Shake Weight Vs Dumbbell Exercises - Which is Better?

The Shake Weight is a popular fitness product which is promoted as an alternative way to workout your upper body to the regular strength training exercises that can be done with dumbbells. It is shaken rather than lifted. This is supposed to provide you with a more effective workout than weight lifting due to the rapid muscle contractions. Naturally, this claim is difficult to verify so the question is does the Shake Weight work better than regular dumbbell exercises?

Let's compare the two products and see what we come up with.

Effectiveness

The Shake Weight is supposed to work with something called Dynamic Inertia. Since you hold the product in your hands and shake it vigorously rather than lift it, you do many minuscule muscle contractions with a very small range of motion. Naturally, when you do dumbbell exercises, you get a much longer range of motion but fewer muscle contractions.

But is the number of contractions really that important? I think that it's much better to do a small number of repetitions correctly, working the entire length of the muscle rather than doing many limited reps. Due to that, I am not convinced that the Shake Weight is more effective than dumbbells. Yes, working with it does strain the muscles, but not more than dumbbells do.

Ease of Use

One thing which I like about the Shake Weight is how easy it is to use. For some exercises you hardly need any space at all. You can hold it and use it while sitting in the passenger seat of a car. Working with dumbbells requires a bit more room as you need to make a longer movement with them.

Range of workouts

The Shake Weight can be used for a variety of exercises, working your upper muscle groups. However, it has a major limitation and that is the fact that it is currently sold in one form for men and another for women. You don't have the ability to switch weights and progress as you can with bigger dumbbells or adjustable ones.

What do you believe is also important. If you feel that the Shake Weight can indeed provide you with a more solid workout than dumbbells which are proven to work and have been used for decades, than go ahead and get it and use it. If you're not sure, you won't be using this product with any regularity anyway so what's the point. Stick with regular workouts and you will see results.