Training For Life

Maybe you’re strapped for gym time and are wondering how those precious minutes would best be spent—with the dumbbells or the barbells? Or maybe you’re trying to put together a home gym without spending a small fortune—should you shell out for dumbbells or barbells? Do you really need both?

Generally, bodybuilders will say that barbells are better for building muscle mass, and dumbbells are for defining muscles and getting that “ripped” appearance. This is partly true, but both dumbbells and barbells have their own unique set of pros and cons, and you should learn a little more about the difference between them, because both can play an important role in your strength training routine.

In weightlifting, negative is actually good thing—negative resistance, that is. Negative resistance refers to the stress put on your muscles when you lower the weights back down to the starting position, and it’s just as important—if not more important—than the positive lifting phase. Imagine you’re performing one of the most popular barbell exercises—the bench press. Once you’ve hoisted that barbell up, you can only lower it down so far—eventually you’re going to have to stop when the barbell returns to your chest. Now picture doing a bench press with a pair of dumbbells. You can lower the dumbbells a lot further—all the way down to your sides.

Most people find that one side of their body that is stronger than the other—more than likely it’s the same side that your dominant hand resides on. When you push a barbell, your dominant side can compensate for the weaker side. But when you hit the dumbbells, each arm is working independently of the other, so that moocher weak side has to pull its own weight for a change. This helps correct strength imbalances across the body.

Plus, the struggle to balance the two dumbbells gets all your little stabilizer muscles in on the action.

Barbells beat out dumbbells when it comes to gaining pure strength in the major muscle groups. When you lift a barbell, the weight on each end is connected through the bar to the other end— you are essentially spreading the load so that it becomes easier to move. Thanks to this even distribution of weight across your body, you can lift bigger numbers and perform higher reps for faster muscle growth. So barbells are especially ideal for strength training newcomers needing to build up a starting foundation of muscle. And if you want to get an ego boost from the number you can lift or love to brag to everyone in earshot about what you bench, then barbells are just the thing for you.

A little earlier, I mentioned that dumbbells are great because they get all the stabilizer muscles involved. This is a dumbbells gift—and curse. Yes, it’s important to train those stabilizer muscles, but they can also hold the major muscle groups back from reaching their full potential. Let’s go back to the bench press example—when you do a bench press with dumbbells, you are demanding much more of an effort from the triceps than you would pressing a barbell. Your triceps are probably never going to be as tough as your chest—they’ll fatigue much earlier and you’ll have to call it quits before your chest muscles were actually worked to exhaustion. So again, for improving strength or and increasing mass in the major muscle groups, a barbell is your best bet.