Is this all you got?
A pair of single dumbbells, 30lbs in this case, and you think you're not going to get
a good workout in because it's certainly not heavy enough to challenge some of your stronger
muscle groups.
Today I'm going to show you exactly what to do, and more importantly, arm you with the
right techniques to make these guys feel two, or even three times heavier.
What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
A 30lb dumbbell.
Maybe you went out and you bought a set of these from Walmart thinking that maybe you're
going to have that all-purpose weight that you can use for a majority of your exercises
to train at home.
Maybe you don’t have access to a gym, or maybe even you're in a gym and all the heavy
weights are being taken at the moment and you are short on time.
Could you actually get a good workout in with 30lbs?
You could if you use the techniques I'm going to show you here today.
As a matter of fact, I'm going to show you an exact workout you can do with these dumbbells
to employ these techniques.
So what we want to do to get started is look at the major muscle groups that you would
train in a full, total body workout, like we're going to do here today.
You've got your shoulders, your legs, your chest, your back, and your arms – biceps
and triceps.
Now, that dumbbell weight might be more appropriate for certain muscle groups than others.
Obviously, right off the bat, legs are going to be able to handle a whole hell of a lot
more weight than, let's say, your arms are.
So the way to break this down is to consider the exercises that you're choosing and how
close those are to the normal weight that you would be using.
So if I'm normally going to use 30lbs on, let's say, a dumbbell curl, or maybe 35lbs,
or 40lbs; I'm pretty close with the 30s.
So the technique that I would have to use to intensify those 30s to bring them up a
little bit, will be different than the intensity technique I have to use on a heavier exercise
like a squat to make that infinitely harder.
So here's the workout.
To kick it all off we start with our arms, right?
The smaller muscle groups that are closest to the weight we probably will be using for
these exercises anyway.
But we can go further than that.
We can make this 30lb weight even heavier by, first and foremost, eliminating momentum.
So I back up to a wall to perform a bicep wall curl.
What I do is, I perform a technique called the 1-1/2 reps.
Now, what I do by doing the 1-1/2 reps is I force more time honored tension and I get
wind of the momentum even more.
So I can't lean forward and back as I could if I was doing this away from the wall, and
because of the fact that I have to reinitiate a rep when I'm used to just letting it drop,
that makes me use my contraction of the biceps even more, and I don’t have the opportunity
to use that swinging momentum.
The next thing I could do is a dumbbell lined tricep extension.
I could do it the same exact way, with 1-1/2 reps.
Again, I make this 30lb weight heavier.
Something that maybe I'm more used to using.
I could do 45s, I could do 50s here, but I only have 30s, and so do you.
That's the predicament we're in right now.
But by doing 1-1/2 reps I can make those weights feel a lot heavier and target the triceps
a lot harder with that lighter weight.
Okay, moving on.
We now have the chest and shoulders.
Two muscle groups that kind of equate well in terms of the weight that we would normally
use, and its relation to the 30lb dumbbells that we're stuck with.
You can see here that the 30lb dumbbells are probably lighter than even half of what we
would normally use.
Maybe you'd be normally benching 70lbs, or even 75lbs, but it's a bigger jump than it
would be, say, to your arms.
So what we want to do is employ a different technique.
In this case, pre-exhaustion into slow motion reps is one of the best combinations you can
have to intensify the weight and allow you to get a really great workout with this pair
of dumbbells.
So we have here, this combination of a variation of a pushup.
When I'm using the dumbbells here, obviously I can get a little bit of a deeper stretch
on the chest as I come down, but then as I come up I can actually roll them together
just a little bit to increase the activation of the pecs.
I do this until failure.
Immediately stand up and go into this variation here of our bench press.
I'm going to actually, again, increase the activation of the chest by squeezing the dumbbells
together the entire time.
Activate the adduction component of a chest press to allow me to really, really fire up
the chest as much as I can, and because we pre-exhausted it with the exercise before,
this becomes infinitely harder.
This doesn't feel like 30lb dumbbells, trust me.
Your muscles cannot count what's on the weight.
They don’t know what number is written on the dumbbell.
They only know what it feels like.
I can tell you this will feel a lot heavier.
For the shoulders we can do the same thing.
We can take those 30lb dumbbells and actually do an exercise here that is actually very
difficult with 30lbs, but is a good pre-exhauster as well.
It's a shoulder L raise.
So when you get the components of the front dumbbell raise, and a side dumbbell raise,
and we go out as many reps as we can.
Once we reach failure we realize that, yeah, maybe I could press 60lb dumbbells and 30lbs
would have been light, but not anymore.
I go immediately from the L raise to a shoulder press overhead, and those are a lot, lot harder.
We could even change the way we do it by doing the wide arc dumbbell press.
Here I can intensify the contraction of the delt by allowing the arms to travel a little
bit more wide, and up overhead, pushing my thumbs together, and getting the dumbbells
to actually push together at the top just a little bit to prolong that time under tension
once again.
If you want to slow down the reps even more you could do all of these in slow motion style,
just to drag out that time under tension even more and make those weights go heavy.
Then we finish with those two muscle groups you probably thought "Uh-uh.
There's no way you're going to make these feel heavy.
I can squat 250lbs.
I can squat 300lbs.
there's no way you're going to make 30lb dumbbells challenging for me."
Not so fast.
The first thing that you want to do here when you're training your legs is to try to split
up the load.
So now we're going to take one leg at a time.
Instantly we've allowed the load to become heavier, right?
We're not distributing over two legs.
Now we want to do a dumbbell Bulgarian split squat, and we're going to do it in a landmine
plyo fashion.
So we're going to make it explosive, and we're going to do something all important here called
a stop ladder.
This technique will intensify any exercise.
Trust me.
You jump off the ground, land slow, come down to the bottom, and hold it for a single second.
Now you come up for your second rep.
land, and you hold it for 2 seconds.
Then you come up for your third rep.
you do your third rep.
explode, come down, and hold the bottom position for 3 seconds.
That increased time under tension that is going to catch up to you.
You might find that you might not even be able to make to 12 reps that you normally
would be able to make on a much heavier dumbbell because of that increased time honored tension,
and accrued time honored tension over time.
Now we move onto the back.
Again, we're in that same situation where our back is usually capable of handling heavy
loads, but not if we tweak and use the same technique here.
Setup and inclined bench and go on reverse.
Now you're going to go with your chest down, arms hanging down, and you're going to do
a row.
Now, the row here, again, is hard.
It's hard enough because we've eliminated momentum by putting yourself flat down against
the bench itself.
So we have to do this without assisted momentum we could get from a standing row.
After we do a single rep we hold the dumbbells up in that position, contracting our mid scapular
muscles as hard as we possibly can.
Lower down, come up for the second rep, and hold for 2 seconds.
And down, and up for three seconds.
Continue with that, again, in the stop ladder fashion and you'll be able to see, again,
lightweights can become heavy if you know how to move those lightweights in the first
place.
So there you have it.
Consider this your "Dumbbell Survival Guide".
No matter where you are, no matter what you're stuck with, no matter what your budget has
limited you to, in terms of the array of dumbbells that you have at your disposal.
There's always something you can do to make them feel heavier, and therefore work more
when you lift them.
If you're looking for a program that gets rid of all the excuses, shows you what to
do step by step, head to ATHLEANX.com right now and get our ATHLEANX training program.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful, and you liked and want to see more
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All right, guys.
I'll see you soon.