Build muscle and gain strength in new movement patterns when all of the Club’s barbells are taken.
Barbells are put on a pedestal. The internet often claims it’s the only tool you need to build strength and achieve muscle gains.
Sure, they can help you make progress toward those goals. But in limiting yourself to the equipment and breaking up with dumbbells entirely, you’re unlikely to achieve peak performance.
Yes, barbells allow for heavy lifting. But the design — one long bar held (generally) with two hands, equipped with weight plates on the ends — means both sides of your body are working in tandem, says Diamia Foster, a COACH X at Equinox Woodbury in New York City. If your left side is slightly weaker, your right side can pick up some of the slack (read: lift more of the load) during bench presses, shoulder presses, and the like.
With separate dumbbells, there’s no way of “cheating.” You’re able to pinpoint weaknesses that may otherwise go undetected. “I think pressing heavy with dumbbells is more challenging than pressing with a heavy barbell — you don't have room to fake the strength on both arms,” says Foster. “So if one arm is stronger than the other, it's going to be lagging in the press, or you may not even be able to press it.”
On top of strength, dumbbells challenge your balance and coordination, says Foster. “If your balance sucks, you could probably get away with [a single-leg exercise] with a barbell because you're holding onto one bar,” which evenly distributes the load and provides more stability, she says. “If your balance sucks and you do it with dumbbells, it's going to be evident because you're quickly going to fall over.” They also allow for greater freedom of movement — you can add a rotation to shoulder presses and biceps curls (i.e., Arnold presses, Zottman curls) or combine multiple moves into one exercise (e.g., renegade rows, forward lunges with chops), for example.
The bottom line? A workout without barbells is an opportunity to challenge your strength in new ways. When you show up to the Club and dumbbells are the only tools at your disposal, follow this game plan to get the most out of your session.
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Change your mindset.
Be married to the movement pattern — not the equipment, says Foster.
Barbells aren’t the only way you can train essential functional movement patterns like the squat, hinge, push, pull, and rotate. They’re simply one modality to get the job done. “However we're training, whatever equipment is at our fingertips, that's what we're going to use,” says Foster. “Because sometimes you're traveling, sometimes you're not in the same location, sometimes you can't get to the Club, sometimes you have to work out at home.”
Say you were planning to use barbells for a lower-body day, with plenty of squats and deadlifts. Ask yourself: How can you practice the same movement patterns — and do so in a challenging way — with other equipment?
“If we remove this idea that, ‘I have to use that equipment in order for me to get these results,’ I think it frees you up more in regards to again, more freedom and room to just explore with movement,” says Foster. “You end up not only reaching whatever goal it is you want to reach, you end up surpassing it. And you end up realizing that you have more goals than what you thought, because you allowed yourself to try something different and challenge your idea of what you think you needed to get to your results.”
Practice building strength in new conditions.
Barbells can build serious strength, but these gains may apply only in the context of the specific exercise. You might be able to barbell back squat 200 pounds, but that’s not too impressive unless you’re also strong when you’re moving through other planes of motion, you’re on unstable ground, you're accessing larger ranges of motion, or the weight isn’t perfectly distributed.
When dumbbells are your only option, it’s time to build up those other facets of strength. If your go-to is barbell back squats, you might try front-loaded dumbbell squats. You might only be able to lower to 90 degrees with the back squat, but you could find yourself sinking deeper and testing larger, previously unexplored ranges of motion with the front squat variation, says Foster. You’re still challenging and building your strength — just in a different way.
Weight position is just one variable to tweak. Try single-leg work (e.g., single-leg deadlift, pistol squat, Bulgarian split squats), which are difficult enough without a full barbell. You could even change your direction of movement. “I think most times we tend to move in a very back-and-forth direction — we call that the sagittal plane,” says Foster. “Maybe you haven't tried lifting heavy and going laterally, so going off the side.” You might try curtsy lunges or cossack squats to challenge your lower body and chest flys and reverse flys to test your upper body.
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Shift away from pure strength.
Pure strength — the maximum amount of force a muscle or muscle group can generate — is just one element of your fitness. Muscular endurance and power are equally important to build — and you don’t necessarily need 100-pound weight plates to train those variables.
Normally train with low reps, moderate sets, and plenty of rest with barbells? Try upping your volume and reducing your rest to build muscular endurance. Alternatively, practice being explosive with cleans, snatches, thrusters, or weighted burpees.
Play with tempo.
You can easily make a lighter dumbbell load feel more taxing by slowing down your reps, says Foster.
In fact, focusing on the eccentric phase of the movement (when your muscles are lengthening while contracting, such as hinging from your hips during your deadlift or extending your arm after a biceps curl) may be more effective for muscular hypertrophy than concentric-focused or conventional strength training, research suggests. A recent seven-week study found that participants who spent four seconds in the eccentric phase during squats had significantly greater hypertrophy in the vastus lateralis (a quadriceps muscle) than the participants who only spent one second in the phase. You might even add in isometrics (think: pauses or holds) to tap into your muscular endurance, says Foster.
Use dumbbells as a chance to experiment. Mess around with your speed and plane of motion. Test out exercises that put you out of your comfort zone. That’s where the growth will happen.