DUMBBELLS & GYM BALL INTRODUCTION

A set of dumbbells and a gym ball can give you serious muscle gains

The foundation of any home gym set-up should be a set of dumb-bells and a gym ball. The reason they're so useful is that they are so versatile. You can target any body part in a variety of ways, increasing your chances of losing fat and gaining muscle.

This feature will give you a wide variety of exercises for each major body part. You can then begin to explore a range of workout techniques that will make sure you keep challenging your body and help you get bigger and stronger.

Dumbbells allow you to fatigue your muscles easily within your desired rep range, helping to build new muscle. The fact that you hold one in each hand gives you balanced muscle growth and develops your stabilising muscles because you're forced to control their movement.

A gym ball is excellent at increasing the instability of an exercise, which will improve your core strength. The greater the instability, the harder the exercise. For that reason, a gym ball is a great tool to use in conjunction with a set of dumb-bells because you'll struggle to complete your sets of unstable exercises, even if your heaviest dumbbell is 10kg.

Of course, there are some things that you can't do with dumbbells and gym ball. If you want to do heavy compound lifts, which will burn lots of calories and flood your body with muscle growth hormones, you'll need to invest in a barbell and bench. But before you do that you need to build a solid base of fitness. And even once you introduce a bar and bench into your routine, you should still do dumb-bell and gym ball moves to get an all-round training effect.

1. SPLIT DUMBBELL ROMANIAN DEADLIFT

Target: Hamstrings Develop the backs of your legs but make sure you use perfect form to protect your back. This move has huge functional benefits because it's similar to the movements you make when bending down to pick something up.