This is a show that I have been looking forward to watching for a long time, since everyone has told me that it is a fun show with cute girls working out and with legit good advice regarding weight training and exercise, and my expectations were surpassed.

Throughout this show, we follow the story of multiple girls who all have their own unique fitness goals. This is what makes the show great, is that it not only focuses on weight loss, but also for people who want to maintain their weight, bulk up, or get toned. The show also has a small gimmick of showing the calories of food that Hibiki is eating on screen, and it never brings attention to this, it is simply a quick visual aid for common foods in Japan.

I think this show can be split into two sections: the comedy and the workout advice.

Workout Advice

This is in my opinion the best part of Dumbbell, is all of the information you can get out of it when it comes to weight training. A lot of the advice you get during episode one is quite basic knowledge that most people who have gone to a gym before would already know, but as the show goes on, it explains concepts that are less known to the majority of people, such as dynamic stretching or dieting.

The most amazing part to me is how they always give alternative exercises you can do if you cannot work out at a gym. Options such as working out at home, in your local park, or anywhere else are great motivators for people who do not want to go to the gym. There are even alternative ways to do certain exercises if they are too difficult to do.

The show also makes sure to properly explain which specific muscles each exercise is working out, how many reps you should do, and even explains how to properly recover after an intense workout. A lot of people get demotivated from exercise due to the pain and fatigue that it brings them the day after their workout, so I am happy that this show provides ways to prevent this and even advises against passive resting.

I even learned about things that I had absolutely no interest in learning about before, such as body building competitions, how they are judged, how they are organized, and how entrants can win one, which I found all very interesting.

Overall, I heavily recommend this show purely based off of the advice it gives, since all of it is actually useful and accurate info.

Comedy

This part of the show is the only reason why I would not give it a 90-100 score, as it drags down the show for me. The comedy in this show is very hit-or-miss for me, sometimes it gets a chuckle out of me, and sometimes it just makes me cringe. A lot of the time, a joke will be shown on screen, and then the narrator will show up to explain the joke for some reason, as pictured below. Can you tell that these women are desperate to find a boyfriend?

The show would probably be better without a narrator, it's just unnecessary and detracts from the comedy. I did enjoy every scene that Machio-san was in, though. I always found the visual gag of Machio's incredibly ripped body being perfectly hidden underneath his clothes funny, as well as him always having a spare change readily available. I also kind of liked when the art style would randomly switch from the simple cute style to a more detailed, serious one (although I hated when the characters pointed this out).

The comedy was mostly bad in my opinion, and is the reason the score is lower than it should be.

Conclusion

All in all, this is a great 12-episode show that I would highly recommend to anyone who is interested in getting into exercise, passionate about weight lifting, doing cardio a couple times a week, enjoys hiking, or just enjoys watching cute girls do things. Even if the comedy wasn't to my taste, I still enjoyed my time with it and do not regret it at all. The opening and ending are also extremely good and I never skipped them once throughout the show. I loved watching the bonus explanations after the ED where they re-explained a workout they showed in the episode.

My best girl for this show has to be Tachibana Satomi. Other characters I really liked were Hibiki Sakura and Machio Naruzo.