The first time I heard the truth about dumbbells, I wasn’t ready for it. I was talking to the owner of a gym, a remarkable man, who told me some words that left me puzzled.
“If I have to help someone get rid of 5 pounds, I prefer using a pair of dumbbells instead of a running belt”, he told me. I admit that in those moments I felt so confused that I couldn’t reply to him. Though, this was not the first time in my career when someone showed me the Truth that I was going to understand only later on.
Since then I have found out not only that dumbbells are the best “tools” to develop muscles, but also the most effective weapons people have in the gym to help them fight extra weight, getting old, diseases, stress, and even stupidity.
Nowadays a doctor could prescribe weight exercises for a multitude of diseases and would have chances to cure them in this way (although patients who have herpes may prefer faster methods…). These humble pieces of iron can help people live longer and better, making them more vigorous, making their waist slimmer and offering them a more optimistic perspective on life.
But, like drugs, dumbbells work only if you use them. That is why we offer you a practice program with enough variations to keep you busy for months, or even years. But first, let’s take a look on the Truth of the most powerful “drug” in the world – but only if you feel you can handle this Truth.
Dumbbells against physical degradation
If you have never lifted a dumbbell (or weights in general), the muscles of your body will reach a maximum of their shape when you are 25 years old. When you pass over 30, they will start to shrink and to gather more fat between the fibers. At the age of 70, an ordinary man will need two or three moans to get up from the chair and will risk a femoral cervix fracture after watching others practicing sport.
Of course, the solution to this problem is simple: he should lift small weights. Only if you were a world athlete when you were young, you will have the chance to be more slender and more powerful at the age of 40, compared to when you were 20. Various studies have shown that weight exercises increase strength and the muscular mass and they reduce the adipose strata, at any age someone practices them.
And if you start lifting weights, you should keep in mind the fact that dumbbells allow a larger degree of variation then the fitness devices or the barbells. “You are only limited by your imagination”, says coach Juan Carlos Santana, who produced a video with exercises performed only with the help of dumbbells.
Dumbbells against burliness
The most frequent “myth” about dumbbells is that they help you only when you want to become larger. Actually, dumbbells can easily help you get thinner. Let’s say you make three intense work-outs with dumbbells, each of one hour, weekly. You will not only burn a lot of calories – between 400 and 500 – during the workouts, but you will have a high rate of caloric consumption after the workouts as well.
And more, the muscles that you will develop will help you burn more calories during the effort. And the intense physical effort increases the production of creatikinasis, an enzyme that helps you be more efficient in your daily activities. And the easier you see a certain activity, the more chances there are of you doing that activity instead of giving it up.
Drawing a line, we can say that 3 hours of intense physical activity weekly induce an additional caloric consumption of 650 kcalories, says dr. Gary Hunter who studies the human metabolism during physical effort at the Alabama University in Birmingham. And like 0,5 kg of adipose tissue stores up 3.500 kcal, you may burn 1-2 kg from the abdomen and other parts each month you seriously lift weights.
To get the same results from an activity of a reduced intensity, such as walking, you would have to practice it for 100 minutes per day, 7 times a week, according to Hunter’s research.
Dumbbels against diseases
The modern existence, no matter if it’s about work or relaxation, consists in most of its part from sittion on a chair. Say it isn’t so… This may lead to some very serious diseases: heart diseases, arterial hipertension, diabetes, artritis. And even more, colon cancern lungs cancer, kidney cancer and rectum cancer seem to be in a close connection with the sedentary life, the weight surfeit, or both.
Many of these affections are a direct result of the progressive decrease of the muscular mass, of the force and flexibility, which get installed as a result of a sedentary life. When muscles hypetrphy, the metabolism slows down, the fat starts to deposit and, little by little, you lose the ability to perform some daily activities in a comfortable manner. So, avoid physical efforts, and sooner or later the diseases will start to strike.
But how could dumbells help you? The dumbbells exercises reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, of arterial tension, they improve the glucose tolerance (reducing the risk of diabetes), prevent cancer (especially the colon cancer, which seems to have the tightest connection to sitting on the ass all day long) and increase the strength, the dimensions and the muscular flexibility.