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Dumbbell Chest Press and Progressions
The Dumbbell Chest Press is an upper body exercise that builds strength and muscular hypertrophy in the chest, shoulders and arms. It involves pressing two dumbbells away from the body while lying down on a flat bench, extending the arms in a horizontal position at chest level. The exercise can be adjusted to fit individual needs by varying the range of motion, stance and weight used.Progressions of this exercise can include the Single Arm Dumbbell Chest Press–which involves pressing the
Transcript
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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness,
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and we're talking about one of my
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favorite strength training exercises for the chest, one of our favorite pushing
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motions, the dumbbell bench press. I'm going to have my friend Joe come out,
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help me demonstrate this exercise. First things first, when we grab these
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dumbbells, notice Joe gets into a nice deadlift form, nice straight back, lifts using his
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glute complex, and then sits down with the dumbbells on his lap. He's not twisting, he's not
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grabbing one at a time, he's not trying to lift them onto his lap from a seated
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position which is going to put more strain on your lower back. He's then
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going to roll back and get into his dumbbell press position. I'm going to
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make sure he stabilizes his core first, that's going to include drawing-in, and
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then I want you to press your heels through the floor, engaging your glute
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complex. Good. Let's go ahead and see what a dumbbell press looks like just right
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off the bat here. So go ahead and push up. I don't want to over queue, all we want to
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get people doing is a push to start. Now we can go for a couple variations from
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here. If Joe had upper body dysfunction leading to an extensibility issue in his
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shoulder complex, we could start with a sagittal plane press. Now, what a sagittal
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plane press is going to look like is Joe's going to drop down this way,
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toward the bottom of his rib cage, and then push straight back out like he's
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pushing open a door.
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So, what that does, is it maintains the space between his acromion shelf and
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the top of his humeral head, so that we don't contribute to an impingement
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syndrome. If I know that he has optimal extensibility though, we can go back and
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go ahead and do a transverse plane press. This is a more traditional way of doing a
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dumbbell bench press. It also incorporates a lot more of the chest
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musculature. Of course this is fairly easy for Joe, so we're going to make it a
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little bit more challenging for you. So the first thing we're going
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to try is the alternating dumbbell press. Now, the trick of the alternating dumbbell
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press, this is a challenge for Joe, is to not shift. You want to try
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to keep this dumbbell directly over your shoulder, or whatever arm is straight
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directly over your shoulder, and you want to try to not shift at the pelvis. Keep
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going. A little tougher? -A little bit. Good. You also want to try not to collapse at the
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arm, I'll show you a different angle for that. Let's try another progression.
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Now, I'm going to take one dumbbell away. Now, of course, at this point Joe loses
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his counter balance, which means now he's going to have to press his heels into the
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floor even harder, keep that glute complex engaged and really draw-in to
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keep this dumbbell from flipping him off sideways from the bench. How does that
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feel? -Good. Think 12 of those on each side will be a little difficult? -15
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15, awesome! Of course you can go ahead and switch arms after he does his 15 reps.
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I want to show you just one last angle so we talk about proper
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form completely with this dumbbell press. Let me have you stand up really quickly.
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I'm going to turn the bench this way.
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Let's go ahead and have you sit back down, we're going to do a dumbbell press
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one more time.
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Alright Joe, go ahead and show me a press. Let's do our nice transverse
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plane press with that wide grip we were talking about before. Now, one thing I
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want you to notice in his dumbbell press form, is he maintains his forearms
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perpendicular to the floor, so they're straight up and
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down throughout the entire range of this movement.
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Now, that should persist throughout our progressions as well. So, let's try
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alternating. This arm stays up nice and straight, perpendicular to the floor, and
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hopefully the arm that's going down, the forearm stays perpendicular to the floor so
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he's not collapsing in. And even when I take him to a single dumbbell, now you can see
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he's collapsing just a little bit. He's going to have to work to maintain
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perpendicular, maintaining to keep the stress off his elbow joint. You
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should also note that one hip isn't raising up. He's staying nice and drawn-
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in, his shoulder complex is staying nice and stable. So those are our form
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queues as well as some progressions for our dumbbell bench press. Thanks again to
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