Essential Tips For the Incline Dumbbell Bench Press
The incline dumbbell bench press is one of the best movements you can do for your chest development. However, there are important tips that apply to this exercise, as well as to pressing exercises in general, that you must follow to get the most out of the exercise. Here are a couple of essential tips for the incline dumbbell bench press.
1. Find Your Ideal Hand Angle
The way you position your hands around the handles is important for many exercises, but especially the incline dumbbell bench press. Depending on the angle of your hands relative to your body, you can preferentially work the triceps, front delts, or upper pecs.
Since you are probably trying to work your chest with this exercise, get your palms as close to perpendicular with your body as possible. This means that they will be in roughly the same position as if they were wrapped around a barbell.
If you want to work triceps and delts more, turn your palms inward until they are parallel or nearly parallel with the rest of your body. In this position, they will be perpendicular to the position at which they would be for a barbell.
2. Get A Strong Kick-Start To Make The First Rep Easier
One of the hardest thing about dumbbell presses, especially the incline dumbbell bench press, is simply getting the weights into position. However, there are a couple of ways to make this part of the movement go more smoothly.
First, position the dumbbells close to your knee, as opposed to higher up on your thigh, when you're getting ready to kick them up to your chest. As long as you get a strong kick, this will cause them to end up closer to the bottom starting position, rather than further down on your torso.
Second, make sure you kick them up HARD. Unless your leg strength and upper body strength are totally out of balance, you're probably not going to be able to kick your working weights up with too much speed to handle. Getting the dumbbells into position quickly will prevent you from wasting valuable energy.
3. Keep On Learning (and Pressing!)
These important tips will get you started on improving strength, but you must always keep learning more new information to keep the muscular gains coming. For pressing movements, you must work on your arch, your tightness, your speed and power, and many more essential elements.
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