The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - BACK EDITION!

The best dumbbell exercises for back are based on the criteria for what you are trying to specifically train for. In this video, as I’ve done in this entire series, I’m showing you which exercises you should be doing to develop strength, power, hypertrophy, metabolic overload, total body, correctiv

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we continue a popular series. The Best Dumbbell Exercises.

This time, for the back. But instead of giving you a mind-numbingly boring, poorly copied video with exercise selections that are based on misinterpreted and misinformed EMG data, we’re going to do what we always do on this channel and bring you the unique training perspective of why we’re selecting these exercises. Based on the goal that you’re trying to achieve, as we’ve done this entire series. To do that, I’m going to select the best back exercises you can do with dumbbells for strength, power, hypertrophy – or eccentric overload – a metabolic effect, a total body exercise, a corrective exercise, and then our ‘miscellaneous’ category. With that being said, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Let’s jump right into our first exercise selection for strength. When it comes to strength, the goal is always going to be to progressively overload. To allow your body to adapt to get stronger to the movement that you’re doing. While we have some rowing options we could incorporate with some dumbbells, I think the best way to load weight into your system as a whole is to add some weight to one of the more difficult exercises, in general. That is the pullup.

The pullup is one of the better back-building exercises you can do on its own. Add some additional weight here, as you see with the dumbbell, and now we’ve really got something to work with. The fact is, we can add the dumbbell in a number of different ways. One, as I mentioned in the past, you can take a leash and wrap it around the dumbbell you’re using, just like this – I say ‘a leash’ because if you want to train at home there’s no limitations here. If you’re at a gym, whip out a dip belt if you want.

But wrap it around the dumbbell, hang it on your hips, jump up on the bar, and go. Of course, if you want something more traditional here, just place the dumbbell on the floor, step up onto it, reach down with your toes, grab it in between your feet, and you’re ready to go as well. As you can see, the back takes a tremendous amount of load here. Again, the assisted weight is what’s important here. The additional dumbbell weight added to the weight of your own body creates a great opportunity for overload and progressive overload, simply by adding more weight to the dumbbell each time you do the exercise.

Next we move onto the power selection. We know if we’re going to train for power there has to be some element of speed and explosivity to the exercise we’re performing. For me, there’s none better than this: the dumbbell dead row. The dead row is performed from the floor as a great pulling exercise, just like the deadlift, but it stops at about the level of the knee, in terms of the hip contribution. From that point on, you want to drive the dumbbells up in a rowing motion, using your arms, and driving your elbows back behind your body into extension to get those lats working.

The element of explosivity comes from the fact that the ground-based force is generated through your feet, into the ground, and they’re going to drive this movement to become as explosive as it is. You can load up the weight here as much as you can handle, and this is a zero-momentum exercise that’s going to require a lot of coordinated explosiveness. Again, through your feet, up into your arms, and ultimately through the back, and the lats to help you develop some explosive power. Next up, we move onto hypertrophy. When we’re trying to create muscle growth, we look to do the opposite of what we’re doing when we have a straight or power focus.

Instead of trying to incorporate a lot of muscles into the activity you’re doing, you try to focus and isolate the work to the muscle you’re trying to create overload on, looking for inefficiency. Here, if we’re trying to create more lat growth, we need to make the lats do all the work. We can do that best with the classic dumbbell pullover, as you see here. Now, a couple things about the setup. You want to position your body perpendicular to the bench instead of lying alongside it.

Why? Because it allows us to manipulate our hips. You might be thinking “Why is it important to manipulate your hips? ” Because we want to create more stretch. We want to give ourselves another opportunity for eccentric overload and stretch on the muscle we’re trying to develop.

A known stimulus for muscle hypertrophy. We can do that by dropping the hips down. You see, I simply allowed them to drop, realizing that the attachments of the lats are going to get further from each other when the hips get further apart than the arms. We can do that by simply letting the hips drop. Now, as we drop the dumbbell back in position, you should immediately feel a lot of tension places on the lats.

You come up and complete this as you normally would. Here’s another tweak that I think is extremely beneficial. You do some forced eccentrics. Some assisted eccentrics at the end. When you’re done, just because you’re concentrically fatigued, it doesn’t mean you can’t do some more eccentric work.

We know that we’re stronger there. And we can by simply cheating the motion back up to the start position. What I do is drag the dumbbell over one of my shoulders, I extend it over my chest here, utilizing my triceps more than anything else, and then I go back into a nice, long-armed, eccentric pullover. I come back again, shorten the arms, take away all the concentric work – or as much as I can – I go back up in position again, and eccentrically lower. Do a few forced reps this way and I promise you; you’re going to get even more out of an already effective exercise for creating hypertrophy.

Next up is our metabolic exercise. When we’re training metabolically, looking for that burn, we need to have an exercise that allows us to do it. But we don’t want to compromise the low back in the process because we know that any standing row variation, while being able to be repped out through that burn, it’s going to cause fatigue in the low back first. Which is going to compromise the safety of the exercise. But we can do that if we put ourselves in this position here.

This is chest supported touch row. We have a couple things to discuss here. Number one: the position on the bench. The bench is going to protect that low back. It’s going to allow us to fatigue the lats without having to worry about the fatigue of the low back posturally, that we would get in standing.

Now, we talked about the touch row. We have these dumbbells placed out in front of us, and the ones we’re holding are being targeted to touch those. Why? It gives us an additional stretch on the lats for additional benefits as we go out with each repetition, out in front of the body. Again, realizing the anatomy of the lats is going to require the arm travel up and ahead of us to get more of a stretch.

But additionally, those other dumbbells are literally sitting out there waiting for you to keep that burn going. To metabolically increase the effectiveness of the exercise by simply drop-setting right down to them and doing another set as soon as you’re done with the first set of dumbbells. This is where the metabolic effect comes in, guys. Remember, when you’re trying to train metabolically, you push to that level of burn, and then through it. For this exercise, because of that setup, we protect the low back in the process and made it a much better selection.

Next, we move onto the total body exercise option here. Obviously, to hit this criterion you’ve got to work your whole body. But we have to be able to hit the