How To Get Strong(er) Using Dumbbells

How to Progress Dumbbell Exercises and How to Make Light Dumbbells Feel Heavy

I love dumbbells. For starters, dumbbells are everywhere, so knowing how to build a program with them will be useful for almost everyone. Second, they are heavy enough to build strength and allow enough movement freedom to require significant control. If there was ever a piece of equipment that has earned the label of “functional”, it’s dumbbells.

I’ve talked about the concept of progressive overload before, but to reiterate, it’s the process of doing more over time so you continue to progress your strength and build muscle. You can’t keep doing the same thing for extended periods and expect to pile on muscle.

Progression is easy with barbells because you can incrementally increase the weight using small weights. Most gyms will have plates as small as 2.5 pounds. With dumbbells, it’s not as straightforward.

Progressing With Dumbbells

Dumbbells typically exist in increments of 5 pounds, which is great when you’re only using one. But many exercises require two, like DB Bench Press, DB Overhead Press, and DB Bicep Curls. So you’ll have to go up by ten pounds each time you want to progress those movements.

That may be fine in the beginning when you have a lot of room for growth, but it will soon become too big of a jump to manage. Here are some strategies for making dumbbell progression more manageable.

Use small weight add-ons like Microgainz

If the jump is too large from one pair of dumbbells to the next, you can try adding small weights to the dumbbells before moving to the next weight. I have these and love them.

These won’t get you to the halfway point between the weights, but they can close the gap enough to make the jump less intimidating. Using two Microgainz on a dumbbell will add 2.5 pounds, so 5 pounds if you’re using two dumbbells.

Double Progression

Rather than simply going up in weight each workout with dumbbells, I recommend what’s called Double Progression. It works like this:

1. Set a rep range. We will use 6-10 reps.

2. Stay at the same weight until you’re able to get to the top of the rep range for all of your sets.

3. Increase the weight by 10 pounds and drop to the bottom of the rep range.

4. Stay at the same weight until you reach the top again.

Here’s what a double progression might look like for a 6-10 rep range. This has been simplified to make it easier to understand. Progression may take longer and you likely won’t get the same number of reps every set.

Note: You don’t need to limit yourself to the bottom of the range when you increase. If you can do more, do more, and it may make more sense to simply set a rep target rather than a rep range. The point is that you can smooth the progression out by dropping the reps to help you get to the next weight.

Progress reps collectively

This strategy is less a specific strategy and more how to think about progress. If you did 4 sets of 8, you might be tempted to aim for 4 sets of 9 next time. If you can do that, great, but progression rarely works that way. It will be more manageable to think about your reps as a pool and try to increase them by 1-2 reps overall. It won’t seem like much, but it adds up and is more manageable than increasing your reps across all of your sets.

When you approach progress this way, you have more flexibility in your approach. Although I recommend changing variables as little as possible, you could play around with sets and reps to get to this number. This also means you can go up in reps on your first set or two, but keep sets three and four the same, for instance.

Rather than increasing for every set, you can pool reps together and try to increase that number over time.

Note: There may be times where you cannot increase your reps no matter what you do. If that’s the case, and you’re not already at the bottom of the rep range, you may just want to move up in weight anyway and drop the reps back down. When you come back to the lighter weight, it will feel easier and you should be able to increase the reps again.

Go to failure on your last set

I don’t generally recommend folks take every set to failure, because it can create disproportionate fatigue and tank your total rep count. But taking the last set to failure will help you squeeze more out of your sets when you’ve got little to lose. You will also learn whether or not the weight is too light. If you’re getting 50% or more extra reps on the last set, you probably need to move up.

Dumbbell exercises are also generally safe to fail, so leaving nothing in the tank on the last set can be a great strategy to squeeze more out of dumbbell exercises.

You don’t need to progress every workout

This is the last but perhaps most important section regarding progress. You only have so much room for growth, and because I assume you will be doing this lifting thing for a long time, there is no rush to progress.

Using the same weights will still benefit for you some time, and may even help alleviate some aches and pains during your training. The only problem is when you sit at the same weight for weeks and months with no intention of progressing.

In the beginning of training, you can get away with frequent jumps because you’re nowhere close to your potential. But as you get stronger, your progress will slow. I often have clients stay at the same weight for two weeks when using dumbbells because the jump is large and I want them to “own” the weight before they move up.

Knowing when to move up can be tricky, but this decision tree graphic might help you. It’s not perfect, but it should at least get you thinking about how to approach this.

Note: This is mostly for barbell exercises as I wouldn’t generally suggest someone go up by two increments for dumbbell exercises, but the thought process works for dumbbells too.

Let’s switch gears now and talk about making light dumbbell workouts harder.

How To Make Workouts With Light Dumbbells More Difficult

At some point, you will be stuck with dumbbells that are too light to get your normal level of stimulation. Maybe you’re traveling and at a hotel gym, you’re stuck at home with your paltry selection of equipment, or you live at an apartment complex that has dumbbells that only go up to a certain weight (typically 50 pounds).

You have a few options to increase the difficulty of your workouts:

1. Make a two-sided exercise one-sided

2. Do more reps

3. Use larger ranges of motion or add a pause, tempo, or half/quarter reps

4. Combine all of these for a level of pain you didn’t know existed

Make a two-sided exercise one-sided

What may not be particularly difficult on two legs, may be very difficult on one (or one and a half). For instance, rather than doing a dumbbell goblet squat, you could try split squats, lunges, or single leg squats to a bench. This only works for lower body exercises as you can’t really hold two dumbbells in one hand.

Do more reps

This seems like a no brainer, but it’s the unfortunate reality of using very light weights. In many cases, you may have to do double the number of reps or more. It likely still won’t be the same because fatigue will get in the way, but it will be significantly better than if you’d made no adjustments at all.

If you normally do DB Single Arm Rows with 75 pounds but only have 50, doubling your usual reps will get more use out of that 50 pounds.

Use larger ranges of motion, pauses, tempo, or additional half reps

It’s easier to control a movement when using lighter weight, so adding additional “work” by increasing the range of motion becomes more viable. Take those squats down as far as you can, lower and raise the dumbbell for rows as far as you can, turn a regular curl into an incline curl with a long stretch at the bottom.

The name of the game with any weight is to get close to muscular failure. By adding pauses and slowing the movement down where there’s tension, you can get to failure quicker. You must add the pause and tempo at the right parts of the movement to get the most benefit. For squats, you can try slowly lowering yourself and pausing at the bottom. When doing dumbbell bench press, you can slower lower the dumbbells and pause at the chest before pushing them back up.

Adding half or quarter reps can also help you build tension, but it needs to be close to the point where you would pause. So using the two examples above, squat down, rise up halfway, then drop back down before coming up all the way. For bench press, push the dumbbells partially off the chest and come back down before finally pushing them all the way up.

Here’s an example of adding a partial to split squats.

Combine all of the above to make using light weights agony

Some combination of the above strategies will put you on the fast track to an effective light dumbbell workout. For example, you could choose split squats over regular DB Goblet Squats and you could increase the range of motion by elevating the feet, slowly lower yourself to the bottom, pause at the bottom, and do a quarter rep before descending and coming back up. Or you could do 15 reps of dumbbell bench press with a pause at the chest for each rep.

You have a lot of options, but some combination of each of these strategies should improve the stimulus quite a bit.

Hopefully you’ve learned something in this post. If you have any other questions about using dumbbells or general fitness, nutrition, or health questions, please drop a comment or shoot me an email at bo@stansellfit.com.

Thanks for reading!