Using many muscles throughout your body makes sure they remain active and do not deteriorate due to a lack of use. Rubber bands provide a safe way to utilize these varying muscles and slowly enhance their strength over time. The dystrophin in my body enables me to increase my strength, but everyone’s journeys are entirely different. Your shoulder and back strength are crucial to maintaining a good posture, which ensures fantastic airflow, participation in physical activity, reduced tightness, and the ability to walk more comfortably. I will show videos giving visual representations of exercises I exploited over the years to my advantage.
James Grade made a video called, “Awesome At-Home Back Workout Using Resistance Bands,” giving workouts fantastic to use shoulder and back muscles. The first exercises involve tying a rubber band to somewhere elevated from you. Crouch down onto your knees and rest your thighs on top of the calves. Next, grab the rubber band with both your hands and use your arms to pull down the rubber band until it is about at the neck level. Make sure your shoulders come down slowly, and then the elbows slowly do along with squeezing at the end of the motion to use the concentric movement. I would recommend releasing quickly for anyone with muscular dystrophy. Next, tie a rubber band to something at about belly button level and move one leg in front of the other to hold a solid stance. With your palm facing down, you can extend your elbow to the sides at about chest level, or you can face the palm down and pull down towards your obliques/hips. The final exercise involves standing on the rubber band and holding a slight squat. Grab the bands with your arms and pull your elbows back. Make sure to try and squeeze the shoulder blades together in combination with tightening the back muscles. With all these exercises, maintain a strong core to stabilize yourself and prevent injuries.
Omit Academy explains five great exercises for the shoulders in a video named “5 Resistance Band Exercises for Shoulder Pain,” and an article called “Shoulder Pain? Try these 5 Resistance Band Exercises.” One hand external rotation involves standing on a lightweight band with one foot and holding the band with one arm. Position your arm at a flat 90-degree angle and externally rotate your arm to have a 90-degree angle facing the sky. One hand internal rotation is the same movement in the opposite direction. For underarm pull aparts, hold a rubber band in front of your body and pull them apart from each other as far as you can. You can do this exercise at different height levels to work different parts of the back and shoulder. Lateral raise begins with one foot or two feet holding down the rubber band and your arms at your body’s side with your hands slightly in front of your hips. Pull the rubber band to the side and up towards the sky. The last exercise, called lying external rotation, demands that you lay on the ground. Holding the rubber band with both hands, externally rotate your arms away from your body to touch the ground.
Since these exercises use rubber bands, you can change the exercise’s difficulty by the length at which you hold the rubber bands (closer is stronger while further apart is weaker). They are excellent to ensure that you activate several back and shoulder muscles as muscular dystrophy may cause further damage if you do nothing with them. For me, rubber bands confirmed that I could increase muscle mass in my body to help every activity in my life. Rubber bands are the best thing to use for a muscular dystrophy patient, as you can use them for a variety of different exercises.
