Gone are the myths that women shouldn’t weightlift regularly. Irrespective of gender, strength training is an essential part of being fit, and if you are a woman who is serious about weightlifting, you are reading the right article.
You have decided to get into weightlifting but aren’t sure about how much weight to start with or at what intervals you must increase the weight. Don’t worry, as I’ve discussed all these factors right below. All that you must do is start off to train by picking your first pair of dumbbells.
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Can You Get Bulk Quickly When You Increase the Dumbbell Weight?
Before getting into intricate details, it is essential to understand that you don’t have the chemical makeup to become too bulky or heavy, even if you lift heavyweights. Hence, don’t be hesitant to start training with your dumbbells. All that you reap from this activity is muscle toning and increased metabolism. Isn’t this fantastic?
So, rather than disadvantages, dumbbell training has potential advantages that make you fitter and healthier.
When Should You Increase Your Dumbbell Weight?
You have started to train with your dumbbells and have been doing it for quite some time. Hence, you might start wondering whether you must increase your dumbbell weight.
But, instead of bringing about changes only because it’s been a long time, answer the following questions and decide whether or not it is the right time to increase your dumbbell weight.
If your answer is a ‘Yes’ to any of the questions below, it is time to increase your dumbbell weight:
- You can do 15 reps of any exercise using your present dumbbells without any strain until the last rep.
- It has been several months since you have been working out using the same dumbbell weight without any increase. Don’t worry if you stop in between the 15 reps using the heavier weight. It is common, and in no time, you would be able to go up to 15 reps using the heavier weight when you train consistently.
- You have hit a plateau in your weight loss target or body composition. If so, it is high time that you start looking out for a heavier pair of dumbbells.
Why Should You Increase Your Dumbbell Weight?
Nothing stays interesting until we engage ourselves in challenging and innovative ways. This applies to exercises too. If you wish to gain strength, tone yourself, and reap metabolism-boosting benefits, it becomes indispensable that you keep challenging your muscles continuously.
If you keep lifting weights that are too light, you might lose such opportunities. There is no denial that you keep burning calories, but the number of calories burned does not remain as high as they were during your initial workout days.
Let’s revisit the basics—to gain strength, the muscles break down, and such muscle breakdown happens only when you strain your muscles.
So, to keep this process going, you must increase the weights, which increases your strength. This way, you gain more muscles, thereby leading to an elevated metabolism.
How to Know How Much Dumbbell Weight Should You Increase?
There is no hard and fast rule for increasing your dumbbell weight, and it mostly depends on you—your strength training goals, capabilities, and how easy the weight is.
Before starting to think about how much to increase, do remember that dumbbells are generally $1-2/pound.
Let’s now get into the statistics. For instance, if you are lifting a 5-pound dumbbell, presently, it is wiser to get a pair of 8-pound or 10-pound dumbbells. If you are lifting a 10-pound dumbbell, you can increase it to 12pounds.
It is possible to buy any dumbbell of any weight in technical terms, but it is practical and feasible to buy anything from 2 to 3 or 5 lbs when you decide to increase the dumbbell weights.
This is because, as you choose heavy-weight dumbbells, suddenly it becomes harder to do your reps and sets.
Hence, my recommendation is to go for small increments—let’s say that you have no experience lifting heavy-weight dumbbells (such as 10lb or 15lb). When you suddenly increase it to such weights, you might realize that your body finds it difficult to adjust.
In general, the rep ranges include 8, 10-12, and 15. If you wish to go for heavier dumbbells, it is possible to start with 8 reps and then go up the weight ladder gradually.
Some of you might find it difficult to start working out with 8 reps. Never be disappointed as this is fine. Remember to do whatever is possible consistently. If you have increased the weight, you might even decrease your reps if you find it difficult at any point.
I would also suggest you do one set or a fixed number of reps with heavier weights, and when you can do no more, you can always go back to decreased weights to complete your workout.
You could even do timed workouts rather than counting the reps.
Another important criterion is to pace yourself as it is impossible to increase the weight at the same rate across exercises.
Most of us find it easier to lift heavy weights with our legs than our biceps, which is evident from the fact that we find it easier to increase the weight while squatting than while doing curls.
Hence, I suggest that you increase the weights for different exercises at your suitable pace besides considering the dumbbells’ cost and how much it would cost more to purchase heavier ones.
9 Ways to Make Dumbbells Heavier
You’ve maxed out and found that doing bench press, shoulder press, curls, or other similar exercises is not as challenging as before. This is the right time to make your dumbbells heavier to keep pushing your boundaries and achieve better fitness levels.
But how do you make your dumbbells heavier? Many of us try switching over to better exercise variations to bring in challenges to the workout routine. There are also a few practical ways in which we can add heaviness to the dumbbells, as discussed below:
1. Increase Your Rep Count
You might be quite disappointed when I list this, and some of you might even consider this to be a useless chore that does nothing to boost your overall strength. But this is not the truth.
There is the possibility of building muscles when you increase your rep count. I don’t deny that this might not be your preferred choice, but it remains true that increasing reps is the first step toward progressive overload, which in turn leads to muscle growth.
Else, you could follow the ‘Rest-Pause Training’ technique to make your lighter weights exercise routine as advantageous as possible.
For instance, use the lighter weights and do higher reps (maybe 15) to activate muscles and then follow it up with a short set of 5 reps with minimal rest.
Use the 150lb dumbbells for 8-10 reps and then try extending it to 12-15 reps and beyond gradually. Whatever you do, remember that you can achieve extensive muscle growth using the dumbbells.
2. Decrease Time Duration of Rest Intervals
We all tend to rest between sets but how much we rest is a key factor that’s often not considered a vital driver of performance. Generally, each of us takes some 2-3 minutes between weightlifting sets.
If you have reached a plateau stage where the exercise seems to be easy to perform using the current weight, I suggest decreasing the resting time between the sets. This way, you get to experience tougher challenges while doing the same exercise set.
When you increase the reps count while decreasing the rest time, it does result in improved muscle growth, increased endurance, and conditioning.
Your muscles are tuned to your exercise routine, and suddenly bringing in such changes would lead to increased overall strength.
Try decreasing the rest time to well under 2 minutes and check whether you can keep going with your reps and sets.
3. Switch Between Barbells and Dumbbells
It is possible to substitute dumbbells with barbell lifts (or even EZ bars or hammer curl bars). All of these could accommodate much higher weights than your dumbbells.
This doesn’t deny the longstanding fact that dumbbells are an excellent means to build more muscles keeping in mind the various stabilizers present and how they trigger your mind-muscle connection.
If you have maxed on your dumbbells, it is always good to choose barbells as they have better chances of ensuring better strength development.
You could even try cable machines and perform some new variations using the weight stacks available.
4. Improve Your Form & Check Out the Nuances
Before procuring a heavier pair of dumbbells, I suggest that you focus on slow negatives (2 seconds or longer) and the pauses that occur at the bottom of your lifts.
Once you start correcting these, you will be surprised to see that you cannot do the same number of reps as previously.
This way, there are higher chances of damaging your muscle fiber, which is good for you! Your body garners more strength and overcomes weak points that remained unknown previously.
Not many of you go by the rule books of pausing at the bottom of a curl and flexing your triceps. Once you start doing it, I bet that your curls become harder than imagined.
Hence, perfect this and experience all the resistance possible with the weights you have before going on to a higher one.
5. Try Different Exercise Variations
Every exercise has a couple of variations possible, which makes it more challenging and interesting. Have you tried any of them? If not, please do it before jumping for a higher-weight dumbbell set.
Instead, switch over to a standing dumbbell press or a one-armed dumbbell press once the seated dumbbell press becomes easy. It could be anything between a spider curl, an incline curl, or a preacher curl when it comes to curls.
Focus on bringing in more instability to activate muscles, use angles to target weak points that might hinder your progress, or try positioning your body for better isolation.
Few other variations that could be incorporated include the one-armed bench press/incline bench press instead of bench press, standing one-armed shoulder press rather than seated shoulder press, and dips/overhead extensions that could also be tried out.
6. Add Chains to the Dumbbell
While most of you might be familiar with adding chains to the barbell bench press, let me tell you that the same is possible with dumbbells.
When you add chains that hang freely from the weight, it increases the dumbbell’s overall weight, making you apply what’s called a ‘dynamic effort.’ The best advantages are reaped while doing your dumbbell bench press, among all other exercises.
But a word of caution here as you would require the help of your friend or spotter to set the chains properly without hurting you.
7. Try Making a DIY Dumbbell
It might be possible that most of your ideas are not successful; Still, you wish to get yourself heavier dumbbells without shelling ample money. The best option here is to make your dumbbell at home.
If all else fails, and you want to keep things simple and use some heavier dumbbells (without spending a fortune), you always have the option of making your dumbbells at home.
It’s not the easiest project in the world, but if you’re at least decently handy, you should be able to do it.
Some of the essential things you need are a drill and hacksaw, tape measure, box cutter, metal electrical conduit, nuts and bolts, concrete mix, and mixing containers/materials.
You could do precise research for making your DIY dumbbells once you have decided to go with it.
8. Request Your Gym for Heavier Dumbbells
If you are a gym regular and have a good rapport with the gym trainers, you can request them to buy some heavier dumbbells.
There are chances that they might give you a negative response but don’t worry about the result but give it a try.
You could even try meeting the manager and put forth your request nicely. Try forming a group of like-minded people who would benefit from such heavy dumbbells.
In that case, the gym might consider your requests and make you happy—after all, they would love to satisfy their customers.
9. Buy Your Heavy Dumbbells
There might be situations where none of the above options workouts in your favor. During such testing times, it is better to buy your own set of dumbbells. Sometimes, this is far better than making your DIY dumbbell.
Remember that heavy dumbbells aren’t usually cheaper. On the contrary, they are quite expensive but help you adapt to challenging variations and shorter rest intervals.
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