[Effie_drine]

Remember that one of the big lies in the gym was that women should stick to machines and stay away from free weights? Related to that is the lie that one should "start out" on machines and then "graduate" to free weights. Well, here's why it ain't so, as well as why free weights are often better for women.

maximum muscle group work

Machines are designed to move a weight along a prescribed track. In many ways they allow you to cheat by helping you keep the movement along a certain arc. With free weights, more weird little muscles are engaged just to help you keep the thing going the way it should. Thus your overall use of your muscles is optimized, since we know that exercises which use compound muscle groups are the best for overall strength building.

stability and balance

A corollary of maximum muscle use, free weights build stability and balance in a way that machines cannot. Just trying to stand upright with, say, a squat bar across your neck requires your body to learn how not to tip over. The body's muscles are engaged to a greater extent than they would be if you were standing under a machine which supported the bar for you. And you cannot learn this stability from a machine. In the case of muscles, they learn by doing. You'll often hear people talk about "stabilizer muscles" as if there's a certain group of muscles that's special. Stabilizer muscles are just muscles that act to provide stability during a movement. So, for example, when you squat, your leg muscles are the prime movers, but other parts are helping to execute the movement: calf and foot muscles are making sure your feet stay planted, torso muscles are making sure you don't fold up like a wet noodle under the bar, back muscles are pulling shoulder blades back to make the shelf where the bar sits, throat muscles are helping to make that grunting sound like a bulldog burping up a bean burrito, etc. But when you do a standing shoulder press, your leg muscles become stabilizers as they work to hold you upright.

natural movement

Machines are pretty stingy with what they allow you to do. As I mentioned, the purpose of a machine is to allow you to move a weight along a pre-defined track. For many people, especially shorter women, the prescribed movement is not natural, and can in fact lead to injury. But free weights not only allow you to do the movement in a way that is natural to you, they also allow for slight variations in the exercise which many machines do not. In addition, many machines, such as the bench press machine, begin the movement when the body is in its most vulnerable position. On a bench press machine, the movement starts with the shoulder joint in a stretched position, its weakest point. In comparison, the bench press with a bar or dumbbells begins the movement at "lockout", or with straightened arms. The trainee can then choose to use as much or as little range as she likes, depending on her individual needs.

The human body tends to move in an arc or curve. Machines tend to move in straight lines or limited ranges. What gives isn't going to be the steel but your soft squishy flesh.


A great routine will have both free weight and machine excerise added together!

[PonyGirl]

excellent post Effie