I work nights and sometimes have a lot of slack periods so I bought a set of 10 pound dumbells to do some exercising. Although I don’t have a bench, I’d like to do some different reps to replace some of the flab on my arms due to recent weight loss. Do any of you have any routines you’d like to share with me?
A web-site with illustrations would be great!
Thank you
Quasi
This site has images and brief descriptions of a bunch of different exercises, including quite a few dumbell exercises.
I think you’ll probably find that 10 lbs. just isn’t enough weight for some exercises, you’ll probably get bored of doing reps before your arms get tired. Another heavier set of dumbells will add more variety to your exercises.
Good for the 10lbs.:
Curls for biceps. With this weight you really want to isolate the bicep, it’s really tempting to assist with your shoulders. Try: one arm at a time, sitting down and leaning forward, brace your elbow with the weight against your knee, then do a curl. Hold your leg still, and don’t move your back.
Kickbacks for triceps. They show this on the site.
Lateral raises for shoulders. Also on the site.
1 arm dumbell rows for back. Also on the site.
You’ll probably want heavier dumbells for the curls and dumbell rows. With a heavier weight you can also try ‘overhead tricep extensions.’ Sitting down, hold the dumbell by one end in both hands directly over your head with arms straight. Keeping your upper arms still (only bend the elbows), lower the weight till it’s behind your head, then raise it above your head again.
If you can come up with something approximating a bench flyes (shown on the site) are pretty good for chest.
I guess those aren’t really routines, just some different exercises to try out.
http://www.exrx.net/Exercise.html
That’s one of the best exercise sites I’ve found. The exercise/body maps are great.
Gender? For a gal 10 lbs. might work, though I think that’s too light. For an average guy that’s probably way too light. I’m not a big guy so I’ll max out at about 30 lbs. on dumbells. That’s why I used to like machines, could control them better. But I like dumbells now. Been using them for about 8 months.
For biceps, curls from a standing position are effective.
For triceps, I’ve seen people do that one exercise where you kneel one leg on a chair or bench, bend forward (body parallel to the floor), hold your upper arm parallel to the floor and extend the lower arm back so that the arm is straight against the side.
Then there’s that one exercise where you raise you elbows to the ceiling and hold the weight behind your head. Then you straighten your arms up to the ceiling.
Push-ups also good for your triceps as long as you can focus on them during the execise.
Almost any bicep curl is effective as long as your elbow isn’t moving forwards or backwards during the movement. That allows momentum and deltoids to move the mass.
There are many bicep exercizes that all have a slightly different effect. Concentration curls (what Ikujinashi described), hammer curls(palms pointing at body), generic curls (palms up), inclined curls, etc. Try them all, see what works for you.
Tricep kickback. This is a good finisher for…
… tricep extensions. These two make an excellent combination, you just have to learn to focus the exercise so it hits the intended muscle. Technique, in other words.
Narrow-grip pushups nail the triceps (forming a triangle with your thumbs and index fingers), wide-grip hit your pecs and biceps.
Though I have to say that if you’re trying to add enough arm bulk to fill the now flabby void, you’ll need a lot of workouts and a lot more than ten pounds.
I’d suggest getting a dumbell bar and free weights, which you can add and remove however you see fit. I doubt that your muscles are all going to respond to ten pound weights. I’d imagine that your biceps and triceps will be much stronger than your deltoids, which will probably be weak enough to get a serious workout from ten pounds.
You’re going to need more than ten pounds pretty quickly.
Also, something you should try to do is get a feel for “the pump”. It’s a term bodybuilders use, describing a feeling they get at the point where they know their workout is… well, working. Essentially, it feels like your muscles are so engorged that they feel awkward to move, wooden. Not exhausted, which they’ll feel if you lift to failure (when you simply can’t lift any more), but pumped full of blood. Bigger. You’ll come to identify it and monitoring it will prove important. If you’re not feeling a pump, then you have to work harder on that particular muscle. Maybe change your exercize to something completely different.
Also, back exercizes, like rowing, are really difficult to get right. Try to pinch your shoulder blades together is the basic rule, though do whatever you can to feel the burn in your back and not your arms.
I would suggest:
Getting a dumbell bar and free weights.
(make sure you always warm-up the muscles first. Always. Yes, this is for safety, but your muscles will grow much more rapidly if warmed-up and stretched before and after a workout.)
Do as many push-ups as you can in one set. If you can do a lot, try weighted pushups.
If you end up getting free-weights, do dumbell flyes and presses.
At this point, you’ll have given your chest and arms a pretty damn good workout. Not a killer workout, but a good one.
For a killer workout, throw in bicep curls, tricep extensions/kickbacks, and shoulder raises. Finish with dumbell rows. Wind down with hyperextensions (lie face down on the floor, hands behind your head. Lift your chest and your feet off the floor by contracting the small of your back – great for posture) and ab exercises (descriptions for these can be found anywhere online). For a truly killer workout, lift to failure on every exercize.
If you can figure out a setup to let you do pull-ups, do these as the first exercize after the warm-up. Pullups are one of the key basic upper-body exercizes, benchpress/pushups being the other one.
Two notes:
Depending on how you lost your weight, there’s a chance that up to 30% of what you lost was muscle. If you lost it through diet, aerobic exercise, or any combination of the two without anaerobic exercise, then that’s probably what happened. The bad news is you probably never lost as much fat as you thought you did. The good news is that muscle is easier to recover than it is to build for the first time. Depending on how much muscle you (hypothetically) lost, your arms can look more muscular in no time.
If you do end up getting free weights, email me before you do anything I recommended. As it stands, what I gave you is a very simplistic, almost haphazardly so, idea of what a good workout for a beginner is, but I did so knowing that you didn’t have the equipment (free weights) to really carry this out. If you do end up getting free weights you are going to need an entirely different presentation of the exercizes to get you through the workout safely and effectively.
Give me a shout if you have any questions.
P.S. What is your gender? Ten pound weights will prove slightly more usefull to a girl than a guy, so if you’re an athletically average woman you might be able to start working with these and still see results.
:o and I would have gotten heavier than 10 pound 'bells, but that’s all they had at K-Mart. And I know what y’all mean when you tell me that the ten pounds aren’t enough of a workout, so until I get heavier bells I am doing 3 sets of 20.
Also, remember I’m at work when I’m doing this, and I’m usually in my office chair. The nature of my job is such that I can get a stat call at any time, so I have to limit myself to working the upper body with the dumbells. A little sweat is okay, but I would not want to drip all over my patients. 
I alternate biking and walking after I get off in the mornings so I’m not too worried about the lower parts, but since the weight loss I have a lot of flab where the fat (or muscle) used to be, and I just want to tighten those areas up.
I will get some dumbell bars as you suggested, and increase the weight. I have to say, however, that even at just ten pounds I am feeling the “burn”. (Guess that just proves how out of shape the upper body is, huh?).
My thanks for the very detailed answers and the cautions you mentioned. I appreciate you taking the time!
Quasi
I’m going to lose my gym membership after I get laid off. And then I won’t have access to a workout center after I sell my condo. Any recommendations on exercises that don’t require weights at all? Will variations on push-ups and chin ups help maintain upper-body muscle tone?
I’m reposting a very long response I posted a long time to GQ. Take from it what you will, the first half focuses on diet, the second focuses on what you can do without weights.
I ended up getting into an argument with some knob and neither of us could settle it properly, so I deleted the controversial part.
Alright, this is what I would suggest for you:
Pushups, work until near failure. Working to failure will get you all sweaty, but don’t let the amount of sweat dictate your workout. I’m not sure how logical I am at one thirty in the morning, but try to follow me. Instead of working until failure and getting all sweaty, work until near failure two or three times (just getting a little sweaty each time - you’ll be doing more work with less sweat). Alternate between close-grip pushups, wide-grip pushups, and normal pushups so you focus on all the muscle groups at least once.
Once you’ve done a nice job of destroying your muscles with pushups, do bicep curls, four or five sets, going until near failure.
Then do triceps extensions, three-five sets, and tricep kickbacks, two-three sets. Again, near failure.
(an optional tricep workout is dips. Sit on your butt, legs extended in front of you, in front of your chair. Put your hands on the chairseat and hoist yourself into the air, keeping your arms behind you instead of out to the sides. Your elbow should never go higher than your shoulders at your lowest point. If you use this, use it as a replacement for tricep extensions.)
Do lateral raises for your shoulders. Don’t lift the dumbells higher than your ears. In all the exercizes, and especially this one, use slow, controlled methods. Jerking and quick movements when you’re a beginner tend to equal cheating.
Actually, this is a good place to throw it in. A good rule of lifting is either 2-1-4 or 2-4. What this means is contract for two seconds, pause at the uppermost point for one second (the second rhythm has no pause), then lower the weight in such a fashion that it takes four seconds. To use the example of the bicep curl, curl it up at such a speed that it takes two seconds. Holding for one second when the weight is near your shoulder (do not curl your wrist towards your shoulder, this takes the strain off your bicep so keep your wrist straight) is optional. You’ll do more work if you don’t hold, but that second pause will let you lift more. You’ll decide for yourself which one promotes more grown in you. Then slowly, and very controlled, lower the dumbell at such a speed that it takes four seconds. Using this rhythm will make the exerisizes much more difficult because it eliminates a great deal of cheating.
After the lateral raises, do a military press. It’s kind of like a benchpress, except you lift the dumbell over your head instead of away from your chest. Normally the lateral raises would be a finisher for the military press, instead of the other way around, but you might find that your weights might not be effective in the military press unless you’ve already torn down your muscles.
Dumbell rows may or may not work for you. If they do, it’s because you’ve found some way to join the two weights together or because you’re doing hundreds of reps at a time. The important thing here is to keep the back straight and to go through the motions of pinching your back muscles together. This is definitely a back exercize, even though you’ll feel it in your arms, and you should make sure you don’t lose that focus and turn it into an arm workout.
If you want, you can also do some wrist curls and use the weights to work on your grip. I’m suddenly very tired, so I won’t describe either of these. If you have any questions, ask.
And I’ll probably add to this suggested workout because I’m tired and I’m sure I forgot something really obvious.
I just realized that pullups weren’t on my long list (at least, I don’t think they were).
Pushups and pullups are pretty much the two sides of the coin. Between them, you’ve got all the muscles in upper body and can look really damn healthy doing nothing but.
Pushups will work your chest, biceps, and triceps while pullups will work your biceps and back (primarily the back once your biceps are strong enough to do the work necessary without wearing away).
To build strength instead of endurance, keep making things difficult whenever you can. Aim for twelve-fifteen reps per set. If you’re pumping out a lot more than that and you want to build strength, try doing things like weighting yourself down.
And you can also look into German Volume Lifting. It’s a technique that involves lifting until you die. Very effective. What it basically involves is you lifting ten sets of ten reps with a ninety second pause between sets, until you are actually able to do 10 sets of 10. It’s as hard as hell and I highly recommend that you try this workout at least once. Use the ten sets/ten reps for the broad workouts like the pushups, pullups, and jump squats; use six sets/ten reps for concentric exercizes like dips. Always do concentric exercizes first.
Damn, now to go to sleep.