Dave’s RBT Story
How a Big Ass BAND Helped A 30+ Year Old Iron Pumping Physical Therapist Stay Fit & Athletic at 60+ while helping 1000’s of others do the same.
It’s pretty wild to think back on your childhood and realize some of the crazy stuff you did was actually a foreshadowing of where life would take you.
It’s definitely the case when it comes to My RBT Story and something I am excited to share with you.
Farm Boy to Physical Therapist
As a boy growing up on a Wisconsin Dairy Farm, 25 miles from any civilization (in my 15 year old opinion), hanging out and playing a little pickup basketball or working out at the high school weight room with my high school teammate wasn’t going to happen.
Instead my weight room was a garage (in the summer) and an unfinished basement (in the winter). My strength equipment was old plastic weights with a 20 pound barbell, tractor tires. hay bales, clothes lines for pullups, sledgehammers, elastic straps my dad used as bungee cords and my body. As for cardio that involved jumping up on hay bales, sprinting through cornfields, and running on gravel roads.
Yes my parents, as well as several neighbors, thought I was nuts.. Especially when I would do it in the snow or on the hottest days of the year, but it added to the overall training effect.
Yes I played high school sports and no I wasn’t very good.
But it wasn’t the game that I loved, It was the training and how it help make me better.
Crazy Right?? Keep reading, there was a method behind my madness…
Knowing the farm wasn’t for me, I attended the University of La Crosse-Wisconsin to major in something that allowed me to learn more about how the body worked and would let me help people get better.
Having suffered a few injuries in high school, Athletic Training and Physical Therapy seemed to be a good fit…. If nothing else, I would learn how to fix myself.
What better way to learn how the body works than by fixing it when it gets broken.
I left the University of La Crosse in 1986 with a BS in Physical Therapy, a minor in Athletic Training and 4 years of working out. Needless to I was fired up to fix people’s back, knees, ankles, hips, and shoulders. For the next 7 years, I dialed in tight and learned a ton while getting a lot of people better.
However, there was something that continued to bug me.
It’s hard to explain but as a 30-year-old guy who worked out lifting weights every day and considered himself pretty athletic, I was waking up stiff and was continually struggling with nagging injuries which as a PT didn’t seem quite right.
Interestingly I was also noticing how much my rehab patients were struggling regaining their strength using weights. Obviously just getting stronger lifting weights wasn’t translating into quick recover, staying athletic or returning back to activities of life that had been lost with injury.
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Thank God for a Crazy Therapist and a Goofy Band Guy named Dick
In 1994, I started on a journey to figure out why just getting stronger and lifting weights wasn’t working. I came across a physical therapist named Gary Gray. This guy was high energy and a little crazy but what he taught me about how the body moved made total sense to me. The body was a quick reacting, multi-planar machine that was designed to work together as complete unit. Traditional strength training with weights was slow single plane, isolated movements that was training the body to work as individual parts. No wonder my iron pumping approach was making me feel stiff , tight, sore and old. Needless to say Gary was a “Game Changer” and I followed him around for 2 years learning and implementing everything he taught me about human movement. The more I learned the better results I got with my patients and in my personal workouts.
In 1996 a second “Game Changer” came along. While attending a football clinic with a coaching friend of mine at the University of Notre Dame I quickly became bored listening to a bunch of football coaches talk X’s and O’s so I went for a walk.
I strolled into a huge indoor training facility and sat down to watch this short little goofy guy named Dick demonstrate all kinds of crazy drills with these big rubber bands. As I watched Dick do his thing with these bands, I started thinking about what Gary had taught me about how the body functionally moved and a huge light bulb went off in my head. 2 hours later I bought a couple of bands and I set out to see if my vision about training with bands could make my patients and myself move, feel and perform better.
For the next year, I started training myself and rehabbing all my patients by combining the knowledge Gary had given me with these big bands. IT WAS AMAZING… Patients started moving even better, recovering even faster while personally I was getting more athletic.
It was awesome. My body was moving and feeling athletic again. So much so that at age 38 I started doing track workouts again, something I never thought I would ever do again after high school.
It All Started To Make Sense….
“A Band Worked Just Like a Muscle which is why The Body Loved Training with It” !!
I Will Never Forget TOM
Tom was one of those special patients that I will never forget. He struggled with cancer and over time it had taken its toll on several areas of his body.
One day while in the clinic working with Tom, it hit me…. my “patients” were really active minded people that were exercising to get more athletic so they could maximize life outside the clinic. It was the same reason I exercised. I wanted to use the gym to help me enjoy life more outside the gym.
That day, Thanks to Tom, I started training, not rehabilitating, my patients to become great movers. It was this mind-shift that took me into the next phase of my Resistance Band Training Journey.
From Rehab to Performance to Fitness
So if my Resistance Band Training (RBT) approach helped people recover from injury faster, why wouldn’t it also help get athletes faster and stronger on the field.
Along with that why wouldn’t it provide active minded fitness adults a more sustainable joint friendly fitness solution that could help them look, feel and move more athletically while maximizing life-opportunities outside the gym.
HERE WE GO!!
To prove my vision, in 2000 I launched a pilot performance enhancement program (G’town Fast n Fit Camps) and a weekly adult fitness program (G’town Band Bootcamps). The goal was to help young athletes and fitness minded adults learn how to train with resistance band. If I was right about RBT these pilot programs would prove that RBT was the secret weapon to helping young athletes get faster and stronger in their sport as well as provide fitness mind adults with a sustainable convenient training approach that allowed them to look, feel and move their best.
With these pilot training programs combined with the my day job as a physical therapist and my personal fitness routine, I was now training individuals from seniors to high performance professional athletes using the same Resistance Band Training System.
Resistancebandtraining.com is launched
10 Years after discovering Gary and Crazy Dick’s big ass bands, I launched the first Resistancebandtraining.com website. The goal was to start sharing information worldwide on a proven but unheard of training system for all ages using a large continuously looped band. I started writing weekly blog articles, publishing videos on YouTube, doing high school athlete training workshops and speaking at any event I could get invited to. Within 2 years I had written 100’s of blog posts, created 400+ YouTube videos and had done probably 50+ workshops.
Needless to say things were a little crazy back then. I was building resistancebandtraining.com, running training session for adults 4 days per week, coaching young athletes 4 day a week in an after-school athlete performance training program, rehabbing patients 30 hours per week, getting my own workouts in and trying to chase after 3 healthy children.
Fortunately, I had an awesome teammate in my wife Karen who made sure I knew where I was going every day.
Decision Time
I wanted to help as many people as possible get better with RBT and with the growth of the internet Resistancebandtraining.com was going to be the best platform to achieve that. So in 2008 I launched Resistance Band Training Systems, LLC with Karen and together we became full fledged small business owners. Quantum Bands, the exclusive band of RBT, soon followed along with several training accessories, the RBT Certification and tons of other educational resources all designed to help people of all ages and performance goals start learning how to “Getting Better and Stay Better Training with Bands”
Let’s Get YOU Better with Bands
I won’t say it’s been easy running the only online website exclusively devoted to teaching and training people on how to get better with bands but it’s sure has been rewarding and exciting seeing 1000’s of fitness enthusiasts, athletes, trainers and coaches discover that lifting weights only is not the best way to get the body stronger, healthier and performing at a high level. Resistancebandtraining.com always was and will continue to be all about sharing which is why we easily have the largest FREE online Resistance Band Training resource library, YouTube channel and newsletter following.
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This isn’t your ordinary boring Newsletter. 4 times per week (since November of 2009) I share training, teaching and workouts on how to use Quantum Resistance Bands to get your body looking, feeling and moving better so you can maximize life outside the gym.
Your knowledge, experience, instruction and products continue to improve the quality of my life. thanks for acting upon your desire to help people enjoy their lives more fully.
Best regards,
Scott Limpert
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Always GOOD Stuff! Thank you. I bought your bands years ago and they are STILL serving me well.
Trish Van Gorden
Fitness Trainer
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I am pretty sure we will help you get better faster with bands. Think of it as having your own weekly band training session for FREE.
Look forward to starting to share with you Today!!
Dave “The Band Man”