Welcome to the Men’s Health Dumbbell Club, your weekly plan for a fitter, stronger body, using just two dumbbells. Your dose of dumbbell goodness drops every week, with workouts lasting from 20-40 minutes and designed to add lean muscle, build fitness and increase strength.
Click here to head back and check out previous weeks. Or, get stuck in to our latest offering: week 57, and follow the programme from here.
New This Week…
This week we’re kicking off a three-week, full-body EMOM training phase. Each session will utilise movement patterns like pushing, pulling, lunging and squatting, ensuring almost every muscle in your body is hit, each time you train.
Each workout will use the EMOM format, shorthand for ‘Every Minute On the Minute’.
Simple on paper, sinister in execution, but seriously effective when it comes to building work capacity and hitting the muscles with metabolic stress. You’re going to start a running clock and at the beginning of each minute, perform a set of a single movement, aiming for the higher end of the suggested rep range and recording your results. You’ll rest for the remainder of the minute before moving onto the next movement. Continue in this fashion until you’ve performed a round of each move. Rest for the entirety of the fifth minute then begin again from the first exercise. Repeat this format eight total times for a full-body workout that clock in at under forty minutes.
Make a note of the reps you achieve for each movement in each set as well as the weights you use. We’ll be coming back to these over the next few weeks.
DAY ONE (W57/D1)
After a thorough warm-up grab your ‘bells, start the clock and get to work.
Min 1. Dumbbell Floor Press (or Bench Press) x 10-12
Grab your dumbbells and lie flat on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the ground (use a bench if you have one). Press the weights up, locking out your elbows (A). Lower them slowly until your upper arms are resting on the floor (B), close to your body. Pause here before explosively pressing back up, squeeze your chest hard. Repeat.
Min 2. Hang Cleans x 10-12
Hold your dumbbells at your side, hinge at the hips, bend your knees and allow the weights to swing back behind your legs (A). Stand back up explosively and use the momentum to pull the dumbbells up on to your shoulders (B). Allow the dumbbells to drop back between your legs and repeat. Avoid excessive rounding of the lower back throughout.
Min 3. Front-Rack Squat x 10-12
Clean a pair of dumbbells up onto your shoulders. Take a breath and brace your core (A). Sink your hips back and bend at the knees, squatting down until the crease of your hips passes below your knee (B). Drive back up explosively and repeat.
Min 4. Romanian Deadlift x 10-12
Stand tall holding a pair of dumbbells at waist height (A). With a slight bend in the knees, push your hips back and slowly lower the bells towards the ground, pinning your shoulders down and maintaining a flat back. Push your hips back until you feel a stretch in your hamstrings (B), pause and explosively return to an upright position.
Min 5. Rest
After you complete your fourth movement, rest for the remainder of that minute and all of the fifth minute.
DAY TWO (W57/D2)
Min 1. Bent over row x 10 – 12
Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides and hinge at the hips until your chest is parallel to the floor, dumbbells hanging at your shins (A). Maintaining a flat back, row both dumbbells towards your hips (B), squeeze here and lower under control to the start before repeating.
Min 2. Dumbbell Deadlift x 12-15
With your dumbbells on the floor just outside your feet, hinge down and grip them with soft knees and back as flat as possible (A). Squeeze your lats, grip your weights and stand upright, ‘pushing the ground away’ with your feet (B). Take a deep breath and slowly reverse the movement, returning your weights to the ground, keeping them close to your body throughout. Your arms should be hanging straight throughout this movement – think of them as hooks.
Min 3. Cyclist Goblet Squat x 15-20
Stand tall holding a dumbbell close to your chest in the ‘goblet’ position. Raise your heels up on a weight plate or block, keeping your heels within 6 inches of each other (A). Sink your hips back and bend at the knees, squatting down until the crease of your hips passes below your knee (B). Drive back up explosively stopping just short of locking your legs out to keep the tension on the quads. Repeat.
Min 4. Hindu Press-up x 15-20
Assume a strong press-up position with your hands shoulder-width apart. Walk your hands backwards until your hips are in the air, almost above your hands (A). Flex at the elbows, lowering your nose to the ground between your hands before shifting your weight forward. Push the ground away, straightening your arms as you drop your hips to the floor (B). Reverse this movement until your hips are back in the air.
Min 5. Rest
After you complete your fourth movement, rest for the remainder of that minute and all of the fifth minute.
DAY THREE (W57/D3)
Min 1. Push Press x 10-12
Clean a pair of dumbbells onto the front of your shoulders. Take a breath and brace your core. (A) Dip at the knees and using your legs to help (B) drive the dumbbells up overhead. Lower them under slow control to your shoulders and repeat.
Min 2. Renegade Row x 20-24 (total)
Drop into a strong plank with both hands on your dumbbells (A). Shifting your weight onto your left hand, row the right dumbbell towards your hip (B). Pause briefly, then lower the weight under control. Repeat on your left side. Left+ Right = two reps
Min 3. Alternating Reverse Lunge x 20-24 (total)
Stand tall, hold your dumbbells at your sides (A), take a long step backward with one leg, bending your front leg until your back knee gently touches the ground (B). Stand up and forward explosively, pause and repeat with the opposite leg. Alternate legs. Left+right = two reps.
Min 4. Split Squat Jump x 20-24 (total)
Step one foot backward and sink into a deep lunge with your rear knee lightly touching the floor (A). Explode upwards into a jump, switching legs mid-air (B) to land in a lunge position with the opposite leg forward. Repeat the movement, alternating legs each rep and aiming to jump as high as possible. Left+right = two reps.
Min 5. Rest
After you complete your fourth movement, rest for the remainder of that minute and all of the fifth minute.
With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.
