Dumbbell Design

New fitness equipment is developed all the time that is made to increase the effectiveness of certain workouts. Cables with adjustable angles for specifically targeting a muscle group under longer tension, benches that can incline or decline to target different muscles with different angles, wider grips on bars to work on forearm strength, etc. are all new products made to improve the effectiveness of people’s workouts. These are machines that are used every now and then, however, and the equipment that has been used for as long as weightlifting has been around, such as barbells and dumbbells, are still the most used and utilized equipment. Nonetheless, this equipment is certainly not perfect, and through decades of improved equipment and training, dumbbells and barbells have not changed in the slightest, despite some of the disadvantages they hold

The problem is that dumbbells can be difficult to hold for those who have limited grip strength, and thus many people have to let go of the dumbbell before they have reached muscular failure. This is important as not being able to go to failure is sub-optimal for hypertrophy, and therefore limits maximum muscle growth. Current solutions involve using wrist straps around people’s hands and wrapping them around the dumbbells, almost tying them together so that the straps can support their grip strength. However, the issue with this solution is that it can be uncomfortable on people’s wrists and leave marks from the high pressure on one’s wrists, and can cause wrist problems if used too often. Furthermore, this product is not available in commercial gyms and requires an external purchase that is upwards of 20 dollars. This can discourage people who are beginners in the gym and who are hesitant to put more money into working out than just a gym membership. The user needs a design that will be available to them within the gym and that is easily accessible. Our solutions will fix the dumbbells by implementing grooves within the handles. The grooves will allow for better gripping and finger placement so that the bars can be held for longer and will be made with a rough texture to increase friction between the hands and the bar, further supporting people’s grip strength.

As stated, lifting straps can be expensive. Furthermore, from personal experience, they can hurt one’s wrists and leave marks, especially when dealing with heavyweights that put a lot of force on the straps tied to your wrists. This solution does not target the dumbbells themselves, which should be the focus of fixing the issue. Therefore, people won’t have to purchase an external product and can rely on their gym to ensure that they can get the best out of their workout.

To fix dumbbells, we first need to understand why people can’t hold on to heavy dumbbells long enough. Our ability to hold dumbbells, and objects in general, is dependent on our grip strength. According to an article written by Jedd Johnson, people often think about grip strength as how strong our hands are, but there is much more to it than that. “Grip involves everything from the musculature near the elbow down to the fingertips. It has to be thought of this way because many of the forearm and hand flexor muscles actually originate above the elbow, and anytime a muscle crosses a joint, it will in some way influence it.”1 To help forearm strength, people’s hands need to be able to fully grasp the dumbbells so that forearms don’t have to do extra work to keep holding the dumbbell. However, most dumbbells don’t have this issue and can be held comfortably by most hands. The issue, then, is within our hands ourselves.

To improve dumbbells, we need to create a design that will help our hands hold the dumbbells better. One way to do this is to place grooves on the dumbbell where people hold it. Grooves create indents for fingers to grasp the dumbbell tighter. Since fingers are a huge part of our grip strength and are the last muscles that act before letting go of the dumbbell, increasing their resilience will greatly increase the time people will be able to hold the weight. Dumbbells with grooves currently don’t exist in any way, so a design like that would be perfect to initiate. Therefore, our design has four grooves in it, for each finger excluding the thumb (because the thumb wraps around the dumbbell) for optimal finger gripping.

Another way to increase people’s ability to hold dumbbells is to increase the friction between our hands and the dumbbell. One way is to make the dumbbell extremely rough in texture, this will increase the coefficient of friction between our hands and the dumbbells, causing there to be a more static frictional force between our hands and the dumbbell, and therefore our hands do less work. As a result, our design used a metal that was not smooth and had a rough texture to it.

Our design will benefit two groups of people. The first is those who have relatively weak grip strength and struggle to hold weights that they’re working muscles should be able to handle. Many of these people are unaware of the concept of wrist straps, so this will benefit people who are unaware of how to solve their grip problems by giving them a clear solution in the gym. It will also benefit those who don’t want to or cannot buy wrist straps because they can cost a sizable amount of money for certain people. This design will also benefit gyms that implement them. Having unique and functional gym equipment will encourage people to buy a membership with that specific gym, and these dumbbells with grooves will help gyms have that status.

This design may, however, hurt some groups. The biggest group is companies that sell wrist wraps. Our product is made so that people don’t have to purchase wrist wraps, thus our product will decrease the number of people buying wrist wraps. As a result, this product will decrease the profits of these companies, however, most of these companies sell other gym equipment as well that will still be in use after implementing these dumbbells, so their businesses should not be at stake.

One issue with our design is how they will be implemented. Gyms will have to spend a lot of time and effort in adding more racks for these dumbbells and removing old ones to create space for these new dumbbells. It is also an issue with what to do with the dumbbells that are being replaced. Gyms will likely still keep them as there is no issue with having an abundance of dumbbells, but spacing could be an issue. We hope that certain gyms will be able to sponsor the production of this design as in the long run it could help their profits as people will be more inclined to buy memberships at the gyms that have these dumbbells with grooves.

Overall, our design will solve grip issues with dumbbells by fixing the dumbbells themselves. Gyms can incorporate this unique design and draw attention to their gyms and people won’t need to buy external products, such as wrist straps, to support their grip strength.