savage- said:
for the levering could you just use a dumbbell or barbell with weight only on one side?
you could, but it doesn't produce the same torque that a hammer does. Because the head is the bulk of the weight we can call the handle massless (the center of gravity of a sledgehammer is often in the head itself anyways). This gives an equation where the moment of inertia is basically a ring formed with the radius equal to the length of handle being used.
With a dumbell, you have a much smaller radius and must use much larger weights to compensate for that. It can be done but there are factors like stabilizing on the two unused planes of the exercise that are not accounted for and the handle itself has more mass than that of a hammer, allowing for some (but not much) counterbalance.
a barbell's moment of inertia is fundementally different from that of a hammer. First you have the weighted end fucntioning as a ring, the bar itself functioning as a disc (adding to the overal resistance), the remaing and unused portion of the bar functioning as a disc (which decreases in size as the other disc increases) and any weight on the opposite end fucntioning as a ring. there is also a matter of reversing any momentum and rotational forces that you build up by rotating the two ends.
let me break it down for you:
You are minding your own business walking through a forest when all of a sudden you come to the three bears house. After eating all their corned beef hash and taking a nap you find a sledge hammer, an adjustable dumbell, a barbell and a pile of weights.
You grab the barbell first. Instictively you grab it in the middle to acheive balance and you begin to move to one end to find how much you can lever. easy going at first as the first couple inches don't have a big noticable difference, but soon you can feel the same increase in resistance in only half an inch, then a quarter of an inch. soon every 8th of an inch you're increasing the torque the same amount as you were with whole inches in the begining. "fuck this hokey non-linear increase in resistance horse shit, I'm gonna try the dumbell." you say, and so you do.
You start piling on weights to one end of the dumbell, doing nifty figure eights and such. but you notice you have an alarming amount of control with such a short handle, and that the arcs you read about online don't seem to be nearly as difficult as they should be. in addition, the pretty figures you painted in the air with it don't seem to have uniform resistance on your wrist, and don't seem to be working the they should as you move it in circles and side to side. In fact, is as if the dominant gravitational force only pulled things down towards the earth and didn't give a shit at all about your side to side movements. "Enough of this non-uniform, momentum based bull shit!" you cry, "gimme the fuckin hammer!"
Well just then the bears return from their. and you begin to bludgen the holy hell out of them with your sledge! I mean really beating their fucking heads in! Blood is flying everywhere as you crack their skulls and smash in their eye sockets, break their noses, knock in their teeth and pound off a jaw or two. As you stand on a pile of bloodied, brown fur, you realize two things: 1) you now have breakfast for at least a week. and 2) the handle of a sledge hammer allows for great, uniform, linearly increasing resistance for leverage exercises. then you head up stairs and finish fucking Goldilockes (you only came down in the first place to get the needy bitch a glass of water) before helping yourself to a well deserved beer from the bear's fridge.
And they all lived happily ever after... except for the bears, who died of course, but turned into very nice rugs.
