The Working Man's Weightlifting Show
Brothers Nick and Stephen Wiley invite you to The Working Man's Weightlifting Show, a relatable podcast for ordinary people who are committed to realistically incorporating health and fitness into their already busy lives. In an industry crowded by flashy aesthetics, photo-shopped abs, full-time camera crews, and misleading marketing, Nick and Stephen leverage their combined 30+ years of weightlifting experience to help clear the air on everyday fitness issues. Common discussion topics include no-nonsense nutrition, exercise tips for the manual labor workforce, best practices for office workers, building home gyms, recovering from injuries, workout programming, and much more.
The Working Man's Weightlifting Show
Barbell vs. Dumbbell
In episode 79, hosts Nick and Stephen visit the age-old question of barbell vs. dumbbell training. Topics include:
• Benefits of barbells for strength and incremental loading
• Advantages of dumbbells for muscle symmetry and isolation training
• Using training logs for progress tracking
• Recommendations on adjusting rep schemes for various exercises
• Managing dumbbell expectations
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Hello and welcome to the Working Man's Weightlifting Show, the show where working men talk about weightlifting. I'm your host, Nick Wiley, and I'm joined today by my younger brother and permanent co-host, Mr Stephen Wiley Nice intro If you are an NFL player.
Speaker 1:Sadly, you're not Welcome. How's it going? Pretty good. How are you Not bad? Not bad. Thanks for being here. I'm pretending that we haven't just been shooting the breeze for like an hour here. I'm pretending that we haven't just been shooting the breeze for like an hour. Well, why don't we just jump right in and do a recap and then talk about the topic of the day? But before we do that, as always, we got to talk about the sponsor. We got to get the red tape out of the way so that we can just move right in to what the people are really here for. And you know who is the sponsor. I'm so excited about this. Who is it? This bit's probably getting old, isn't? It Should probably just not do this anymore.
Speaker 2:If you've been here before, you've known the drill. Yeah, you know the drill.
Speaker 1:I think for four years now. Yeah, five, yeah, you know the drill. I think for four years now. Yeah, five, actually five years now. This has been the joke. But you know, one day there may be money involved and then it will be sellouts. But until then we can say whatever we want. That's right. You know, roughly within the bounds of legalities and all those things.
Speaker 1:But we're not bought and paid for. That's all I'm saying. You're right, real hardworking, honest blue-collar man Gosh got a frog in the throat there Kind of helped. Yeah, it did. It made it a little more authentic. Anyway, you know, if you'd like for there to be money involved, the best thing you can do is tell somebody else about this show, and then you know if we eventually get popular.
Speaker 2:Or if you're a sponsor, just go and shoot us an email.
Speaker 1:That'll work too. Yeah that'll work too, and you can also actually give us money. If you'd like to do that, we'd be eternally grateful. You can buy something from us at shopworkingmansweightliftingcom. You can support us with just a good old fashioned donation at supportworkingmansweightliftingcom. Now that that's out of the way. Moving on to the quick recap what has been going on in the last week, since the last time we recorded? How about you? I'm first.
Speaker 2:You're first. Yeah, cool, the training has been going well. I think we talked about it in one of the last episodes, but we've got a new program where we're doing some strength days and some hypertrophy days. Um, everything's going smoothly. This was actually the first week where, on the hypertrophy day, I did not hit all of my reps, okay, so now I can tell it's starting to get a little heavier. Yeah, um, but that doesn't scare me. I kind of like getting there. I'm more nervous when I'm like it's going too good. Yeah, right, so it wasn't. It wasn't like a bad workout or anything. I was a little bit, probably under rested.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um like I did, a couple of really hard work days yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was freezing cold. Uh, that day it was Friday. It was bitter cold in the basement gym, so cold that we actually turned a heater on. I haven't done that? I don't think I've done that since we've lived in the house. Oh wow, it was cold, so that kind of zapped it for me. I don't know why I was just not feeling.
Speaker 1:To be clear, it's like 19 degrees Fahrenheit outside that day, which here we live in central North Carolina. That's pretty cold for this region, you know.
Speaker 2:So I know we've played a little bit. It wasn't weirdly cold, it felt even colder.
Speaker 1:It felt yes, that was the thing it's like the wind chill or whatever they call it, it was like. It felt like it might as well be like negative five.
Speaker 2:It was like super awful deal with that is, but so I think that makes with some rest. Uh, yeah, probably pulled me off a little bit, but I'll just get right back at it next week and continue on. But but the strength days, uh, I'm consistently dead, lifting in the 300s, squatting in the upper 200s, getting close to 300 pounds again. Yeah, um, that is not like a max or anything, that's just what I'm training at, so I'll hit five reps and move on. Um, yeah, it feels very good right now, like I haven't had any issues of missed reps or anything like that on the strength days at all. Right, um, but I intentionally kind of pulled all the numbers back when we started that program and just went for. I'm just trying to get to good, good reps and make sure everything's feeling right, not blasting through anything too quickly or anything like that. Um, but yeah, so far it's going really well. Um, not really any complaints. Um, most of my weird nagging injuries are all at the moment staying away. That's good.
Speaker 1:Especially getting the cold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my knee. I have like a weird knee pain going on that I don't think is related to uh like, uh it's. It's a weird. It's not something I've really experienced before, but I will say I did notice on the on this week of squats. Uh, the bar was kind of moving around my back some. I had a big hoodie on I think it had to do with that and I was squatting with a different bar. We have two different Rogue barbells and I was using the one that my wife normally uses and it doesn't have as much knurling, so it was actually not gripping, like gripping to my back as well. The shift in that I could tell, threw me off and my knee was hurting, and when I realized that, I kind of fixed it and then my knee didn't hurt after that. So I think that's where some of that knee pain is coming. I think the bar has been moving a little bit and I wasn't really paying enough attention, so-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been thinking for a while that it would be really nice to I I don't know where you get them. You know, actually this might be interesting for the listeners of the show for us to kind of figure this out, but it'd be really cool to get a bunch of those like wall mirrors that you would get at a normal gym, because it's hard to know. It would be easier to look at your own form.
Speaker 1:It is yeah yeah, it's nice Right now. The surroundings, if you want to picture it, if you're listening to this Stephen's home gym, basically is all concrete cinder blocks and then you've hung a bunch of flags that are different bands that we like, or TV shows, games, yeah, all kinds of Sort of like buying a poster, but they're flags. So it looks kind of like a boxing gym, a little bit like a basement boxing gym, I think. It's kind of the vibe of it which is, I think, is really cool, but it would be nice to have at least a couple of mirrors in there that you could put in front of the squat racks or something.
Speaker 1:So you know, maybe we'll figure that out, yeah, which I assume will be like anything. It's probably harder to do than you might think at face value, because aren't like bad, like cheap mirrors are supposed to be like really distorted right, like they're not accurate to what you see at all. I don't know why that piece of dumb is in my head, but whatever.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I'll hop in briefly, briefly. We're doing essentially the same program, except that I'm doing the one hypertrophy day at my house instead of coming to your gym. So I'm only going to Steven's gym twice a week. You know, the biggest thing for me to say is that I'm just I said this last time, but for some reason it's like sticking with me more this time. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1:It's been a long time since I've actually like decided I'm doing a program and then actually done everything on the program for any length of time at all. Usually I sort of aim for a hundred and end up at 70. And I've said before that I still think that's helpful, because if I weren't aiming for a hundred I just wouldn't do anything. But it is not that helpful, like mentally, when you're just never achieving what you set out to do. And you've pointed that out before and for some reason I can't tell you why, but I just my personality, I'm sure, and the fact that I'm too much of a yes man, I'm over committed on too many levels, and I'm sure that you know basically what always happens I just always run out of steam by the end of the week. I'm just like I'm not going to go, or whatever.
Speaker 1:You know I'll start out Monday like oh yeah, I go to the gym get strong and then by the end of the week I'm just like no way, but for some reason it's stuck with me. So it helps that Fridays generally are supposed to be at my house, so it's a little bit easier.
Speaker 1:I can get up later, which is really nice and I'm using all dumbbells for everything I'm doing on that day, which is a nice little lead-in to the topic of the day, which is barbells versus dumbbells.
Speaker 1:If you're a beginner lifter, if you're maybe lower intermediate, hopefully this information might be useful to you. But I thought we'd kind of like generally dive into what is the difference between barbells and dumbbells, why would you choose one over the other? And then what are the things to sort of consider, I guess, in terms of like, I think what we were thinking is like sort of what feels. I guess, in terms of like, I think what we were thinking is like sort of what feels normal, because they achieve different things and they are optimized for different things. And so you got to understand that if you're choosing one over the other or, like in my case, on Fridays, like I don't really have the choice of a barbell because I don't have one here, so it's not a choice as much as it is learning the limitations of what you know one may have or the other.
Speaker 1:So I guess I'm going to be throwing some questions at you.
Speaker 2:These are not premeditated at all.
Speaker 1:I'm totally firing from the hip, but I'll try to do my best. That's what we do around here. If you're new to the show, that's how we roll it. Preparation yeah, so generally, just from a broad stroke perspective in your mind, sort of why would one choose dumbbell movement over a barbell movement or vice versa? Quickest answer you can give 30 second elevator version. What does it boil down to?
Speaker 2:Why would you choose one just based off of like your own feeling Is that?
Speaker 1:what you're asking. I'm asking if someone had the option of both, why would you choose one over the other?
Speaker 2:Okay, Essentially the barbell you would choose for maximum strength, because you can load it incrementally, meaning you can get little half pound weights, one pound weights, five pound weights, two and a half pound weights, whatever. Went backwards there. It helps a lot, though, because if you plateau, so you're doing five reps, you reach five reps. You may fail if you add five pounds to the bar next week, but you might not fail if you add one pounds to the bar next week, but you might not fail if you add one pound to the bar, right. So then, dumbbells.
Speaker 2:People call that micro-loading, yeah, is that another word yeah, I think they call those micro-plates or something. Okay, so you got that. Then with dumbbells you've got more, maybe range of motion, independent limbs, so like if you're like in your case. Nick's talked a lot about his bad shoulder. I've told him to do dumbbell, overhead press because he really needs to work on the left shoulder and he's noticed he can talk about it, but the right shoulder, or the good shoulder, right shoulder, I believe, takes over on the barbell a little bit more, because it can, because it's kind of all connected into one right unit like that, um, not a bad thing necessarily for strength.
Speaker 2:Like you, you can lift more weight with a barbell, but the left shoulder is not getting as much out of it yeah that's that kind of plays into like they're good for different things like
Speaker 1:you might say that, um, it's almost like what is good about one is the reason why you might like how do I the words are failing me but it's almost like the fact that here's the, here's the example. I'm going for the because both limbs are stabilizing a barbell. You are basically removing any little problems you might have with one limb over the other and you're able to just compensate for that and move more weight, sure. So on the one hand, you might say that's an advantage for strength training. The other hand, you might say it's a disadvantage for, like, mobility. I guess would be the yeah, and like some symmetry, like keeping everything the same.
Speaker 1:Right. So, like you're saying, it's actually good that, like our bodies are amazing at compensating for deficiencies.
Speaker 2:I mean, we all have some.
Speaker 1:Everybody's got one leg longer than the other, everybody's got something weird and your body is just like very natural at compensating for that. Yeah, so that's kind of good about barbells, but also, like, if you're trying to, I suppose, work on that issue specifically, maybe that's not the right tool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and on that line too, though, I mean, you can definitely strength train with dumbbells it just gets more difficult because of the way they're loaded. You can't micro load a dumbbell, unfortunately. Well, typically you can get the style where you put little barbells on them, yeah, but they get really awkward really fast. I mean, you can't really rest them on your knees because they're probably this little. There's basically a little pole you're sitting on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just stab you right in the knee.
Speaker 1:You're talking about the dumbbells that are little. They're little barbells. They're a little tiny barbells. Yeah, you basically load old school.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had those starting out, um, and I remember I think we got them up like 70 or 75 pounds and we're trying to bench with them and it was just so awkward just to lay down on the bench and hold those things, it was we were like handing them to each other. Pretty miserable.
Speaker 1:Hard to, I guess I might say I would not recommend that product to anyone unless you're just on a crazy budget, because you can probably go to like a used sporting goods store and buy a set of those for like 40 bucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or like a yard sale or something.
Speaker 1:So yeah if you need to get started. Like you know, anything's better than nothing, but in terms of if you're just choosing something based on its merits, the little tiny barbells are, and not to mention they're a total pain in the butt to change weights.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it takes forever, yeah.
Speaker 1:You basically almost have to like preload them for like a generic weight that you need that day and just use that because they're such it takes so long to reconfigure.
Speaker 2:And then they get real big, like, say, you're doing a bench press if you have too big of a plate on there, it's like rubbing into your forearm or something. There's not comfortable. I mean, if you can find any other method, I would recommend it If you're hearing us recommend dumbbells.
Speaker 1:there's basically two styles that we're going to recommend. One is your stereotypical, like the kind you're used to seeing at a gym, or even like a hotel gym, like where you have individual dumbbells that range across. So you've got like a rack of them, which Steven actually has now in his home gym. But for a long time we used I guess you call them like sort of quick select or there's maybe another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, selectable, dumbbells Selectable dumbbells yeah, and there are several manufacturers of those. We've talked about them a lot in the past. Power blocks are the ones that we recommend. They're also probably the most expensive, but they're amazing. They'll last forever, there's some new ones out now that I've never yes, right, yeah, and then, before that, we use nautilus um select tech. I think they were called yeah, I remember right um and I both flex has the same kind yeah both flex they're.
Speaker 1:In fact I'm pretty sure those are the actual same product with a different name on them, they actually lasted for years they did they really weren't bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, they just didn. Eventually, the locking mechanism gave out on it. It wouldn't hold the weight anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the main difference. It's reliability, but you're weighing that against space. That's probably another thing to talk about quickly. I know I said the 30 second version. Here we are 10 minutes later. But the other thing you know, you can, if you use selectable dumbbells and a bench, you, if you use selectable dumbbells and a bench, you've pretty much got a rig that you can do full body workouts that takes up very little space. That's what I have now in my home office. Dumbbells can take up more space, but like in your case where you got a whole rack of them. But generally, if you need like a very compact rig, like that's going to be the smallest thing, because we're not going to recommend barbell training without a squat rack period, right, right.
Speaker 1:I don't think I mean, unless you would say otherwise, I wouldn't you know which is. That's a $400 or $500 purchase alone, plus the space that it takes up, which is significant.
Speaker 1:So you know it's definitely a commitment if you're going full barbells and we always talk about buying it. I mean, if you go to a gym like a commercial gym, you don't have to make any. You can use whatever you want. I mean, almost all of them are going to have all these things and you just decide what you want. But even then, you know there's a lot of considerations because most gyms don't have as many barbells as they do dumbbells.
Speaker 1:So if you're waiting in line, you know, or you go at a popular time, you know you might have to deal with that. Some are different, though. I mean I've seen videos of people that like pure strength gyms, where they basically only have squat racks, but there's none of those around here.
Speaker 2:Right, right, that I know of.
Speaker 1:I mean, most of them are like family gyms where they'll have maybe two squat racks, maybe two.
Speaker 2:Maybe just one, so. So you're just kind of like go at five in the morning you'll probably be all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other disadvantage with a dumbbell is going to be if you're trying to go for strength eventually on something like a squat or a deadlift, if you really want to get strong at those movements, you just can't get heavy enough. You're going to get so strong that pretty quickly that the even if you have a hundred pound dumbbell doing a squat, holding a hundred pound dumbbell, however you decide to hold, that sounds like a lot of weight on a dumbbell but that's not much weight on a barbell. Like you're going to get to a hundred pound squat really quickly on a barbell, yeah. And then you're going to get way beyond that because you can just it racks easier on your body Like you hold it. The bar fits on your back easier If it's in your hands, better for a deadlift. You can kind of leverage against it a lot better than just holding a dumbbell. That's just kind of. Holding a hundred pound dumbbell is kind of difficult in of itself, not because you're weak, it's just awkward. The shape of it's really awkward and everything. Um, you can get around it a little bit, I would say with something like a kettlebell just because of the shape. Um, you can rack it like in the rack position, they would call it Um. So you're kind of holding it up your chest, but just the way the kettlebell sits on you, if you hold like two kettlebells, for example, you hold two 75 pound kettlebells or 85 pound kettlebells that's a decent bit of weight actually, and you will. You're going to burn your legs. I mean, you're going to feel that Sure, um, but still you're not. You can't go to two 86 pounds next week when you did 85 pounds today. So you have to get more creative, and that was kind of the other thing I wanted to say.
Speaker 2:The creative side is probably where I think people get confused, because they'll follow a program. You know, the program says three sets of five or three sets of eight, five sets of five, five sets of 10, whatever program you're following, it's going to say that. And so you're going to follow that with the dumbbells, with the barbell, and as you go along. Let's say you're hitting the barbell and you're going, for you know, each week you're hitting your five sets of five and you add five pounds to the bar, add five pounds to the bar. Well, now, like I said earlier, you can't quite get five pounds. So now you add five pounds to the bar, add five pounds to the bar. Well, now, like I said earlier, you can't quite get five pounds. So now you add three pounds to the bar and then that gets a little bit harder. So now you add two pounds, one pound, whatever. You keep going up very low, little, small increments. Eventually you're just getting stronger and stronger. You will hit a plateau eventually, but it takes a very long time. You can add weight to the bar for a very long time and that will help build more muscle, more strength, everything With the dumbbells, like I said, you're going to be kind of capped at whatever dumbbells you have. So even if, like in our case, we have old school dumbbells that go from five pounds up to 90 pounds, we have pairs of each one and then we have the power blocks that go from five pounds to, I think, like 120.5 or something weird like that, some weird number I remember. So we have a lot of choices there. But still, when you get to like a hundred pound dumbbell bench press, it's much harder to go to 105 pound dumbbell bench press than it is to do a hundred pounds on the barbell and then do 105 pounds because you're using your full body, like you just mentioned. It's all connected.
Speaker 1:The barbell is connected and technically that's more weight. What you just said it's it's twice as much of a exactly, it's a huge jump, cause you're at it. You'd have to add five to each each arm, yes, so it's way harder.
Speaker 2:In your head it's like, oh, it's only five pounds, but it's actually five per side. There's no, like you said, there's nothing that can kind of compensate your individual arms moving. So what I usually do and what Nick actually you kind of came to me with that question because you were telling Nick was saying he's been doing lateral raises for his shoulders, so that's where you take the dumbbell and kind of go out to the side to build the kind of the middle of your shoulder, basically what rounds out your shoulder, and like a t-shirt. Yeah, nick was like, you know, hey, because of his bad shoulder, he's like I don't think I can add any more weight at all, like I'm already hitting the reps, but there's no way I can have weight. I'm like shaking already.
Speaker 2:Um, the solution at least that I come up with is to just simply change the rep scheme when you're doing a dumbbell movement. So in this case, uh, we're doing three sets of eight, I believe, is what's kind of prescribed in the program. That's right. What I do, and what I've been doing, is I'll just, you know, the next week I'll shoot for three sets of nine. If I get two sets of nine, once at eight. Okay, then the next week is still shooting for three sets of nine. Once I hit that, three sets of 10, three sets of 11. And I'll just keep increasing that. Most likely, you know, if you get up into the 15 range to 20, we'll say you probably will be able to add some weight to that dumbbell now and go back to the three sets of eight and once again I would just start the same process. Maybe you're hitting three sets of five, we'll just work to eight and then get to nine, get to ten and keep kind of manipulating that rep range.
Speaker 2:Um, biggest reasons being number one that's not a big strength movement. You're not winning a powerlifting competition with a lateral side race. Um, it's really a hypertrophy movement, just a shoulder health movement, whatever you want to call it. Um, so it doesn't really matter how many reps you're doing for one, but that's a good way to make progress, weekly and monthly progress, without kind of just falling apart on the program, being like, oh, I don't really know what to do anymore, because that used to happen to me too.
Speaker 2:I would see a program that would talk about dumbbell curls and I would just like hit the reps and be like, okay, I can't continue to go up weight. It's so heavy now that I can't hardly get this thing up now. But if I go back five pounds I can hit all the reps. Like what should I do? So that's my solution. I sometimes I might even drop the weight and go ahead and increase the reps. So if it's three sets of eight, maybe I'll drop it down five to 10 pounds and I'll do three sets of 12 and then start building back up to three sets of 15, or maybe even, like I said, three sets of 20, depending on the movement and kind of build up. And so, like an example for myself, I've started doing that. I've started to get a little bit of like a elbow pain from being kind of stupid and filming myself doing a pull-up. So some friends of ours asked how much I could do with a weighted pull-up. So I just started adding 45 pound plates to my belt and doing pull-ups.
Speaker 2:And as soon as I did that, my elbow flared up and so I've noticed body weight. Pull-ups and chins don't really bother me. So right now I'm kind of any part of the program that says chin, chin ups or pull-ups I'm just using body weight and I'm continuing to add refs, like this week I think I did three sets of 12 each time. Okay, um, so I'm just, uh, maybe one of those five sets, but either way, I think I'm a 12. So next week I'll go to 13 and I'll just keep building that, hopefully to like 20. And then maybe, when I hit 20, I may start adding a little bit of weight back, like five pounds, 10 pounds, whatever. Um, I know the strength's still there. I could still add a decent bit of weight and do pull-ups, but it feels better to my elbow and it's a good way to make progress. It keeps you excited Every time I come to the bar. I know, okay, well, last week I hit that. It feels good when you hit one extra rep and again, it's all about the progress. Really, that's your biggest thing. So how to keep up with that?
Speaker 2:Um, uh, like, we're using an app for our program, the strong lifts app, and we've talked about it a lot. Uh, it kind of. It just tells you three sets of eight. You can manipulate it, but I'm not going to take the time every week to change that rep range Just every single week is just. That's too too much aggravation for me.
Speaker 2:So I actually keep a physical log on top of that, just cause I'm kind of old school and I enjoy it. I like to be able to go back and look at things. So what I would recommend is just keep a log of some sort so you know how many reps you hit the week before. Maybe it's just a simple piece of paper like a cheap little notebook from your local office supply, whatever. Just get it and then make sure you're just recording how many reps you hit. So you know each week you're actually making progress. And, like I said, if you're adding one rep and then you're, the next two sets are back to what you did the week before. You still just did more than last week. So you, you have made progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, we did a whole episode years ago like probably one of the very first episodes we ever did was on uh tracking your progress using using either a like a fitness tracker app or uh. We talked a lot actually a lot more, I think about notebooks that are available. We did, yeah, to do it physically, and so if you need information on that, be sure to check out that episode and beware that we probably were a little bit more awkward on the mic back then.
Speaker 2:But the thing is too, those apps are really, really cool, but I have had them fail before randomly, and then you don't have your progress anymore. That's why I keep a physical one, and it drives me nuts.
Speaker 1:So I'm using the strongest app now and I think it's the best one I've found so far, but I would go as far as to say that if I was actually making an honest recommendation to someone, I do think paper is better, because exactly what you just said yeah, you don't there.
Speaker 1:What especially you run into is like if you, if you're doing exactly what the app tells you to do, it's one thing, but if you ever need to like track something outside, or like you need to tweak something or whatever, that's when you run into trouble. Yeah, you know and some of them can accommodate it better than others, but paper is never going to bark back at you. No, no, whatever you write down, it's just going to be there.
Speaker 2:I like the, the app has other and keeps like a rest timer going and stuff. So I still enjoy using it, but I just if it's something where I'm going to manipulate the reps like that, I don't sweat it. I'm not going to, like I said, I'm not going to take the time to go in there and edit the app. I'm just writing that down and moving on. It's much faster to me, it's easy to keep up with and, like I said, it's fun to. You might randomly one day remember some program you did three years ago and you can go through your notebook and actually find that what you were doing each week and be like, oh, that was pretty cool, I forgot I did that. My wife does that all the time Actually. She'll. She'll randomly want to change something up and she'll go back and see what she did and be like wow, I just did that three years ago or whatever. It's like that's crazy.
Speaker 1:I often thought that would be a sweet like merch item that we could do. It's like a fitness tracking journal. Yeah, yeah, that would be cool, with our brand on it. Yeah, yeah, that would be very cool. But I imagine that's the kind of thing we'd have to get mass produced in order to like we're not going to get those.
Speaker 2:Need some pre-orders, yeah.
Speaker 1:We'd have to have a lot of people line up for him to get it at a decent rate. So maybe one day, anyway. Last thing I was thinking we could talk through in this whole thing is, especially if you are more on the beginner spectrum, what are some expectations that you should have about, especially if you're doing well? I guess really either, but um, I guess really the question is especially dumbbells like what are the lifts that you can expect to load pretty heavy? And then what are? What are some examples of lifts that you just are going to hit a plateau like pretty quickly, and I don't think they always are what people think they might be. Like you, you think you you see these videos or whatever, and you think, man, I should be able to do a ton of weight on you know, an example would be curls is the one that comes to my mind and, um, you know, like I don't know, like, do you have any opinions about?
Speaker 1:like, maybe give us three, three options of exercises that you can get pretty heavy on, even if it's a dumbbell, and then maybe three that you you're always going to have to lean on that light side and just go for reps, uh, yeah um, probably, I mean it.
Speaker 2:To me, the, the dumbbell bench press is the main one I would think of when I think people tend to get really heavy with, because it's it's the cool one, it's whatever, I wants to do.
Speaker 2:Um, and you see, some guys do some pretty impressive things but uh, like I've said before, they don't make dumbbells but so heavy so they'll get weird and take rubber bands or whatever and attach them to the dumbbells. It's, it's, it gets crazy but uh, that's, that's definitely one that gets heavy. The goblet squat, where you hold the dumbbell up kind of at your chest, that you can get really heavy with, in my opinion, for a dumbbell. But it's like I mentioned earlier, your legs are not going to be what gives out first. It's going to be your ability to hold that thing more or less, or maybe like it feels weird on your back or something because of how you're holding it, but your legs are like they're going to burn, but they're not. I don't think your legs are going to give out. You're not going to get to a set of five and be like I cannot do another squat. That will happen quickly. You'll build up that capacity pretty quickly. Kind of isolation movements, like your triceps, if you're doing a skull crusher with a dumbbell, like a tricep kickback, any of the shoulders, like rear delt raise, lateral raise, any of that. If you're using a really strict form, I mean, you'll see professional bodybuilders not really using that much weight on those movements because it's just not a strong muscle. So that's where, I would say, the rep range really kind of comes into play.
Speaker 2:A deadlift I think you've mentioned this before, that you've tried doing that you can get like very strong at that quickly with dumbbells. It's just more the awkwardness again, cause it's just very odd feeling to bend down that low and pick up heavy dumbbells. That's right, um. But what you can do is like a RDL, a Romanian deadlift with dumbbells, um, where you start from the top. So you just kind of get them out of the rack and as long as you can handle whatever you're holding, you keep more of a stiff leg and it's more focused on your hamstrings and you bend over, but not as far. You kind of bring it down below your knees and then come back up and that movement it's a little less awkward. So you can kind of hold the dumbbells and as long, like I said, as long as you can hold whatever weight you're handling, I don't think your legs are going to give out as soon as your grips. Basically right, um.
Speaker 2:And then rows, dumbbell rows are really. That's a really good one you can get strong on and I see a lot of professional bodybuilders and powerlifters using that um, because there's a lot of variations. There's croc rows, there's just normal dumbbell rows where you're kind of bent over, uh, like a bench um. There's some where you just you stand at the rack, that I do that a lot, where you just kind of bend over the rack and and lift it from there. You're in like a standing position um, to me, those you can get pretty heavy with because you you can use a little bit of leg momentum, especially like the croc row. It just puts a little more of a full body effect in the row. But anytime you isolate something which is essentially what the dumbbell is doing, the weight is just going to come down because you're not using your whole body with it.
Speaker 2:And all of the barbell movements. More or less use your full body Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that's most of what there is to say about that. Any, do you have any final thoughts about? You know somebody who's confused about what to use for what, or you know like, I guess, trying to sort of decipher, like navigate their way through?
Speaker 2:I mean I would say I started with nothing but dumbbells when I started in the home gym. Yeah, so when we very first started kind of building stuff, we used exclusively dumbbells for years. I had the first set you were talking about the Nautilus set it only went to 52 and a half pounds, I think was the max first set. You were talking about the nautilus set. It only went to 52 and a half pounds, I think was the max. Um, and pretty quickly we got to where we could use that for a lot of different movements. Um, then we bought the power blocks and that kind of unlocked another significant amount of time that we could train and make progress.
Speaker 2:Um, you, I don't think there's anything wrong with with dumbbells at all, for really, I mean for life, honestly, you can. You can use them for about anything. I did not even know everything we could do back then, especially with leg movements like the RDLs or goblets or anything. Um, but if your goal is just, you want to be strong and you want to get as big and as strong as possible, the barbell is as most people say, barbell is king in the gym. It's just, it's the one that's going to get you the strongest, the fastest and the biggest, the fastest. But dumbbells are great at isolating things and if you care more about just being lean and healthy and strong, but not, you know, or strong, strong man, strong, then like, like, functional strength.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah like, if you, you know you want to feel good, um, just stay in shape, all those things then you could literally train with dumbbells for your whole life and you would be completely fine. Yeah, um, it's just, the barbell is great at. You know, if you want to get to where you're dead, lifting 500, 600 pounds, whatever, squatting four or five hundred pounds, that's the only way you're gonna do it. You're not gonna hold two 200 pound dumbbells to do a squat because you're probably never gonna find that right.
Speaker 1:They would be so awkwardly huge that that, even if you could find them, they have.
Speaker 2:I think they have them in like what's called a circus dumbbell. Um, like strongman will use to like show off.
Speaker 1:Okay, but they're insanely awkward they're like big balls on the end.
Speaker 2:I think so, yeah, yeah and they're just like a big peanut, yeah, yeah, like you're. It's more about like a feat of strength, like you would show off circus. Like you would watch this man lift this over his head or whatever it's like. You know it's cool to do that, but it's really not. I wouldn't recommend somebody to buy a 200 pound dumbbell, if you could find it, because what are you going to do with it?
Speaker 2:The kettlebell a little different they do make. They have a name for them. Actually they get extremely heavy. Like that A little different, because you could do like a really heavy kettlebell swing and you actually could probably pick that up. Fine, you could deadlift it, whatever. You'd have some limits on what you could do with it. But I do actually think I could talk myself into buying a heavy kettlebell way before I'd talk myself into buying a pair of insanely heavy dumbbells just because there'd be a few more movements I could get out of it. But even still, I mean you know just your typical heavy set of dumbbells getting up to 90 to a hundred pounds. You can get a lot of years of really good, solid training out of that. And, uh, I mean we did it, like I said, for probably five or six years, honestly, maybe longer. Yeah, yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 1:Cool deal. Well, I think maybe we'll wrap it up there, trying to keep these things a little bit shorter these days, you know, yep, make a little bit better use of people's time, or you can just move on and listen to another episode of the Working Man's Life.
Speaker 2:Anyway.
Speaker 1:As always, thanks for being here and for lending us your ear. As I like to say, until next time. I've been Nick, I've been Stephen and we've been the working men who talk about dang it, dang it Every time, every single time I mess this up. We have been the working men who lift weights and talk about it on this show, and we'll catch you next time you
