Upper body workouts are comprised of emphasis around the chest, back, shoulders and arm muscles. Dumbbell workouts can be an excellent way to target all these different muscle groups. We provide an exercise or more for each of these muscle groups.

Benefits Of Dumbbell Upper Body Training

Effective Tool For Muscle Growth of Back and Chest

Dumbbells are probably second only to the barbell for upper body exercise with weights. They allow overload through almost every movement pattern and don’t require as much stabilisation as the kettlebell making them more effective in some instances. If your goal is to gain muscle, you will likely have a large number of dumbbell exercises in your programme. Consider adding a tempo to some of these dumbbell upper body exercises for increased muscle growth.

Improved Aesthetics

If you’re just trying to look better naked or you’re preparing for a show, muscle gain will be a key part of improving your aesthetics and dumbbell upper body exercises will be one of the main tools you use to achieve this aim. Don’t miss out on the dumbbell arm exercises for improving aesthetics.

Increase Strength of Muscles

Using heavy dumbbells is a little less effective than heavy barbells, that being said they can still be a very useful tool to increase strength. Also the muscle gained through the hypertrophy training will help with increases of strength.

Training Considerations

Hypertrophy (Muscle Growth) Protocols

Using high volume through each movement pattern will be crucial to gaining muscle. This will mean doing 8-12+ working sets for each movement pattern / muscle group. When writing your training plan, ensure that each muscle group is getting the volume it requires to grow. These guidelines are based on the latest research (1) and advice from some of the leaders in the field at RP Strength .

Training Splits With Dumbbells

There are many different ways you can organise and structure your training, the main two being either the upper and lower split and the full body split. There are many factors that go into choosing which one of these suits you best including:

Using a full body split is probably the most effective as it allows you to be more dynamic and adapt to which muscle groups need attention. That being said, if you love running and would rather do an upper lower split timed around your different runs, that makes perfect sense too.

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