The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - CHEST EDITION!

In today’s video we look at the best dumbbell exercises for chest. We’re going to focus on several areas of training: from strength, to power as well as hypertrophy and a few others you’d expect along with the best way to train adduction of the chest muscles.

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I’m going to talk about the best exercises for your chest. However, there’s a catch.

That is, we can only use this. Some dumbbells. I realize there are some exercise options that would be really, really helpful if we had a barbell, but that’s not the game here. As a matter of fact, this isn’t even a fantasy land scenario because a lot of times guys out there that don’t have a lot of training space find themselves training with just dumbbells. What I want to do is provide you with the best options for that.

Now, we’ve covered other videos in this series. Namely, we did the shoulders that you’re going to want to check out here. The idea there is, I need at least some context. If I’m going to play this game and make the best selections for you, I need to know what we’re trying to train for. So just like we did in that video, we’re going to cover the best options for strength, power, hypertrophy, metabolic overload, a total body option, a corrective option, and then one that doesn’t really fit any of these categories in the case of the chest by trying to address the lack of adduction that we have when we’re strapped with dumbbells as our only implement.

But don’t worry, guys. I’ve got you covered there as well. So, let’s get it started, guys. We’re going to break it down, one by one, right here. First, with strength.

So, we kick it all off with strength, the goal being progressively overloading the exercises that we’re doing. Now, we know if we had access to a barbell it would be a lot easier because we could take the barbell bench-press, which should be a staple exercise option here if you have access, but we don’t. That’s not the rules of the video. What we have here is, we need to substitute. Look, before we make a jump to the dumbbell variation of a bench-press, I want to show you something else.

Here’s the weighted dip. It’s an exercise I like to use for progressively overloading the chest as well. Of course, we’re involving some other muscles as well. But I can favor the chest by leaning forward more and making sure I keep my shoulder blades down, and back. Now, what happens when we make the substitution.

If I go from a barbell bench to a dumbbell bench-press I run into a little bit of a problem. I’m never going to be able to press, on an equal basis, what I could with a barbell once I split those hands up and have dumbbells in each hand. The requirements of stability are normally what are going to undermine our ability to press with as much strength as you have. You can see that you’ve probably experienced that firsthand as you’ve tried to correlate a move from a barbell bench-press, to a dumbbell bench-press. Let’s reevaluate that dip.

I believe there’s a great opportunity here. We can take the weight that we load up here – which was plates – and replace them with dumbbells. I use a dog leash here. It’s a simple, no excuses way to do this. You can see me wrapping the dog leash around and through the handle, around the dumbbell, and then to itself.

Now you’ve got a perfectly weighted dip belt of any weight. It doesn’t matter what I’m using. Whether I’m using plates or dumbbells, the ability to carry this exercise over from a plated option to a dumbbell option is a lot closer than what you’d expect than going from a barbell bench, to a dumbbell bench. So, for that reason, I love the weighted dip. It still gives you the chance to continue to add a slightly heavier dumbbell, keep the progressive overload coming, and keep those strength gains coming.

So, the goal of these strength exercise selections was one that you could progressively overload with the most weight and push as much weight as possible on – we need to do something different here when we’re talking about power. That is a speed component. What exercise could you move as quickly as possible without having to sacrifice the weight, to a level that would be insignificant? Well, if I had my Druthers, I’d do this. This is a sled push away that I had Antonio Brown do.

There’s a key factor going on here that we want to try and emulate and bring across to our dumbbell selected exercise because it’s critical for maximizing power development. That is the ability to release the load that we’re trying to accelerate. If I were to take a dumbbell and bring it to a dumbbell bench-press and just try to move it as quickly as possible, as we reach full extension with those dumbbells, we’re decelerating right at the end of each rep. That’s exactly the opposite if what you want to do if you’re trying to maximize force development. They decelerate because they have to get on their back and allow us to get back in the position to perform the next rep.

However, we can take something very similar to what we did with the sled push away and translate it to a dumbbell exercise, not even using the dumbbells in our hands, simply as targets. That is the plyo-tap that you see here. Here, we’re using our bodyweight as a resistance. Trust me, this is not an easy exercise. If you choose dumbbells that are heavy enough, the height of those dumbbells will increase higher and higher because of the additional weight on those dumbbells.

That makes you have to push off the ground harder and harder. More forcefully, more explosively, faster. Again, I tell you this is not an easy exercise. You have to push with a lot of force. You are not hindered, however, by having to hold anything.

You push your body away from the ground with the roof as your only limitation – which I don’t think you’re going to be hitting – and the key here is that you perform them to a submaximal level. Don’t take these all the way to failure. Leave a couple in the tank but maximize the force and speed with which you push, and I promise you the best gains from this exercise. Now we move onto hypertrophy. Trying to build bigger muscles.

Look, you’ve probably heard at some point that you don’t need to get sore in order to build big muscles. While that is absolutely true, at some point you’re going to have to because you’re going to dry up with how much weight you can contain a load to the bar. Metabolic training alone – which we’re going to talk about – is going to, at some point, become limited in its ability to overload your muscles because of the lighter weights that you use to perform those exercises. So, at some point, to continue the growth and the gains coming, you’re going to need to explore an eccentrically overloaded exercise option. That is why I want to load you and arm you with the right one.

This one right here is the eccentric floor fly. What we’re doing is trying to eccentrically overload the chest. We can do that with a fly. However, as I’ve said many, many times before, to protect the health of our shoulders, we don’t want to unnecessarily have to get up onto a bench to perform the exercise. We could perform it on the floor and have the floor act as our safety net.

The great thing is though, because we know we have a safety net for our shoulders, we can do this exercise with a lot heavier weight than we might usually use when we do a bench version of this. You’ve probably heard people tell you “Don’t go ahead of me on the fly and you’ll be okay”. How about, if we want to go heavy to create more eccentric overload? Don’t worry about the fact that you’re not flying back to the top. We’ll cover the adduction in our later exercise selections.

Get to the top and overload, and lower slowly on every rep. Cheat the positive back up to the top by altering the position of your arms, and this exercise will be an absolute winner for you when it comes to creating that eccentric mu