Dumbbells vs Barbells: Which Builds More Muscle?
Building muscle is a long and intense process that requires discipline and commitment to the grind. It’s natural that dedicated athletes would want to squeeze out every possible advantage that they can get. When it comes to building muscle, which is more effective, dumbbells or barbells?
Potential Weight Lifted: Barbells
Barbells are the clear winner simply off of potential. You can just place more weight on a barbell than you can a dumbbell. If you get into powerlifting or olympic lifting and start throwing around some pretty heavy weight, that’s only possible with a barbell.
In terms of continual progress, the barbell affords you more options and if maximal strength is your goal, barbell it is.
Range Of Motion: Dumbbells
A full range of motion is critical for muscle growth. While training in partial ranges can be helpful to overcome specific strength curve issues, you can’t have that be your only training. A full range of motion dumbbell rep is going to recruit all potential muscle fibers and strengthen the specific muscle as length with maximum tension just because you can move through the range of motion more efficiently.
Variations: Dumbbells
There are just more dumbbell variations of movements than there are barbell varieties, As a result, you can play with different ranges of motion and build a different type of muscle.
The main caveat between the two is that if you have a specific application to sports, you need to stay with that implementation. I’m not going to tell a powerlifter to avoid barbell bench pressing. If I had to ball park it, I’d train with dumbbells 80% of the time and barbells the other 20%.
There’s clearly not a winner in this debate. It is entirely dependent on your goals and what you wish to achieve out of your training as well as what equipment that you have access to.
About The Author
Jimmy Phillip, MS,CSCS, is a lifter, reader, runner and small business owner of The Physique Formula featuring a all natural bcaa with stevia.
