The Best Adjustable Dumbbells

Compared with a full rack of traditional dumbbells, adjustable dumbbells require far less room, making them ideal for smaller spaces. We’ve lifted thousands of pounds of weight for hundreds of reps to find the best set of adjustable dumbbells for at-home use. We think Core Home Fitness’s Adjustable Dumbbell Set —with a lightning-fast adjustment mechanism, a compact footprint, and a 5- to 50-pound load range—is the set that will work best for most exercisers. We continue to recommend the Bowflex SelectTech 552 Dumbbells , which have been a pick in this guide since 2016.

Adjustable dumbbells (along with other pieces of at-home exercise equipment) were perhaps one of the hottest commodities of pandemic-era workouts. Availability has improved, although prices may still be unsettlingly high on some sets, and delivery times can vary. Can’t find what you’re looking for or not sure you want to make the investment? There are other ways to strength train at home; you can also improvise with items you may already have on hand.

Each dumbbell in the Core Home Fitness Adjustable Dumbbell Set can go from 5 to 50 pounds per dumbbell in a matter of seconds with just a twist of the handles. Even better, at 14½ inches long, the weights are a manageable length when fully loaded, and they get shorter, and therefore more ergonomic to handle, as you reduce the load. Our runner-up dumbbells remain 15¾ inches long no matter how you load them, so they’re potentially unwieldy for smaller-framed folks.

Our complaints about the Core Home Fitness dumbbells are minor: The weight increments on each are 5 pounds (rather than the 2½ pounds of others), which can make an increase feel significant, particularly at lower loads (say, going from 10 to 15 pounds, or from 15 to 20). And like most adjustable dumbbells we tested, these weights require careful alignment for you to re-rack them, and the racks get hung up when you pick up the weights fully loaded. Of the 13 sets of adjustable dumbbells we’ve tested, the Core Home Fitness model offers the best, most approachable experience in its price range, making it a great choice for most home gyms.

The Bowflex SelectTech 552 Dumbbells adjust smoothly from 5 to 52½ pounds when you turn dials at either end of each weight. With 2½-pound increments for the first 25 pounds (and 5 pounds thereafter), the Bowflex weights allow for more nuance in training progressions than our top pick, whose increments are 5 pounds. (The PowerBlock USA Elite 5-50 Stage 1 set, which we review here, is also able to adjust in increments of 2½ pounds.) Still, the Bowflex weights have two dials to adjust per dumbbell (lest you accidentally create an uneven load), so they aren’t as quick or elegant to load and unload as our top pick. Also, the 15¾-inch-long bars don’t get shorter as you change the weight, making this set a bit harder to handle, especially for smaller-framed people. If our pick is unavailable, or if the ability to adjust the total weight per dumbbell in smaller increments matters to you, these dumbbells are a solid choice for lifting at home.