0:03 This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, and we're talking about one of my 0:06 favorite strength training exercises for the chest, one of our favorite pushing 0:11 motions, the dumbbell bench press. I'm going to have my friend Joe come out, 0:15 help me demonstrate this exercise. First things first, when we grab these 0:19 dumbbells, notice Joe gets into a nice deadlift form, nice straight back, lifts using his 0:25 glute complex, and then sits down with the dumbbells on his lap. He's not twisting, he's not 0:30 grabbing one at a time, he's not trying to lift them onto his lap from a seated 0:33 position which is going to put more strain on your lower back. He's then 0:37 going to roll back and get into his dumbbell press position. I'm going to 0:43 make sure he stabilizes his core first, that's going to include drawing-in, and 0:48 then I want you to press your heels through the floor, engaging your glute 0:52 complex. Good. Let's go ahead and see what a dumbbell press looks like just right 0:56 off the bat here. So go ahead and push up. I don't want to over queue, all we want to 1:01 get people doing is a push to start. Now we can go for a couple variations from 1:06 here. If Joe had upper body dysfunction leading to an extensibility issue in his 1:13 shoulder complex, we could start with a sagittal plane press. Now, what a sagittal 1:17 plane press is going to look like is Joe's going to drop down this way, 1:20 toward the bottom of his rib cage, and then push straight back out like he's 1:25 pushing open a door. 1:31 So, what that does, is it maintains the space between his acromion shelf and 1:39 the top of his humeral head, so that we don't contribute to an impingement 1:44 syndrome. If I know that he has optimal extensibility though, we can go back and 1:49 go ahead and do a transverse plane press. This is a more traditional way of doing a 1:54 dumbbell bench press. It also incorporates a lot more of the chest 1:58 musculature. Of course this is fairly easy for Joe, so we're going to make it a 2:03 little bit more challenging for you. So the first thing we're going 2:06 to try is the alternating dumbbell press. Now, the trick of the alternating dumbbell 2:12 press, this is a challenge for Joe, is to not shift. You want to try 2:18 to keep this dumbbell directly over your shoulder, or whatever arm is straight 2:23 directly over your shoulder, and you want to try to not shift at the pelvis. Keep 2:27 going. A little tougher? -A little bit. Good. You also want to try not to collapse at the 2:33 arm, I'll show you a different angle for that. Let's try another progression. 2:41 Now, I'm going to take one dumbbell away. Now, of course, at this point Joe loses 2:46 his counter balance, which means now he's going to have to press his heels into the 2:50 floor even harder, keep that glute complex engaged and really draw-in to 2:56 keep this dumbbell from flipping him off sideways from the bench. How does that 3:03 feel? -Good. Think 12 of those on each side will be a little difficult? -15 3:09 15, awesome! Of course you can go ahead and switch arms after he does his 15 reps. 3:16 I want to show you just one last angle so we talk about proper 3:20 form completely with this dumbbell press. Let me have you stand up really quickly. 3:26 I'm going to turn the bench this way. 3:30 Let's go ahead and have you sit back down, we're going to do a dumbbell press 3:34 one more time. 3:44 Alright Joe, go ahead and show me a press. Let's do our nice transverse 3:49 plane press with that wide grip we were talking about before. Now, one thing I 3:53 want you to notice in his dumbbell press form, is he maintains his forearms 3:58 perpendicular to the floor, so they're straight up and 4:01 down throughout the entire range of this movement. 4:06 Now, that should persist throughout our progressions as well. So, let's try 4:13 alternating. This arm stays up nice and straight, perpendicular to the floor, and 4:17 hopefully the arm that's going down, the forearm stays perpendicular to the floor so 4:21 he's not collapsing in. And even when I take him to a single dumbbell, now you can see 4:31 he's collapsing just a little bit. He's going to have to work to maintain 4:34 perpendicular, maintaining to keep the stress off his elbow joint. You 4:40 should also note that one hip isn't raising up. He's staying nice and drawn- 4:44 in, his shoulder complex is staying nice and stable. So those are our form 4:50 queues as well as some progressions for our dumbbell bench press. Thanks again to 4:57 Joe for helping me demonstrate this exercise! Have fun.
