With a very simple cable or exercise band you can do three particular types of workouts. Each of these does something different for your body and will deliver different results:

Circuit Training

Power Training

Recovery

An effective exercise band workout program may include all of these exercise types or just one of them. You may also want to incorporate other types of exercise equipment such as an exercise ball, but that is not necessary. What equipment you use and which types of workouts you incorporate depends on the results you want to see from your workout program.

Exercise Band And Recovery Workouts

One of the worst things you can do is over train your body. Your muscles benefit from workouts that are very challenging, but if you have too much challenge in a short period of time you risk injury from the overuse of muscles. That is where recovery workouts come into the picture.

A recovery workout won't be as challenging as the other workouts in your program. They stretch out your muscles and help your body recover from your more intense training sessions. An exercise band is perfect for this, since it is by nature gentler on the body than other types of exercise equipment.

The benefit of an exercise band recovery workout is to stretch and ease the muscles while picking up blood flow throughout the body. This is done by moving slower and extending the body fully with every motion. You should do 15 or more slow reps of every movement.

Though recovery workouts and circuit training workouts have different benefits and goals, you can easily turn a recovery workout into a circuit training session.

Circuit Training with Exercise Bands

The benefit of circuit training is that you can strengthen and tone the body while burning fat. You alternate between muscle building exercises and rounds of cardio movements so your heart rate stays high and your muscles are challenged at the same time. This option is great if you have limited amounts of time to workout and can't do cardio and strength training separately.

The best movements for a circuit training session will incorporate the upper and lower body at the same time. You should also change between different muscle groups in the body so you can move from one exercise to the next. You don't necessarily rest between sets like you would with a straight weightlifting program. The goal is to keep moving so the heart rate remains high, but at a safe level, for cardio benefits.

Exercise Band Power Training

Power training helps your body improve speed while becoming more powerful. The exercise band is perfectly suited to this type of training since the goal is to move fast with explosive power whenever possible. Exercise bands allow faster movement without threat of injury, so they are used over dumbbells or other hand weights.

You have to rest between sets and follow proper form with this type of exercise band workout.

Think about what results you want from your exercise program and then determine which of these workout types you should include in your exercise band program.

Mandy Gibbons Virtual Fitness Trainer.com For VFTs free report on incorporating the exercise band into your workout visit Virtual Fitness Trainer.com.