This is one of the questions that you will often find in the minds and discussion boards of bodybuilders and common people. Is it really possible to build muscle only with dumbbells and body weight?

You can definitely build muscle with dumbbells and body weight. If you need resistance training to build muscle, resistance can be provided which are body weight and dumbbell. If you need strength training to build muscles, that can be done using your body weight and dumbbells.

Dumbbells

Dumbbells are not only safer but they will also force you to use the stabilizer muscles in your body and as a result of that you will be working on different muscles with the same exercise which may not possible in other types of exercises using barbells and machines.

Even without barbells, it is possible to build some serious size and strength. There are different types of exercises which you can perform to strengthen different parts of your body and to add more muscles. For example, dumbbell military presses, handstand push-ups and lateral raises will be good enough for your shoulder training. For the chest, you can always use the dumbbell presses and push-ups. There are inclined dumbbell press, declined dumbbell press and simple dumbbell press available to work on your chest.

Dumbbells will offer you different types of variations which will help you to work on different parts of your body.

Body weight training

Even though some fitness expert may claim that you cannot build muscle just from body weight training, but such claims may not be true at all. Handstand push-ups for example can easily match the max bench press.

There are some benefits of body weight training. If you are doing heavy weight exercises, after some time different parts of your body will start aching. You will suffer a lot of pain and as a result of that the amount of time you spend in the gym may be reduced. If you are doing less workouts than me during a year, it is more likely that you are going to be smaller than me if other things were equal. When you perform body weight exercises, the possibility of injury and loss of exercise time as a result of that both decrease. During body weight exercises, you use a more natural range of motion which will also decrease the joint stress on the body.

Through body weight exercises, you also perform incidental training. In the bench press exercise, you hit your pecs, deltoids and triceps. But when you crank out some one arm push-ups, you are doing lots of incidental training and it will hit your pec, deltoids and triceps, lats, abs, and glutes, quads and hamstrings.

Maximum benefit

For maximum benefit, you can always combine body weight exercise and weight training. This weight training can be done with the help of dumbbells. Even though some people may think that body weight exercise and weight training have to be mutually exclusive, it is not so. If you one more benefit, you will need to combine both body weight exercises along with weight training using dumbbells.

What type of tools and equipment you are using for exercising will depend on the goals that you have. The method will depend on your goals and your needs. First, you need to find out your goals and then decide what will help you to achieve those goals. Once you figure out the particular training goals for yourself, now you can decide how to combine bodyweight and weight training using dumbbells so that you can achieve these goals.

References

1. Bad45: Tacfit Bodyweight And Dumbell System
2. Resistance Exercise for Knee Osteoarthritis
3. Improve your strength