As a certified personal trainer, I love introducing my clients to new and interesting fitness tools. While ankle and wrist weights might not dominate your gym floor, they’re great for adding variety to your gym routine and engaging your muscles in different ways.
Recently, the dreadful weather in my area has kept me from getting to the gym. Rather than doing my usual heavy dumbbell circuits, I decided to stay warm indoors and pull out my ankle and wrist weights for a change of pace. I hadn’t used them in ages and I was amazed at the impact they had on my workout. Here’s why I’ll be incorporating them more often.
My hips and glutes felt stronger
My usual workout routine features squats, lunges and deadlifts with dumbbells, which are fantastic for building lower-body strength. These moves target large muscles in your lower legs, so you need to use heavy weights to make them challenging.
As wrist and ankle weights are lighter than dumbbells, I switched out these exercises for leg lifts and kickbacks. These moves still target similar areas (glutes, hip abductors and hip adductors) but as they isolate smaller muscle groups they don't require heavy weights.
Within just a few days of practicing these new exercises, I noticed improvements in my lower-body endurance. They required a more sustained effort from my muscles and challenged them in new ways.
When I returned to my dumbbell work, my muscles felt stronger, my range of motion had improved and the nagging lower-back pain I often experience on leg days had reduced.
I worked my upper back more effectively
I’ve always had trouble activating my middle and lower traps and rhomboids—muscles that sit between the shoulder blades. Conventional exercises like dumbbell rows often tighten my neck, aggravate old shoulder injuries and rarely seem to hit the right spots for me. I usually have to go lighter than I’d like and finish feeling like I’ve not worked effectively.
Using wrist weights for rows instead of dumbbells was really interesting. At first, it felt too easy but by the 12th repetition of the exercise, I could feel my middle back muscles fatiguing like never before. Even better? My neck stayed relaxed throughout the entire set.
They made core exercises more challenging
If your abs workouts feel too easy, using ankle and wrist weights can take things to the next level.
As someone in my third trimester of pregnancy, I’ve had to modify my core routine quite a bit. None of the pregnancy-safe abs exercises I've been doing have felt challenging enough, but adding ankle and wrist weights completely changed that.
Bird dog, for example, a staple in my routine for months, suddenly became more challenging. The weights forced my deep core to work harder and I felt the muscles there engage for the first time since early in my pregnancy.
I know that working my core like this will make a huge positive impact on my postpartum recovery as well as my performance in the gym.
