These Are The Most Effective Exercises That You Can Do With Free Weights

Meet the experts: Sarah Warshowsky, CPT, is a trainer at Aneva in New York City.

Let’s also be sure to link to our best dumbbells e-comm story.

What are the benefits of free weight training?

– benefits

-why they are a great modality for building muscle/muscular endurance

-what it is about free weights in particular that is effective

-something about how dumbbells require you to also tap into balance and stability

-accessibility of free weights

[Let’s also cite some dumbbell training research in this section.]

How To Get The Most Out Of Free Weight Training

advice for how to maximize your DB workouts.

-Warming up to prime the muscles,

– going heavier than you think

-playing with tempo/time under tension,

let’s be sure to link out.

• Best Free Weight Exercises: Let’s embed 25 workout loops, following our typical format for each (A blurb about why the move is awesome and what muscles it works), and a how to numbered list of steps. For each one, remember to bold the That’s 1 rep. part. Example attached.

Here’s the loop library, which you can share with Sarah to pick from! Let her know to not share the doc with anyone (and apologies thati t’s still a work in progress, but the move names should be all in there):

For some people, the idea of picking up a pair of weights can feel intimidating and somewhat vulnerable, especially if you’ve never done it before. The good news is, free weight exercises are often not as complex as they might seem, and even the simplest moves can be super effective.

What’s more, training with free weights isn’t just for building arm muscles, for instance. You can work every muscle group from your core and back to your glutes and legs. And if dumbbells aren’t your thing, you can also grab a kettlebell or barbell. (Psst, free weight simply refers to any type of load for exercise that are not attached to a piece of equipment.)

Here are a few facts to know about free weight workouts before grabbing the dumbbells.

Meet the experts: Sarah Warshowsky, CPT, is a trainer at Aneva in New York City.

Benefits Of Working Out With Free Weights

Here, a few upsides to keep in mind if you’re looking to incorporate this form of strength training into your routine.

Improve stabilization. Over time, the muscles that help stabilize you will become stronger. With free weights, “you are either on your two feet, or you’re in a certain position where your body needs to stabilize itself more so than if you were seated on a machine,” says Warshowsky.

Increase calorie burn. Free weight training often requires you to use multiple muscle groups at the same time. Therefore, it leads to a higher energy output and burns more calories. In fact, dumbbell workouts can create inter- and intramuscular coordination, which means there’s a greater level of muscle activation, according to ACE Fitness.

Free weights are functional. Many of the movements done with free weights help strengthen the muscles that you use daily. “They can allow us to move in ways that we actually move and operate in everyday life rather than just sitting on machines,” says Warshowsky. Think: carrying a load of laundry or getting in and out of your car. Not to mention, you’ll also be able to build muscle using different planes of motion.

You don’t need to hit the gym. You can save a lot of money by investing in free weights to use at home rather than paying for a gym membership. That also means you can work out from the comfort of your home. “You can have maybe a light pair, medium pair, and heavy pair [of weights] and really have a wide array of things to do with them,” says Warshowsky.

Fix muscle imbalances. Some people realize that one arm or leg is slightly bigger or stronger than the other. While this is super common, the differences can be minimized through unilateral training (that is, single-sided training). With machines, it’s easier to let one side do more of the work than the other, but Warshowsky notes that free weights will level out any imbalances over time since you’ll be pushing the same weight.

How To Get The Most Out Of Free Weight Training

Like with any kind of exercise, there are best practices to consider to make all of that hard work really pay off.

For starters, you should always take 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, says Warshowsky. A warm-up can include jumping jacks, core-focused and bodyweight exercises, or light dumbbell moves that mimic what you’ll be doing in the main workout.

If you’re working toward lifting heavier weights, be sure to factor in progressive overload. In other words, you need to slowly increase the weight or the difficulty of the exercise as you grow stronger and accustomed to a particular load. You can also use compound lifts, which target multiple muscle groups at the same time (like a deadlift), to improve your strength and build muscle mass. Generally speaking, you can hit your hardest moves at the beginning of your workout when you still have all your energy and end with isolation moves that can be done with lighter weights.

Playing with the tempo can also put your muscles under tension for longer (which is a good thing!). “If you don’t feel ready to go up another dumbbell size or you don’t have another set at your disposal, using tempo and adding pauses is another way of progressive overload,” says Warshowsky. For example, you can take an extra pause at the bottom of your squat or you can go down slowly and move faster on your way back up to build power.

25 Best Free Weight Exercises

Mix and match this list of moves into your future workouts, performing anywhere from 8 to 12 reps of each move depending on your workout and skill level. For an easy full-body workout, you can choose 4-5 exercises, aiming for a mix of upper- and lower-body moves, and perform 8 to 12 reps of each exercise before moving to the next (don’t forget to repeat unilateral moves on the other side!). Repeat the circuit three times, resting as needed.

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