With the rows of plates, stacks of barbells and a selection of benches to use at your disposal, a gym might sound like the most obvious place for developing upper body muscle.
However, once armed with a pair of the best adjustable dumbbells, you can still build chest strength and definition at home with no weight bench in sight. In personal trainer Caroline Girvan’s 10-minute workout, she uses a box, but you can easily switch that for a yoga mat instead.
The workout includes a handful of the best dumbbell chest exercises, with the likes of a pullover, decline push up and standing cross-body raises. The humble chest press is also included. "The main movement throughout is the regular chest press,” Girvan reiterates.
“This is followed by variations of chest press and other movements to target the whole chest area. The main reason I like to train chest is that they are large and can lift a lot of weight." And Girvan isn’t kidding! The trainer uses two 27 lbs dumbbells for this workout, but recommends using a weight that feels right for you.
Watch Caroline Girvan's 10-minute dumbbell chest workout
Organized into a high-intensity resistance training (HIRT) session (which is similar to high-intensity interval training, but focuses on muscle-building moves rather than cardio exercise), there are six different exercises in total.
Each exercise is performed for 30 seconds, followed by 30 seconds of rest, and the chest press is the main exercise in this routine. So, along with being the first move in the workout, it’s also repeated after each of the other five chest exercises.
What are the benefits of this workout?
For starters, the humble chest press, which is the backbone of this workout routine, is a type of compound exercise, which gives you more bang for your buck as this type of movement uses multiple joints and fires up more than one muscle group.
Each time you chest press, not only will you be building your pectoral muscles, but you’ll also be working multiple other areas of your body, like your triceps and deltoids along with your core which you’ll engage to keep your trunk stable.
Chest muscles are used for many everyday activities. From lifting bags of shopping to pushing a buggy. So training your chest can help you go about these daily tasks with ease. Plus, according to an article published in the journal Sports, strength training your chest helps improve shoulder stability and protection from injury.
If your goal is to build strength and muscle in this area (or all over your body), take a deep dive into our guide on hypertrophy vs strength training. This lays out the difference between both types of training and which is better for building muscle.
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