Dwight Freeney Instructs How to Build Upper Body Strength

Indianapolis Colts Pro Bowl defensive end Dwight Freeney performs Dumbbell Power as part of his upper body strength and power workout. William Hicks, Syracuse assistant AD for athletic performance, provides coaching.

Dwight Freeney shows how to build stability in strength training by simulating on field motion through resistance weight training. He emphasizes that strength needs to be acquired in each arm individually as well as together.

TRANSCRIPT

Dwight Freeney (Indianapolis Colts Trainer): We call it Dumbbell Power. The reason being is it's one arm at a time but secondly it's speed of movement. If you watch the game and you play with your arms independently. Very seldom do you ever strike at the same time. It's push-pull, rip, turn. When you want that you want stability in the shoulders to avoid injury. So when you're doing the dumbbell power and you've got the arm that you're not using and you're trying to hold it deadline, so you're having to flex your shoulder and chest just to keep the stability as you're using one arm. And if you've ever tried that, what naturally happens when you take this one down, this one wants to drift away from you. So today we did it three ways. So we did it from the top, we did it from the bottom and then we did full reps. So hopefully we got every range of motion that we simulate that he may have to put himself through in a rip, as he calls it, doing some of his assassin moves. We put him through that today with weight in his hands with resistance. When the arms are up top it's mainly chest and triceps. When the arms on the bottom its chest and shoulders and then you bring a compound movement when you come together. Athletes shorten the distance. They bring the dumbbell down and they try to use a little too much weight and don't get a full range of motion and they let it get outside of the framework of their body where they change into more of a Anterior Delt upper peck move instead of a power move where it stays within the framework of the body. Today we started out with six on three way, which really is 18 reps. Then we went to five. Then we went to four so we could progressively go heavy. I mean his last set I think we did 95 or 100 pound dumbbells one, but it was 15 reps. So it goes along with the muscular endurance we talked about before. It goes along with the conditioning aspect we talked about before.