Band Decoder

Ten product lines from nine brands, 58 bands in all, read in August 2026 with the URL kept and printed next to the result. Nine of the ten lines come off the maker's own spec page. TheraBand is the stated exception and is labelled as one wherever its numbers appear: it prints no figure on the band and ships its force chart as an image, so its kilograms come from a peer-reviewed laboratory measurement instead, cited to that study rather than to the brand. Brands whose numbers only exist on a marketplace listing or a review site were left out rather than guessed at. The full list of what was dropped and why is in the sources section below.

Pounds become kilograms at 0.45359237 kg per pound, and that is the only arithmetic applied to a range-rated band. If a maker prints 50 to 120 lb, you get 22.7 to 54.4 kg. No rounding to a friendlier number, no averaging across brands, no house scale invented on top.

A band has no weight. It has a tension that rises as you pull it further, so a single number is meaningless until someone says at what stretch it was measured. Makers do not agree. Rogue states one figure at 100 percent stretch. Serious Steel, Titan, RDX and RitFit print a range and do not say what stretch either end refers to. Bodylastics prints a nominal figure plus a stated maximum. TheraBand publishes a colour chart with no number on the band at all. The page prints each line's basis next to the answer, because that mismatch is the reason two bands labelled 50 lb can feel nothing alike.

Rogue quotes a point, not a range, so a top end has to come from somewhere. Uchida and colleagues measured latex band tension at every 25 percent of elongation up to 250 percent; across all eight TheraBand colours, tension at 200 percent stretch came out 1.3 to 1.6 times tension at 100 percent. For a point-rated line the low end of the working range stays the maker's own printed figure and the high end is that figure times 1.6, the top of the measured ratio. It is labelled an estimate everywhere it appears. Range-rated lines never get it, because their printed range already spans the stretch.

TheraBand's own force chart ships as an image and states no tension as text, only a 25 percent step in pull force through black and a 40 percent step for silver and gold. Its numbers therefore cannot be quoted from that page at all. This tool uses the independently measured tensions from the Uchida 2016 study instead, at 100 and 200 percent elongation, and attributes them to that study everywhere they appear. Those measured means ran 13 to 44 percent below TheraBand's published reference values depending on colour, with a single exception the paper records at low stretch, which is worth knowing before you trust any brand's chart to a decimal place.

Assisted pull-up assistance is scaled to your bodyweight at 30 to 50 percent, which is the usual working range for someone training toward a first rep. The other four windows, for rows, hip thrusts, pull-aparts and face pulls, are this site's coaching judgement about the peak tension a productive set needs at those rep ranges. They are not measurements and no paper states them. A band passes when its working range overlaps the window at all, which is deliberately generous, because bands are a tool for a rep range rather than a precise load. The test runs in both directions: a band whose range starts above the window is called too heavy for the job, and the verdict under your result says so rather than telling you that you are covered. If you tick the whole-set box, that check runs across every band in the line, so the kit can pass on a band you did not pick.

It will not tell you how much assistance you are getting at the top of a pull-up, because the honest answer is close to nothing. Band assistance is largest at the bottom, where the band is stretched furthest, and falls away exactly where the rep gets hard. That is the central limitation of band-assisted pull-ups and no colour chart fixes it. The page also will not tell you a band's breaking point, its safe stretch limit, or how long it will last, because none of those are published in a form worth repeating.

RDX is both one of the ten lines in the data and this page's affiliate partner. It is in the data because its own product page publishes width and resistance figures that could be read and checked, on the same terms as the other nine. Nothing on this page ranks or sorts by brand: the comparison table sorts by how close another band's kilograms are to yours, and the gap check is arithmetic on your bodyweight and the range your own kit covers. The verdict is finished before the link is considered. The link then appears only if RDX's own published ranges contain a band that lands in the window you need, which is checked against the same figures printed in the table above. That cuts both ways: when your band is too heavy, the recommendation is a lighter one, and when the gap is bigger than RDX's heaviest band can cover the page says so and shows no partner link at all.