If you want to build stronger arms and upper body muscle, you may spend hours at the gym lifting weights. This is an effective way to train, but it’s not the only way. Fortunately, you can also get results in just 5 minutes a day with this short routine from Chris Hemsworth’s personal trainer.
All you need to get started is a pair of weights. If you’re at the gym, a fixed-load set of dumbbells will do, but we recommend the best adjustable dumbbells for home workouts since they combine several weights for easy storage and you can quickly change the load.
With weights by your side, roll out a yoga mat for under-foot support, and you’ll be ready to take on this short routine from Chris Hemsworth’s personal trainer, Luke Zocchi. The workout was developed for the workout app Centr and is part of the platform’s 28 Days of Arms program.
As it’s only five minutes, you can use the routine as a short standalone session when you’re tight on time or add it to the end of your regular workout as an arm-focused finisher. Zocchi uses Centr’s Smart Stack adjustable dumbbells, but you can use whichever weights you have to hand.
The aim is to do each move with perfect form, as this will help engage the right muscles and avoid injury, so choose a load that’ll challenge you to get through a set, but isn’t so heavy that it’ll affect your technique. Then you can follow Zocchi’s demonstrations as you go.
Watch Centr’s 5-minute dumbbell arms workout
Rather than try and hit a certain number of repetitions for each exercise, you train for 30 seconds, take a 20-second break, and then start on the next move. This helps work your muscles hard and means that can fit an effective session into just five minutes.
Zocchi encourages you to focus on your mind-muscle connection, where you tune into how your body moves as you go through each part of the exercise. It’s a similar technique that you use in yoga, where small adjustments to your posture can make a big difference in the pose.
But the mind-muscle connection is really a form of mindfulness, bringing your attention to how your body feels in the present moment. But instead of focusing on your breath as you’d do in a meditation session, you bring awareness to how each muscle feels as you train.
As you practice this skill, you’ll notice that your technique improves during some of the moves in this routine, like biceps curls. With better awareness, you’ll get more from your workouts, and see the results more safely and sustainably than rushing through sets with poor form.
One of the other ways you can tweak your technique is to change the weight you’re lifting. If you’re struggling to keep good form, then consider dropping the load. Then, as you get stronger, you can gradually increase the weight following the progressive overload training technique.
