Forget pull-ups — strengthen your arms and shoulders with this 20-minute dumbbell workout

Armed with the right workout, you only need 20 minutes to strengthen your biceps and triceps, and increase your upper body power. If you’re able to do a 20-minute arms workout once or twice a week and back up your efforts with a healthy diet and good sleep, you’ll quickly start to see impressive results.

If you have a set of the best adjustable dumbbells you can change the weight as required for each exercise, or you can use just one light set of dumbbells for the whole workout if you don’t have a range of weights available.

For reference, Anna Engelschall , who goes by GrowingAnnanas on YouTube, uses two sets of weights in the workout – an 11lbs set for moves like curls, and a lighter 3.3lbs set for exercises like the lateral raise .

It’s a no-repeat workout that targets the biceps, triceps and shoulders, as well as boosting your core strength, and you only need dumbbells to do it. However, there's no warm-up included, so it's worth spending five minutes doing some dynamic stretches with light weights before diving into the routine.

Watch GrowingAnnanas 20-minute arms workout

For the workout you’ll be doing each exercise for 30 seconds and then resting for 10 seconds. This makes it a very fast-paced session and you’ll be flying through the moves, which makes it engaging and even when you’re really struggling with a move, you know the end is in sight.

For the bulk of the workout you do standing exercises with dumbbells — have your second set handy if you are using two different weights, because you’ll need to swap them over quickly in your 10-second breaks. Make sure you're also keeping an eye on Engelschall throughout so you can see what move is coming and change your position quickly.

In the final few minutes of the workout you hit the floor to do a variety of push-ups , including finishing with a challenging low push-up hold that you should aim to hold for 40 seconds, which will help to improve your core strength as well as your arms.

The workout is a no-repeat session, where you don’t do any exercises more than once. This means you can do a wide range of moves in just 20 minutes, although given that the exercises all target similar muscles in the arms and shoulders, some of them are just minor variations on each other.

This means you can maximize the time under tension for your biceps and triceps as well as other upper body muscles, ensuring that you get a lot of bang for your buck in terms of improved strength and power after just 20 minutes of exercising. As you get stronger, try to use heavier weights for the workout to help you keep improving.

If you do have time, it’s worth following Engelschall’s cool down in the video, which involves doing arm, shoulder, chest and back stretches and will help your muscles recover after the workout, lessing the impact of DOMS (delayed-onset muscles soreness) in the days afterwards.

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