In my house the pandemic began with a flurry of online shopping to create a home gym. Or rather, to round out our existing supplies.
We have a TRX and yoga mats, bikes and a trainer for Zwift, and even resistance bands with handles and a lone kettle bell. We’ve hung our punching bag. I’m feeling pretty lucky.
My son also bought a giant tire for flipping, and some sandbags and water jugs for lifting.
The most recent fitness tool we acquired are peach bands. They’re resistance band loops and they come attached to whole marketing campaign that’s got my feminist attention.
They’re marketed as booty bands. Peach is both the colour of some of the bands and the desired booty shape that’s the aim of the workout. There’s lots of peach booty imagery out there and discussion of “peachy glutes.” Google it! Or not. Your choice.
See 5 Booty Band Moves (Other Than Squats) That’ll Give You A Peachy Butt.
The bands are incredibly useful for me because my mobility warm up is one I do with bands. My knee physio exercises use the bands too. And now I have some strength training that uses bands.
What’s interesting (and not surprising really) is that the knee physio exercises and the “develop a peachy booty” exercises are the same. See How glute strength supports your knees and Strengthen Glute Medius to Avoid Common Knee Pain.
So my knee pre-hab workout is also some Instagram fitness model’s booty beautiful workout.
See 6 Resistance Band Exercises to Relieve Knee Pain.
As a feminist I always have mixed emotions about workouts aimed at making some body part beautiful. What’s in the mix? Well, a healthy dose of “you do you” and “go girl” along with some sadness that the great feel good of moving your body and sports performance is reduced to mere means to aesthetic bodily improvement. Also, I fret that it won’t work anyway and then you’ll hate yourself and stop exercising losing out on all the good that movement brings.
Still, still, these exercises do help knees. And more women than men have knee issues. We tend to move in a quad dominant way and have issues activating glutes and hamstrings. These bands certainly help activate those muscles. So if younger women are motivated by booty-beautiful and end up with fewer knee injuries as a result, then why worry about the motivation?
Also, they are really nice bands with (for me) the right range of resistance. And they come in a handy (peach coloured) carrying pouch. The marketing campaign has a lot of empowerment messaging. See the pie chart above.
