Five of the best ways to use dumbbells in your workout regime

To reach your true muscle-building potential, make use of all available training tools

With many New Year’s Resolutions beginning to crumbling in the third week of January, it’s clear that training can quickly become stale.

Ensure your motivation remains high by keeping your workouts varied. The best method of achieving this is by using a variety of equipment.

Dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells and resistance machines are among the best. London-based Fight City Gym have today revealed five unique and effective ways to use dumbbells.

Fight City combine combat disciplines with dedicated strength and conditioning training. Classes include Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Judo.

Pyramid sets

With this technique, you’ll increase the weight and decrease the reps for each set. For example, assuming you’re performing a shoulder press with dumbbells:

• Start with a lighter weight that you can perform a lot of reps with
• With each set, increase the weight and decrease the number of reps
• Altering your rep range and the weight you lift will lead to a more varied and demanding session

Skull crushers

They sound scarier than they actually are, but skull crushers are an incredible way of working out the triceps – a muscle that many forget about.

With their three heads, the triceps are what really give your arms that all-important t-shirt-tearing power that most people are after. Aesthetics aside, the triceps are a key muscle for supporting every pushing movement or exercise.

The 21 method

This is a great technique for when you want to work the entire bicep effectively. The 21 method involves using three different ranges of motion to focus on building strength at different phases of the movement.

• You’ll perform the bottom half of a bicep curl for the first seven reps
• The top half for the next seven
• The full range for the final seven reps

It’s an all-encompassing and burning workout that will provide a long-lasting pump for your muscles and leave you feeling great.

Supersets

Considering the hectic schedules many people have to live by, time really is of the essence. If you’re looking to cut down on your workout time, try implementing supersets into your fitness regime.

Supersets allow you to work all of muscle groups to their maximum while still getting enough recovery.

• A superset is when two or more exercises hitting different muscle groups are performed in a row without rest

They attack your muscles with huge volume in a short space of time, amplifying your gains in muscle growth.

Arms blast

Known as a giant set, the arms blast is an absolute killer of a workout that achieves maximum results in a short period of time.

Using dumbbells, it should take no more than 30 minutes, hitting all muscle groups in your arms. You can easily tailor this to your workout needs, too.

• It involves performing five sets of five different exercises; all with 15 reps each
• Repeat these three times with a one minute rest between giant sets
• Combine any bicep or tricep exercises, such as: bicep curls, tricep extensions, forearm curls, skull crushers and incline curls