Best Dumbbell Weight Exercises

You don’t have to try too hard to find reasons to resistance train. From increasing muscle mass that can up your metabolism to achieving toned muscles, lifting dumbbell weights has many benefits. The only catch is that you must lift enough weight and often enough to build muscle. Understanding when to increase the amount of dumbbell weight you lift depends on your body and how fast you gain muscle given your overall training schedule.
Three Aspects
When you lift dumbbells, there are three factors that influence if you'll gain muscle: how much weight you lift, how many repetitions you perform and how many sets you do. Lifting dumbbells provides resistance for your muscles where they must resist against the weight to raise the weight. Over time, however, your muscles become accustomed to lifting a certain weight amount. If you want to gain strength or muscle size, you must lift more weight to effectively do so. That’s why it’s important to increase your dumbbell weight over time. You can use one or all of three strategies to accomplish this: listen to your body, increase at a steady rate and/or use a load-repetition percentage to determine how much you can lift.
Listen to Your Body
Sometimes determining how fast you can go up in dumbbell weight is a matter of listening to your body. By sensing when you've increased in strength, you can know when to bump up your weights. If the weight that you're lifting doesn’t feel challenging by the time you get to repetition 11 or 12, the weight likely isn’t heavy enough, and it’s time to step it up. If you increase the weight and you can perform between 10 and 12 repetitions, this is the right weight for you.
Steady Rate Increase
If you prefer a hard-and-fast rule about how often you can bump up your dumbbell increments, a general rule is increasing the amount of weight you lift every two to four weeks. You also can increase the amount of repetitions or sets you perform to further challenge your muscles. To increase the weight, you’ll generally step up to the next available dumbbell. For example, if you're lifting a 5-pound weight, you’ll likely increase to a 7 or 8-pound dumbbell. If you feel as if you can’t control the weight when increasing it after two weeks of weight training, you may need to keep with the weight that you were previously lifting.
Load-Repetition Relationship
Each weight lifter trains differently. You may prefer a heavy dumbbell with fewer repetitions or vice versa. Either way, there's a proportional relationship between the amount of weight and number of repetitions that you can lift. You can determine the amount of weight that you should lift by finding a weight that you can only lift one time. If you like to perform between 10 and 12 repetitions per set, use a weight percentage that is 70 to 75 percent of the maximum weight that you can lift. For example, if you can lift a 10-pound weight once, lift a 7-pound weight for 10 to 12 repetitions. You can retest the maximum amount of weight on a weekly basis to determine when you should increase your dumbbell weight.