gym bag that has never been left at home on purpose. Fit Simplify was not a company I knew anything about before that. It was a set of five loops and a carry bag, and I figured if it fell apart I would know inside of a month.

Two years of pregame warmups, two or three lifts a week, and not one of the five bands has torn.

The set is five latex loops, a carry bag, and a small instruction booklet with illustrated exercises. The bands are 12 inches long and 3 inches wide, a quarter inch thick, and the whole set weighs about 3.5 ounces. Five resistance levels, running from extra light up to heavy. I use the middle one and the two heaviest. The extra light band is basically a big rubber band for somebody my size, and I have never found a real use for it.

My warmup takes ten minutes now. Band above the knees, lateral steps across the dugout and back. Monster walks forward and backward. Then the band goes around my ankles for a set of hip openers. Then I loop one around my forearms and pull my hands apart while I sit in a squat, which is the only thing that has ever gotten my shoulders loose before I throw. Same routine before every lift in the garage, just shorter.

Here is the difference between the bands and the pair of 35-pound dumbbells I have owned for about ten years. A dumbbell gives you resistance in one direction, and gravity does the rest. A band pulls the whole way through the movement, including the part where the dumbbell goes easy. For hips and shoulders, that middle part is the part that matters. The 35s still get used for pressing and rows. They were just never going to warm up a hip.

Two years in, none of the five have torn. I have lost the carry bag behind the seat of my truck twice and found it both times. That is the whole report. They do not fix anything. If you have a real injury, a hip that catches or a shoulder that wakes you up at night, see a doctor. A band is a warmup tool and a light resistance tool, and that is all I would ever ask it to be.

One honest complaint. They roll. Drop one on the dugout floor and it will find the one gap in the concrete and disappear into it. I have chased the middle band under a bleacher more than once. The Fit Simplify bands are latex, so if you have a latex allergy, skip them entirely. I keep mine in the bag for that reason as much as any other.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you the thing that changed my Tuesday nights was not a gadget. It was ten minutes of band work before I played, done the same way every time, for two years. I would tell you to buy the gear you will actually keep in the truck, because the best warmup tool is the one that is with you at the field and not on a shelf in the garage. I would also tell you that if something hurts in a way that is still there a week later, that is not a band problem, and you should get it looked at. For the rest of us, the ones who are just stiff and getting older, a set of five latex loops and a carry bag covers more of my warmup than anything else I have bought. Fit Simplify made them, they have held up, and they ride in the gym bag behind the seat of my truck.