What is better barbells or dumbbells

One of the most effective ways to overload muscles for strength or muscle-building purposes is to increase range of motion. There is only so much range of motion one can accomplish with a row or press. But with dumbbell variations, you can extend the range of motion, adding a new dimension of overload to your go-to mass movements. When bench pressing with a barbell, your arms and shoulders are in a fixed position and move through a set range of motion.

In contrast, dumbbell presses allow you to alter the movement pattern slightly and let your shoulders move freely. Dumbbell pressing allows you to externally or internally rotate your shoulders or bring the dumbbells lower down or higher up your body to specifically target muscles and press pain free. As a result, research by Schwanbeck et al shows that strength transfers quite well, regardless of whether we build that strength with the barbell bench press, dumbbell bench press, or machine bench press.

We can still build muscle with smaller lifts, but our workouts start to become less efficient and it starts to become harder to reap all the general health benefits. But the dumbbell bench press has just as many advantages, as do push-ups. Push-ups are lighter, more painful, and harder to progress, but they do a great job of bulking up our abs and serratus anterior muscles:. The dumbbell bench press takes our abs and serratus out of the mix but allows us to load our chest quite a bit heavier.

Plus, because the dumbbells can fall away to the sides, our chests need to put in extra work to squeeze them together, making the dumbbell bench press the best bench press variation for guys with stubborn pecs. The barbell bench press removes that extra stimulation for our chests and the range of motion is a bit smaller, but it allows us to lift quite a bit heavier, putting more load on our shoulders and triceps.

That makes it a very efficient lift at stimulating growth in several different muscles at once. Furthermore, because the barbell bench press is so stable, we can lift in lower rep ranges. The machine press removes much of the work from our stabilizer muscles, since the bar is moving along a fixed path, but we still need to use our chests, shoulders, and triceps to push the weight forward, and so the machine press stimulates a similar amount of muscle growth to the barbell and dumbbell bench press.

Load is load, and we can build muscle with almost anything. Dumbbells are essentially short barbells, about 10 to 15 inches long. And usually, you hold a dumbbell in one hand. Dumbbells offer an increased range of motion for some exercises. Take the chest press, for example. Using a barbell limits your range of motion to the vertical pressing movement, but with dumbbells, you can also bring the weights together at the top of the movement, increasing the range of motion. Hex dumbbells are convenient if you change weight often, since you don't have to slide weight plates on and off.

Dumbbells allow you to work your body unilaterally , one side at a time. If your left biceps is weaker than your right, you can focus on just the left side with dumbbells. When determining which strength-training equipment you should use for your workouts, consider the following questions:. Fitness Workouts Exercise Equipment. Dumbbells vs. Barbells: Which Is Better for You? Then you'll absolutely love working with my team of highly-qualified trainers and nutritionists plus myself!

Find out more here:. Click the button below to find out more about the 3-on-1 coaching program:. Find Out More! As of now it may seem as if barbells take the cake. However, before jumping to conclusions we need to take a deeper look into exactly what dumbbells have to offer. The first and one of their most significant advantages of dumbbells in terms of muscle growth is that they tend to elicit higher muscle activation when compared to their barbell counterparts. For example, this paper from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that the dumbbell press consistently elicited significantly higher pectoralis major activation than the barbell bench press.

The results from the study can be seen in the graph below. He found that both the flat and incline dumbbell press elicited greater chest activation when compared to flat and incline barbell presses. And as for other muscle groups, this paper found that utilizing dumbbells allowed for more activation of the anterior deltoid when compared to barbells during both the seated and standing press.

Thus, this increased activation is something that would likely hold true for most other muscle groups as well. And the reasoning behind it is probably because utilizing dumbbells enables you to achieve a slightly greater range of motion than barbells.