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A case Against Dumbells
A Case Against Dumbells
The title of this post is actually a bit of a paradox for me as in many ways I am actually a big fan of dumbells for certain things. I was very fond of dumbells during my college years. The dumbell bench press and dumbell shoulder press were staples of my routine for probably 10 years or so.
I used dumbells to great effect to build some pretty impressive shoulders as well as rehabbing those shoulders from various injuries I sustained thru bmx riding over the years. While I am very fond of dumbells due to a few favorable experiences with them, I would have trained differently had I known what I know now.
Everyone has read about the various upsides of dumbells, they let you isolate a muscle better, they can increase the range of motion in exercises like the bench press, they allow you to work the bicep thru it’s fullest range of motion which includes supination which can not be achieved using a barbell, and they are pretty easily found in most gyms. There are even whole workout plans and books out there devoted only to dumbell training. We’ve all seen articles in bodybuilding magazines where some huge guy advocates using dumbell bench press as his primary chest exercise, and hell I even followed that myself for a very long time and I was happy with the results-at the time.
There is however a very dark side to dumbells.
It’s actually not that dark of a side, so far there have been no studies released (yet) that link dumbell use to colon cancer or something else terrible but the best way to put it is that dumbells are not the most effective tools for you to base a training program around.
Dumbell exercises should not make up the bulk of your training ever! They can be acceptable if you absolutely have no other option. They are better then sitting on the couch anyday.
Why is this? What is wrong with dumbells?
The main reason that dumbell exercises should not make up the bulk of your training is actually very simple, they are not scale-able. Unlike the main barbell exercises, the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift, dumbell versions of these exercises can not be scaled up for a very long time. You can always add weight to the bar in the main barbell exercises but the point of diminishing returns and risk of injury arrives very quickly with dumbells.
Any guy who has progressed past the 100 pound dumbells for bench or shoulder presses starts to see this very quickly. How exactly are you going to safely get 120 pound dumbells into position for the bench press? Have you ever seen this procedure before? It either involves multiple people to help steady and hold the dumbells in place and then spot them, or it involves some half ass dumbell power clean, to box squat position then you have to lay down, under control backwards holding 240 pounds in your hands. All this is before you have even done a rep yet. And then what happens when your done? How do you set down in a safe and controlled manner two dumbells that were almost too heavy to pick up in the first place? Have you ever seen someone get “out of the groove” when doing heavy dumbell bench presses? Imagine dropping that 120 pound dumbell square onto your face.
At some point dumbells heavy enough to effectively create a training stimulus become extremely difficult to handle safely. Here in lies the next problem, if we are substituting dumbells for major barbell exercises, how exactly are we going to create an effective training stimulus while at the same time minimizing our risk of injury? Lets just say you’re a bodybuilder (a natural one) with a 300 pound max bench press, your best weight to stimulate the most muscle growth is about 75% of that, that roughly works out to about 225 pounds. We will probably have to round down and we get 110 pound dumbells needed to create an effective training response. The problem just gets worse if we decide focus more on strength.
Even if you can handle those 110 pound dumbells, how exactly are you going to increase weight from week to week? Most dumbells only come in 5 pound increments, but lots of research has shown that for upper body lifts, gains of 5 pounds per week are too high to sustain for long. Most dumbells that big aren’t modular, so we cannot use micro plates to make smaller jumps in weight as we do with the barbell. So what are we left with? Adding more reps, more sets? At some point you will reach a point of diminishing returns and you wont have the time or recovery ability to do enough volume with those weights to create a training response.
Do we even have to cover the two biggest lifts-the squat and deadlift and talk about how useless dumbells are for those? The limiting factor for weight used for either of those variations is your grip, or your arms. How exactly are you going to do goblet squats with a weight heavy enough to create a strength stimulus? If you think front squats are awkward to hold in the racked position try doing the goblet squat with a 100 pound dumbell. Split Squats or lunges become problematic as well. Even when using straps to take your grip out of the equation, you will still get to a point where getting into the proper position for these exercises with a heavy enough weight puts you in a very awkward and potentially dangerous situation.
Dumbells definitely do have a place in your gym bag, just not as your primary exercise. Dumbells are better suited for lighter exercises after the muscles have been pre-fatigued by a large compound movement. They can effectively be used to rehab an injury when the range of motion is so limited that a barbell cannot be used. Even then the point is to get back to a real barbell as soon as possible and continue the rehab. The problem with all the exercises that actually work well with dumbells is that none of them utilize a large enough amount of muscle mass or exhibit significant progress potential to warrant using them as a primary training movement. Those exercises are what they call accessory movements and you just can not base an effective program around them.
Despite all of this it isn’t impossible to see significant gains using only dumbells for certain exercises. I found the seated dumbell shoulder press to be a very good exercise back in my college years. I also thought I had great success with regular and incline dumbell bench press. I didn’t actually get to compare though so its possible I made shitty progress and didn’t even know it. I did eventually hit a plateau training that way and it is a 100% certainty that using the barbell bench press and overhead press as my staples during that time would have increased my progress dramatically.
Don’t be Afraid of Strength
Are you afraid to be strong?
Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights-Ronnie Coleman, 8 time Mr Olympia
It seems nowadays that no truer words have ever been spoken.
Literally every single friend I have who is into lifting who doesn’t do powerlifting says the exact same thing. None of them care about getting stronger. Every guy, and every girl I talk about training with, only wants to “get toned” or “build their physique”
Why is everyone so afraid to be strong?
When did strength and performance become completely detached from “building a physique”? Do these people ever wonder why they seem to have the same physique year after year? Do they ever wonder why they spend so much time in the gym isolating every little muscle,or spending hours prepping strange trendy foods only to never appear significantly leaner or more muscular?
How is it that these same people seem so obsessed with watching sports, and envying the physiques of their heroes but none of them seem to look like these people? How can these people be spinning their wheels and not going anywhere? Bad genetics? No drugs? Not enough money to eat right?
The simple answer is this-THEY ARE NOT STRONG ENOUGH!
It really is that simple. Want bigger legs, then squat more weight. Want bigger shoulders, overhead press more weight. Want a bigger back, then deadlift and row more weight. I can almost just end this article right there and be finished; the answer is really that simple.
Every single person i know who wants to tone or just look buff has this one problem in common without fail. They are not strong enough. How do know they aren’t strong enough?
Its easy, they are not even anywhere near their genetic potential. How do I know what someone’s genetic potential is? The real answer is-I don’t need to.
No one knows the answer to that but it certainly isn’t less then a double body weight squat, a 2.5 times body weight deadlift or a 1.5 times body weight bench press (for men.) With the exception of some medical problem every single able bodied person can get to these numbers and exceed them with fairly little effort. Yet everyone I know with a less then impressive physique who still spends hours in the gym, can not hit any of these strength bench marks.
The basic barbell exercises are the fundamental corner stones of the most basic human movement patterns. Even the barbell itself is the most basic yet most efficient tool for building strength in these fundamental movement patterns. Oddly enough, strength is also one of the easiest athletic traits to grow and improve. The vertical jump cannot be dramatically improved and sport skill can take many many years to perfect. Yet building some decent strength can be done in a relatively short amount of time with efficient training, and without drugs, and it is a fairly permanent physical change to the body. So why the hell isn’t anyone doing any of this?
Two main reasons:
1: Mental laziness
2: Lack of education
To varying degrees and combinations these two things are the main reasons that most gym goers refuse to believe that getting strong on the basics barbell exercises is the answer to their physique goals.
Mental laziness: A lot of the people I’m talking about are not actually lazy, they really do “work hard in the gym” the problem is that it’s physically hard to do tons of drops sets to get a burn or pump but it is way easier mentally to do drop sets or high reps with 135 pounds on the squat then to climb under the bar with double body weight and pound out 5 or 6 grueling reps. Real heavy weight can be scary, it can be stressful, and that can make it very appealing to use other techniques to make lighter weight seem harder. But at the end of the day its still just lighter weight, and while in the very short term you may see a change, this will lead to stagnation very quickly. This is a time when you need to work smarter, and harder.
This brings me to a lack of education. The very principles of volume, frequency, intensity, and hypertrophy are simply not taught to people by the magazines or whatever bullshit websites these people read. The actual hormone response from lifting heavy weights simply cannot be faked by using light weights until they feel heavy. If it could we could all just squat 10 pounds a thousand times and build huge legs.
The best strength results come from training with 85-95 percent of your one rep max, the best muscle building or hypertrophy results come from using 65-75 percent of your max. The middle ground of 80-85% works well for building strength and mass. Roughly speaking, 75% of your max is a weight that you can lift ten times and not an 11th.
What does this mean? It basically means that the prevailing common knowledge of higher reps building more muscle then lower reps, to a point, is true. The key here however is that weight used still has to increase over time. If you can bench 225 for 10 reps and you increase to where you can do 245 for ten reps then you will be much larger. if you don’t add weight to the bar, that weight simply becomes too light to stimulate an adaptation in the muscle, because it falls out of the hypertrophy range and into the endurance range 50-60% and your physique will begin to stagnate. It’s perfectly fine to stay in the lighter range of the spectrum (75%) for a while, maybe a very long while, but improving within that range has to be your main priority. You simply have to add more weight. You have to get stronger.
This brings me to another point-Efficiency
You’re already spending hours in the gym each week, why not spend it on the most efficient exercises you can. Tons of arm curls may build big biceps but they won’t build anything else, but being able to row a large amount of weight will build a big back and big biceps. You can flail around with tricep extensions all day, but that won’t build a bigger chest or bigger shoulders, but building a bigger over head press or bench press will build all three of those muscle groups. These days everyone seems super busy and we can only spend so much time in the gym, why not spend that time as efficiently as possible?
This brings me back to the basic barbell exercises. These exercises work the largest amount of muscle groups thru the fullest range of natural motion. More muscles moving more weight equals more muscle mass being built.
They are also scaleable. You can always add more weight to the squat, or deadlift, but 900 pound deadlifters aren’t doing bicep curls with 200 pound dumbells.
They aren’t doing lateral raises with 150 pound dumbells. The isolation exercises simply can not be scaled up that far. However, you can always add a little bit to your bench press, squat and deadlift.
I’m not saying that isolation lifts don’t have a role to play but they should never make up the bulk of your training time.
There isn’t a 500 pound squatter on earth who doesn’t have impressive quads. There isn’t a 600 pound deadlifter who doesn’t have an impressive back. If you want to get bigger, you have to get stronger. it is that simple. Every major muscle growth spurt I’ve had coincided with large strength increases, and also, every period of stagnation I’ve encountered happened when I focused too much on making lighter weights feel heavy, and not actually increasing the weight on the bar. So after reading all this, ARE YOU STILL SCARED OF GETTING STRONGER?
Learn The Deadlift
Just bend over and pick the bar up off the floor, sounds easy right? Maybe not…..see how here:
