The Trouble with Barbells

Barbells are amazing tools. Really, think about it. If you had to totally reinvent the wheel and create a system or implement for loading the human body through movement, is there anything better than barbells?

Kettlebells and dumbbells are pretty cool, but a little less stable and therefore harder to load.

Bands don’t provide consistent resistance.

Cable and plate-loaded machines are both bulky and expensive.

Sure, barbells are long, but they’re also one-piece. So they’re easy to stabilize. You can easily add just 2.5 pounds, total, to a barbell and increase your weights incrementally over time.

They’re useful not just in a straight bar fashion, but also in a landmine setup. And you can do literally hundreds of exercises with barbells.

Barbells are probably the best tool we have for getting strong when we really look at all of the criteria.

And this is the trouble with barbells. 

Barbells are incredibly easy to load. They create immense stimulus on the body and build strength like no other implement.

But being the heaviest and most intense exercise variations, barbell movements also have the capacity to place the largest strain on our body as a whole. 

On our muscles, our joints, our nervous system.

For that reason, some folks just don’t love barbell training. Dumbbells, kettlebells, bands – these things all seem to just feel better and leave our joints less achy the next day.

So next time you’re trying to figure out what implements to use for your workout, remember that barbells are amazing. They’re quite frankly the best tool we have for building total body strength. 

But there are also lots of other cool things to workout with.