#TryThis Banded Dumbbell Press

Now everyone has an opinion on resistance bands and accommodating resistance, if they are good or not we will leave that discussion for another day. I want to talk about a movement I have been utilizing in my training recently for a number of reasons ill speak about further down.


Banded Dumbbell Press

Now I am sure you are wondering how is this possible? so i have taken a video of the setup in order to give you a better idea.






Pretty simple really, just be careful to get the bands in the right place on your back because if they are too low or high then they will effect the press and possibly make it uneven.


Benefits of Banded Dumbbell Press

Banded Dumbbell press was something I came up with because I was unable to progress any further on my current setup of dumbbell's (only go up to 60kg) a lot of people specially with home gym's have loadable dumbbell's normally the spinlock variation and what you will quickly find is that they only go up to a certain weight even with the thinner 5kg plates. If you do have extra long dumbbell's you maybe able to go up to 40-50kg but you will then find the dumbbells are too long to perform the movement correctly. With a couple of different resistance bands you are able to do the exercise correctly and be able to load the exercise more than normally possible.

The main benefit of using bands on this exercise in terms of muscle development is in the triceps, think of this as a way to overload them as you press upwards the weights get heavier, it also requires you to press faster because normally when you press dumbbell's and it starts getting heavy the weights slow down but now the weight is trying to be pulled back down throughout the entire range of motion , the further the band stretches the more expontential the effect

Using Dumbbells also has the benefit of improving your stabilizing muscles because of the nature of dumbbell's being free to move in any direction. Even with the band's which you may feel hold the dumbbell's more in line you will find it more difficult than a regular bench and not be able to do the same weight.


Con's to Banded Dumbbell Press

Typically because of the setup to get into the best position will require you to have two people to hand you the dumbbell's although this is not entirely a bad thing as it will allow you to get into the same position you would for your normal competition bench press and focus more on pressing the weight.

Less weight in the hand will be achieved because of the overload of the band's so don't expect to be adding these to your top dumbbell bench press.


How to Implement Banded Dumbbell Press

I have found it best to be more the end of a pressing session as somewhat a finisher, where you finish off your triceps and work the smaller stabilizer muscles. I have found the best result from using a weight that you can be explosive with and to stop the set when the weight starts to slow down before you end up grinding the reps too much, this allows you to maintain form and focus on force generation throughout the movement. Be careful to not use a band that is too strong as you want to overload your tricep's but don't want to have the majority of the exercise as band tension. Using heavy weight dumbbell's is fine but I would not recommend going below 5 repetition's. Make sure that each repetition is controlled do not try and bounce at the bottom either a very slight touch and go or a complete pause then explode up throughout the movement to lockout.


Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments below.