What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. Today I m going to
show you an arm workout that you can do with just a single pair of dumbbells,
or actually just one single dumbbell that going to help you build jacked arms. That's right. If
you know how to train with the dumbbells in your hands and the right exercises to choose
your ability to build bigger arms becomes a lot easier. So, my job here is to make sure that,
you know exactly that information. I'm going to break down the sets in the reps. Let's start
breaking down the exercises one by one. If you're looking for a complete program
where we break down every single muscle with just the use of dumbbells,
you can find that in our Jacked program over athlete.com. Now back to the video.
All right, so the way this workout breaks down is actually very, very simple. You're
going to take six exercises, three for the biceps and three for the triceps. And each of them are
going to be performed for three sets of eight to 10 repetitions. Now I understand that not
everybody has access to a full rack dumbbells, but that's the beauty of this workout, you don't need
them. If the weight that you have access to is appropriate for you to reach failure in the eight
to 10 rep range, then you're going to perform the two dumbbell variation of the exercise.
If the weight that you have access to is too heavy, then you're going to perform
the single dumbbell variation provided for each one of those exercises. And finally, if the
weight that you have access to is too light, then what you do is perform the two double variation
and simply just keep going until you reach failure. That being said, we have to make some
accommodations. Instead of getting the overload through the tension of the dumbbell we need to
create overload another way and we're going to do it through metabolic overload. Decreasing
the rest time in between sets dramatically to just 45 to 60 seconds will do the trick.
So we kick this our workout off with the biceps portion of the workout and this is going to start
here with the long head focused Dumbbell Drag Curl. And it's that outer portion of the biceps,
the long head that is responsible for that bicep peak that we see. And you can actually
activate it by trying to place the biceps on a stretch. The way we can do that and try to
place our arms back into extension. Now let's say you don't have access to the appropriate weight,
the one you have is too heavy. Remember the rules, you simply perform a single dumbbell version of
an exercise that will do the same type of thing. The Waiter s Curls my option of choice here.
Remember, the dumbbell weight that you have access to is going to determine which variation
of the exercise you do if you had access to a full rack dumbbells then, of course,
you could choose between either one. Next up, we move to the short head of the biceps,
which would be the inner head of the biceps. And what we want to do here is focus on an exercise
that gets those arms out in front of our body. And again, if we had access to two dumbbells,
I would do the Standing Dumbbell Curl. And I've mentioned before that I like the
alternating version because I can focus more of my effort on the weight that I'm handling.
Not being compromised by a weak core. I can lift more weight here and get more stress to make me
fail in that eight to 10 rep range. Of course, if I didn't have access to the two dumbbells,
then what would I do? This right here, this would be the Dumbbell Kneeling Preacher Curl.
I'm taking a two-handed grip on a single dumbbell, but most importantly, getting those elbows posted
up against my own knees out in front of the body. Remember to hit that short head. You
want to have those arms placed out in front of you to limit the long head contribution.
This Dumbbell Kneeling Preacher Curl does exactly that three sets of eight to 10 reps.
Once again, if the way you have access to is to light, you simply rep it out and decrease your
rest. Time between sets just 45 to 60 seconds. And of course, no arm workout is complete until
we realize that there's more muscles to your upper arm that flex the arm than just the biceps,
namely the brachialis. And my exercise of choice here is going to be the Crossbody Hammer Curl.
What's great about this exercise is if we can pronounce it the forearm, then we can minimize the
contribution of the biceps to elbow flexion. And that's a good thing because again, we want to
try to focus on the other muscles of the upper arm. And the brachialis just happens to be the
one that lies underneath the biceps and when it's developed helps to increase the overall size and
girth of the arm, so we want to do this exercise. But if we didn't have access to the two dumbbells,
then what we would do for our single dumbbell option? This is where we do something called the
Dumbbells Shovel Curl. You're basically getting an assist, a spot from one arm for the other. So,
when I'm curling the dumbbell off to one side, the side that I'm curling towards is
the one that's doing the majority of the work, with the opposite arm acting as a spot.
Either way, here just use the weight that you have access to and perform the exercise that
correlates to it. And now we move on to the tricep portion of the workout and the first exercise here
is actually one that brings back nightmares. That's right, the time that CT and I actually
did this exercise, oh, I don't know 200 times. That's right, 200 times and the tricep gauntlet,
my triceps still feel it, thank you CT. Now what we do, though, is we utilize the floor
as our bottomed-out position, but we're still performing a Lying Tricep Extension,
which is a long head stretch exercise for the triceps, one of the best out there.
But in order to do this correctly, I say all the time you never want the dumbbell to fully
extend over your chest. Keep those arms angled slightly back at all times to continue to place
some of that tension directly on to the long head of the triceps. If the dumbbells I had
access to were too heavy, I just use one of them and perform the single dumbbell variation
of the same exercise. Once again, you can see here that the mechanics don't change,
I'm still dropping the dumbbell down back behind my head and keeping that slight angle back of
the arms at the top of every single repetition. Three sets of eight to 10 repetitions here.
If the double weight that you have access to is to light just keep going until you reach failure and
drop that rest time down from the 90 seconds to two minutes that we would normally get to 45 to
60 seconds and go for that metabolic burnout. Exercise number two is another one that's going
to focus on the long head because, as I say, you can never have a big enough long head.
Anyway, we're talking about the Dumbbell Overhead Extension. And again, if we had access to a
pair of dumbbells, that was the appropriate weight to fail in that eight to 10 rep range,
then we'd perform the variation of the exercise with the dumbbell in each hand. I like this one
the best because I feel like it gives us a chance to get the best shoulder position.
That's right shoulder position. Because I believe that this exercise can compromise the shoulders
of somebody that already has an irritated shoulder or impingement if you don't do it
properly. By making sure our elbows are facing forward rather than out directly to the sides,
we can minimize internal rotation of the shoulder at the top and maximize external rotation. Again,
that makes a difference because external rotation is going to clear some of that joint space to make
the exercise feel more comfortable, particularly for those that already have those issues.
Now, if you didn't have access to the pair of dumbbells and you had only a single dumbbell,
well, again, I would say just make sure you exercise with caution here because
more likely that we have just a single dumbbell held by two hands, those elbows
are going to want to drift even more because of the lack of mobility that most of us have.
Keep those elbows pointing forward if you want to maximize the gains without the pains. Once again
three sets of eight repetitions here. If it s too light guys, remember up those repetitions until
you reach failure and decrease that rest. And last but not least, every time I talk about
the triceps, it seems I always talk about this next exercise, it's a Tricep Kickback.
And the reason why I do is because it does a great job of getting the triceps long head
into a fully contracted state. It's not always about just training it from the stress position,
but you also want to make sure you get into its fully shorten position, and the
Dumbbell Kickback allows us to do just that. If the weights I had just happen to be too heavy,
I drop one of the dumbbells, use just one and do the Tricep Cheat Back. That's right, very similar
to a Dumbbell Cheat Lateral for the shoulders, you're just trying to utilize some momentum to
initiate the movement of the dumbbell to get it back into that fully contracted state. Remember,
that is the important portion of this exercise that we're trying to target, that full shortening
of the tricep long head. Three sets of eight repetitions here once again, if you had access
to the dumbbells or three sets on each arm if you're going to go with the Double Cheat Back.
When it comes to building bigger arms, your muscles speak only one language
and that's tension. And we can certainly deliver all the tension that we need
through the use of just dumbbells, especially if you know how to use them. In this workout here,
you've got a taste of exactly what you need to do, now, just go get the job done.
If you're looking for a complete program where we break down every single muscle with just the
use of dumbbells, you can find our Jacked program over at athleanx.com. If you found
the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below. If you're looking for a
total body example of how to do this, click this video here and watch that one too. Guys, we ll
be back in just a few days with another video. Make sure you click, Subscribe and turn on your
notifications so you never miss a video when we put it out. All right guys, see you soon.