But if you want to gain size and athletic performance, you may be better off with dumbbells, which allow you to lower the weights past chest level-maximally stretching the pecs and activating more muscle fibers.

That’s not so bad if your goal is to press the biggest weight you can.

When you perform bench presses with a barbell, the bar hits your chest before your pectoral muscles achieve a full stretch. Dumbbells Allow a Greater Range of Motion Dumbbell training offers the following benefits for chest gains. That’s a good thing, he says: the smaller muscles in your shoulder joints learn to stabilize those joints, while the big muscles (the pecs, mainly) work harder to control the weights, preventing them from drifting in all directions. John Rusin, a strength and conditioning coach and author of Functional Hypertrophy Training (available at ). “The second you put two weights into your hands, it becomes doubly hard to stabilize them,” says Dr. What Are The Benefits of Working Out My Chest With Dumbbells? We’re about to show you the best dumbbell exercises and workouts to develop your chest, top to bottom. Strengthen Your Chest with Dumbbellsĭumbbell training may not be as sexy as loading up the bar till it bends, but for most people, it’s actually a better road to a bigger, stronger, set of pecs, and offers less risk of injury to boot. Gym wisdom suggests that building a big chest is all about slapping as much weight as you can find on a barbell and bench-pressing it till you’re blue in the face.īut if benching hurts your shoulders, you train at home without a trusty spotter, or you’ve found that barbell training just doesn’t give you a bigger chest, dumbbell work is the answer.

Pounds of force tank shell