Dumbbell bench variations when and why you should do them

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Dumbbell bench variations when and why you should do them

Training our chest with dumbbells has some very specific advantages. Because we have the freedom to move our arms anywhere we want within a 90% angle along the side of our body and our hand positioning can be adjusted 180%.

The 3 most common arm and hand positions that are used are prone, neutral and reverse or a supinated grip. These positions can be used when doing both the flat and incline bench press. They all affect our chest and assistance muscles differently as well as our joints. And what position we decide to use depends on what we are trying to accomplish. Today we are going to take a look at these variations and when we should use them.

Prone grip is the most common and when we look at bodybuilders like Ronnie Coleman we see that he does this movement with his elbows quite high and close to a 90% angle from his torso and this is not uncommon to see. This position gives you get a slightly more effective range of motion because your arms are internally rotated and having your elbows high puts the maximum amount of stress on the chest.

It also puts the maximum amount of stress on the shoulder joint.
With what could be described as a minimal advantage when it comes to chest growth. With shoulder health a minimal advantage just isn’t worth it.

All that needs to be done to take some of the stress off our shoulder joint is to lower our elbows until they are closer to a 45% angle. Now we don’t normally bring a protractor to the gym, so another good que would be to keep our elbows just outside of shoulder width.

I personally lower my elbows very slightly to what I find to be a more comfortable position. But we don’t have to feel like we need to limit ourselves to a slight adjustment and everybody’s body mechanics are a little bit different so what might be comfortable for one may not be the same for another.

A lower position is safer for the shoulder, but you don’t want to go much lower than 45% as the lower you go the more it becomes a neutral grip bench and the emphasis starts to move away from the chest and moves to the triceps.

This is where the neutral grip bench works best as a Tricep builder. When your benching and you have a sticking point or you always fail on the upper half of your bench, then your triceps are weak and the neutral grip bench press will help to strengthen them.

The one way you can turn the neutral grip bench press into a bit more of a chest exercise is to do a squeeze press this is where you squeeze the two dumbbells together as you press up. This is a great exercise to help develop the mind muscle connection with the inner and mid chest.

A point to keep in mind when using a more neutral position on the incline press is that there can be a tendency to press a bit forward instead of just up which puts more emphasis on our shoulder, kind of like a front raise. One of the ways we can counter act this is to lower the bench to a 30% angle instead of a 45. Something to think about if you always feel the incline press more in your shoulders.

This tendency gets even stronger when you move into a reverse position. But there are some benefits to doing this. Research has shown we get more upper chest activation in the clavicular portioned of our chest when we do reverse grip flat bench press than when we do a traditional incline press.

You can also do an incline reverse grip dumbbell press for a double whammy effect on your upper chest. Important again to keep your elbows outside of your shoulders so you keep the focus on your upper chest, because no matter what position you chose the narrower your grip and the closer your elbows are to your sides the more you are activating your triceps and taking the focus away from your chest.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b2e3/223dc4c342526e8350c17e92d53f481ad296.pdf