157 Home Workouts with Dumbbells

01 Feb 2020

Below you will find a list of 157 handpicked workouts that require only one dumbbell. It doesn’t matter how heavy your dumbbell is or if you have pair of dumbbells, I will show you how you can easily adjust the workout so it matches your equipment and fitness level.

Workouts in the list range from very short ones of just a few minutes to workouts that may take you over 30 minutes. Most of the workouts could be easily done at home and don’t require any extra equipment (and if they do, I will show you how to replace such movements).

All workouts are inspired by HIIT and CrossFit and should be done as quickly as possible for the best possible time or score while keeping an eye on proper form.

How to use this collection?

This article is a collection of random WODs (Workouts Of the Day), and you should select just one of the WODs from the list.

You can either use the random WOD generator below or select any WOD that you like.

After you’ve selected a WOD, start building a full workout around it.

Building a full workout from random WOD

For example, take this workout. The WOD is 20 Min AMRAP (As Many Reps As Possible), so it means that you should try to go as fast as you can without any unnecessary rest.

Now you have to consider how long you want your full workout session to be.

If you have only 20 minutes then start the clock and do the workout, but that won’t be the best idea because you should warm up first.

I would recommend to always have at least 10-minute window before WOD for a proper warm up. Make sure to include easy full body movements to prepare, for example you can do something like this:

But what if you want to work out for more than 30 minutes?

To make the workout longer, you can add skill and strength block before the WOD that consists of similar muscle groups that are worked out in the WOD.

In this example, WOD consists of easy full-body cardio movement (burpees) and complex pull + push movement (power cleans and jerks).

So for the skill part, you could focus on handstand holds under fatigue. A combination of a total of 3 rounds (3 rounds of 10 burpees and 45-second handstand hold) with 3-minute rest in between should do the work.

And for the strength part, you should try focusing on strict parts of the push and pull movement that is done during clean and jerks. For example combination of 4 sets of dumbbell rows, strict presses, and biceps curls of 8-12 reps would be great.

Example of full workout with dumbbells at home

See? It wasn’t that hard to create an almost 90-minute workout with just a single dumbbell. Just make sure you hit leg day after this one because we focused a lot on the push and pull.

Here is a little overview how would a full workout look like but keep reading to find out how to scale WODs if you own a dumbbell of different weight.

Scaling WODs to match your dumbbell weight

Most of us have only a single or just a few dumbbells at home. So what to do if WODs are with different weights?

There are a few things that you should consider when scaling the workouts.

First, have a look at the WOD and try to check which dumbbell you have at home is the closest to one in the WOD. If WOD is asking for 20 reps of something with 1x20 kg and you have 2x10 kg then you don’t need to adjust anything, just use both dumbbells but if you have just 1x12.5 kg then you need to scale the WOD.

Next, consider what is your fitness level and how heavy a dumbbell actually is for you. As in the example before, you have a 7.5 kg lighter dumbbell but that doesn’t mean you need to scale if the movement is still difficult for you, even with that lighter dumbbell. On other hand, if 12.5 kg feels easy just bump the reps 2x to 40.

However, you may also have only a 30 kg dumbbell, and doing 20 reps will be almost impossible. In that case just decrease reps based on your best judgment, even to only 5-10 reps.

The next possibility is to also scale the movement. If WOD asks for goblet (front) dumbbell squats and you have just a light dumbbell, try to do overhead squats instead. They are much harder and can give you a very good workout even with light weights.

Scaling other movements

It is not really that hard, usually, you are looking for a variant of some other movement that is working on similar muscle groups and has about the same difficulty.

For example, wall balls is a movement where you are throwing a 9 kg ball to target at ~3m height on the wall. You can replace them with lightweight (10 kg) dumbbell thrusters (squat + press in one motion).

The next good example is running, not many of you can take dumbbells outside. So you can scale every 200m of a run for 1-minute of any different cardio. It may be 15 burpees, 80 double unders, or 60 jumping jacks

I hope that it is clear. If you don’t have an idea how to scale movements, just google [scaling X] or [X progression]. If you still don’t know how to scale, select some different movement from a different WOD and just replace it.

Repeating WODs

One last thing, note your results and try to do at least 10 different WODs from the list before deciding to repeat some of them.

Why? You don’t want to master only one of the WODs, you want to get better at all of them. Your body will need to adapt to each WOD and will keep improving because it doesn’t know what to expect.

And if you have multiple weights at home, you can try increasing weight when you repeat the WOD while trying to beat the old score.

Conclusion

I hope this little guide with a list of dumbbell workouts will help you improve your fitness level by a huge margin!

Now let’s pick your favorites from this list of 157 home workouts with dumbbells!

Random WOD from the list

157 Home Workouts with Dumbbells

wods, quarantine wods, dumbbells wods, bodyweight wods, crossfit wods, quarantine workouts, dumbbells workouts, bodyweight workouts, wods collection, workouts collection