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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