Quote Originally Posted by gloomyDAY

I've been hitting the chest for the past 9 months. I found a few online videos from a professional body builder, Milos Sarcev, and have seen a big difference in my chest muscles.
I see. I thought you would be able to bench a bit more, but if you have done it for 9 months then that is an okay result.

If anyone is interested: http://thefitshow.tv/index.php?optio...son1&Itemid=69
I will give it a look.


Quote Originally Posted by Paddy Cummins
I have a set of dumbells which I'm starting to use but don't really know how to approach it. I've been doing 30 reps on each arm with a 4.7kg weight. This is about as far as I can go without pushing myself to go uncomfortabely further. I don't want to injure myself early on! According to my brother, who has been lifting weights for a few years and used to do body-building, its important to work your tricep too. The bicep and tricep work in pairs so you need to build them evenly.

Has anyone any advice then?
Why would you injure yourself? You need to understand what kind of pain you have when you are donig those exercises. If you have pain in your joints or wrists, then that issue you needs to be solved, for example with more warmup for wrists. Joints are always a different matter. But if you have muscle pain, the right pain, from the difficulty of the exercise then there is no danger of injury, but rather you are doing something right and giving your muscles a good workout. So in that case you should push yourself more. Just doing 30 reps without going further than that is not really worthwhile, because you need to push yourself. So you could do still the same amount of reps, just with lower pace and better technique or just go for more series and more reps per series. That said, for example I never do more than 8 reps per any series for biceps workout.

As for triceps, good old fashioned pushups are good enough, but there are other ones you can do. With your dumbbells, what you could do for example is find a bench (or you can do it on the floor even, no difference) and put your knees on ground, then put your weight on one arm and grab a dumbbell with your other arm and start straightning that arm backwards (if this makes sense, I cant explain it better). If you do it slowly and properly, it gives quite a good workout.