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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2112 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 23, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I am faced with a novel and difficult situation at my place of employment. I recently discovered that a transwoman coworker of mine has developed a "crush" on me, and has been talking about me at length (at length here means for an hour+ a day, longer than any daily interaction I have with her) to other people in her personal life. I've already brought this to the attention of my immediate superior as well as to the hr department of my employer, not my first choice in a situation like this but there are some extra variables.

The reason this situation gets very very sticky, is these revelations all took place over the course of an evening where I received a series of texts painting a gruesome picture of this transwoman coworker being drugged, battered, and raped by a Fox News watching, misgendering MAGA supporter. Knowing just how many of these sensational stories don't pan out, I was skeptical but I provided guarded support, largely because I didn't want to see that she'd committed suicide and her phone showing a message to me left on read (engaging at all, I understand now, was a colossal mistake). As this evening of the alleged assault continued, every attempt I made to corroborate a single aspect of her story came up blank. It wrapped up when I received a handful of texts, culminating in a phone call, from my coworkers legacy wife (female) who clarified the timeline for me as well as the details I've mentioned above, as well as some extra background that I don't think I can share anywhere since it's pretty specific/identifying information.

Suffice to say, the picture painted by everything I could put together was one of a narcissist with a cratering need for attention and a willingness to lie about anything and everything in order to get it. I am deeply disturbed by all of this.

I have ideas for what my conversation with this coworker will have to be in order to establish some kind of professional boundaries and so that I don't have to deal with this kind of unhinged behavior in the future. I am, however, very much looking for any other advice I can get when it comes to this. I'll be talking to her tomorrow in a public place with people nearby, so any advice that comes in before then is extra appreciated. I'll be responding with clarifying details as necessary for the rest of today, but I'm also going to be quite busy so I won't be prompt in any way.

E: mods feel free to unshadowban me, thanks in advance.

E: mods feel free to unshadowban me, thanks in advance.

Okay, buddy, I approved your initial post, despite misgivings. This had the looks of a troll post, possibly someone dropping by from rdrama for a few lulz, but we generally let people have at least one bite at the apple even if they are spinning a rather fabulous tale.

However, that line above sealed the deal for me. You're a troll. FWIW, you aren't shadowbanned. You're just a new user and all the posts you have in the new user filter have to be manually approved by a mod. I'm not going to approve them. I'm going to ban you. Go post your creative writing exercises on /r/relationship_advice, they eat this shit up.

On the off chance this is real, you have probably already screwed yourself. You've obviously internalized a script that made you vulnerable to this narcissist's manipulation strategy out of guilt and the need to feel like a good person. Still, the best chance you have right now is the following:

Do not meet with him. Do not contact him. Leave his texts unread. Lawyer up and have him draft you a complaint to HR, with an eye to signaling to HR that it would be a costly mistake to throw you under the bus.

Do not try to change his mind or "clear up misconceptions." He does not have a misunderstanding: he has an internal narrative in which you are an object that feeds his fetish of being valued and protected "as a real woman." When you contest this, he will switch to a different narrative and turn on you instantly. This will most likely be that you were a "chaser" sexually harassing him because he is an irresistibly beautiful woman. This is what he will report to HR if you destabilize his current obsession.

You already screwed up by interacting with this guy in any way, because your HR department will be pressured to take his side by two things. First, HR ladies natural hatred for cis-white-males and a desire to hurt them. Second, and most importantly, your corporation thirsts for ESG scores from leftist queer "rating organizations" that act as mafia bosses. Only one of you can cause a multi-million dollar lawsuit if the company throws you under the bus, and it's not you, regardless of how much fear your lawyer can put into them.

Again assuming this is real, you have an opportunity here to learn a very important lesson, but it is probably already too late to stop the fallout from this entirely preventable mistake.

Full disclosure, I was put off, confused even, by some of your terminology, in particular "legacy wife," which, if I understand it correctly and without googling it (because I should be able to understand the juxtaposition of two very easy words in this way), means "wife" but presumably now they are divorced because the guy has transitioned or decided to be female? I simply don't deal with trans issues in my daily life beyond what I read here (and, previously, reddit) but I guess it's something to look forward to, as Japan seems to latch on to US cultural trends to some degree, with a bit of lag time.

You also use the passive voice "received texts" but in the context of the remainder of your post I have to assume this person crushing on you was the one sending you such texts. If so, it seems odd not to have made that clear. You also insert rather loaded terms in your post here (MAGA supporting, misgendering, both presumably intended as slurs) which suggests you may not regularly read the same posts here that I do, or perhaps you have a different audience in mind than me.

Who is reporting the crush, chatty-about-you behavior to you? What is this person's or these people's likely motivation for doing so? Why would this have made you go to HR, as opposed to seeding the same grapevine with a Not Interested, that it might get back to said obsessor, as has happened throughout the course of human history? And I also wonder why you're being contacted by the guy's wife. (That I call him a guy is a function of my age, don't get alarmed, I don't mean any hate )

It seems to me that you are taking a much different route than I would all around, and I'm trying to get my head around it.

Have you asked this person to stop? Have they even been bothering you at work? It took me a 2nd read-through of your post to realize that you don’t mention either of those two things.

I ask because if a dude came onto this forum and said that he really likes this girl at work, thinks she’s the best thing ever, decided to get her number and go for it, spilled his feelings out over the phone to her in a moment of weakness, and then ended up fired by HR with no warning, I’d be pretty sympathetic. I don’t think that’s an analogous situation to what you’re describing, but I can’t rule it out.

I'll be talking to her tomorrow in a public place with people nearby, so any advice that comes in before then is extra appreciated.

Meeting with people nearby is very different from meeting with people. The former prevents lies about say...a row but not more insidious tales. Can you actually count on any of the people nearby to corroborate anything that happened?

I'm prone to avoidance so factor that in, but I honestly wouldn't want to do anything that doesn't have independent corroboration with someone with this sort of disordered relationship with truth. The fact that they're capable of such lurid and over-the-top falsehoods actually may make it worse: good people may simply default to giving her the benefit of the doubt.

I mean, you did.

You need to minimize contact with this person and if you do have to communicate with him for business purposes, do so only through official company channels like email. Avoiding him altogether would be best. Absolutely do not meet or communicate with him outside of work.

Start leaving a paper tail with HR voicing your concerns and discomfort over this “crush,” even if they’re unlikely to be immediately sympathetic/helpful. This way if/when things blow-up there’ll already be records and documentation in place. You definitely don’t want to let this person get first-mover advantage with HR. And like @grognard said, start looking for a new job.

Look for a new job, you’re on your way out.

How often do you end up reading one of your ideas by a public intellectual? I commented along the lines of athletes seem above average intelligence a few days ago. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/in-which-sector-are-the-top-performers-stupidest.html

I’d say every 4-6 months I see a person I read say the same idea. A few times I assumed they lifted my thought like if Scott said something I wrote in the Reddit.

For athletes I’d say he left out Kobe Bryant who I believe is above most of the ones he mentioned.

Happens occasionally, but often I see them much more fleshed out and better explained than the concept I have in my head when a writer like Scott posts it.

I've noticed this as well. To me it signals that I am imbibing so many of the same ideas as other people, reading the same blogs and watching the same videos and listening to the same podcasts, that the same things are occurring to me at the same time.

If you are demographically and culturally similar to the public intellectuals you read (raised in the same kind of town went to the same kinds of schools at around the same time etc.), if you plug in the same inputs you will get some of the same outputs.

I noticed it when I would read a lot of fashion blogs in undergrad, I would pick something up at the thrift store and two months later I would see it on some trash-tier zine's front page. To a certain extent, this is what we mean when we talk about developing "taste."

Jungian Collective Unconsciousness strikes again.

My conclusion as a person with “taste” is that I’m a solid second rate mind. Not smart enough to be the leader like a Cowen or Alexander but able to get things early. Someone once said a writers readers are one intellectual tier lower. Either that or there is something about work ethic of the high volume thought leaders. Feynman had a quote about having 7 or so ideas he was working on and whenever a new process or paper would come out he would apply that to the things he was working on to see if he got a result. So perhaps there is some combination of being smarter or having better work processes/discipline.

Are you a girl?

No, I distinctly am not. But who knows anymore.

A lot of it is work ethic, or just putting hours in every week to produce content. Nobody remembers the blog posts that kinda suck.

I think Cowen is just overrating the intelligence of his examples, which is a particular weirdness of basketball fans (probably trying to signal their own intelligence despite following a sport with a pretty dumb fanbase). LeBron is notorious for pretending to read. I'll give him Jordan, who clearly has impressive business sense, and trust him on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom I only know from Airplane! In general, top athletes are surrounded by a large staff trying to make them appear as well as possible to the public, including media coaching and PR.

In the sport I follow, football (no, football football), intelligence seems to be all over the place, and somewhat but not entirely correlated with "football IQ." The easiest way to see this is by looking at the jobs they take after their playing career, with most top managers having played a high-football-IQ game rather than a physical one, often in midfield - Guardiola, Ancelotti, Wenger, Arteta, etc. all fit that mould, and Klopp describes his playing career by saying "I had fourth-division feet and a first-division head." Meanwhile, a lot of top players become pundits based off reputation, and quite frankly come across as pretty thick, if good at courting controversy in the mode of modern media. Or, to take an example of current players, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal team around the same time, and had very similar promise until ESR's injuries and Saka's break-out, but ESR is known among the team for being humorously dim while Saka scored relatively similar exam results to people I know from top private schools.

The bailey of your point is sound, I think, it's rare for top top athletes to be that stupid (much below 100IQ it would take a lot of crystallized intelligence just to understand top-level tactics). I'm sure most top footballers are above average intelligence, but not that much above average and generally quite uneducated. So there's definitely a floor for required intelligence, but at the highest level it's something which is important but can be traded off against other aspects of one's game, such that the smartest players aren't the best players and the best players aren't necessarily so smart that a guy like Tyler Cowen should be fawning over them and reading the books they "wrote".

(To address the elephants in the room: Ronaldo isn't that smart but makes up for it by sheer force of will. Messi is probably very smart but so cripplingly introverted he doesn't let it show off the pitch.)

Agree. Though I’ll note I posted it back here cuz felt more mental healthy to talk about how ideas pop thru the internet and the feel good feeling when someone widely viewed as smart says an idea you think you were somewhat novel on.

My original post was subtly a hbd type thing where black IQ average is supposedly low 80’s. But I don’t think the average athlete is that low. And many seem to be significantly higher. I think I’m just chilling in the bailey and Cowen is pushing it farther.

Yeah I just couldn't resist talking about football, too excited for the season starting.

The HBD point is kind of interesting, because both of the main 'black' sports have a much greater selection for body type which would presumably crowd out a lot of athletes who are smart but don't have the right body. But, while basketball does demand some serious tactical nous and on-the-spot thinking, american football is much more about getting really big guys and having them follow specific tactics to ram into each other, while giving themselves traumatic brain injuries - and when I think of famous black athletes doing really stupid stuff, it's pretty much all american football players and not NBA players.

Also I think both of us have confused motte and bailey here, I meant to say that the motte of your point is sound but I'm not sure about Cowen's bailey.

Some reason I confuse them a lot and went with your usage.

Basketball I feel like you are constantly running probabilities in your head. Is the three better than the pass for that guys cut for a lay up. Lineman frequently make a decision of two unblocked guys which one would be better to grab.

Although it depends somewhat on how “famous” is defined, NFL rosters are about 3-4x larger than those of the NBA, plus there are two more NFL teams than NBA. So there is a larger pool of NFL players available to provide colorful off-field/off-court behavior.

I generally label all my ideas so banal that any smart person could have come up with them, as it happens often. Nothing is original after 100 billion people lived and died.

There are quite a few national-level journalists in the general rat/motte sphere, it's entirely possible that one of them sees a comment and decides to copy the idea.

Ya Im sure all those types lift things from all over the place.

I this incident is more likely same thought process. This doesn’t feel like a place tc would read.

I remember I once I had a bschool prof who used a phrase that is credited to Scott Sumner frequently and I mentioned it and he said he thought he got it from TC but did not read Sumner. Tracing thoughts especially ones that seem fresh is something I find interesting.

Not sure what it is about basketball but there are a few who seem to be somewhat “philosophers”.

I once had a professor use a Kobe press conference in a psychology course and was like wow that is really smart. So that is where my initial comment came from.

This doesn’t feel like a place tc would read.

I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Here is close to places he would read. But I feel like we are witches to his group. It’s close to my athletes aren’t dumb point I made this week so who knows.

I don’t know any one else who said something like that recently.

On the meta of reoccurring ideas:

Happens to me occasionally. Often with people that run in the same intellectual circles. It is way more common the other way around, where I think of something that I thought was original and then find someone else already had the idea.

On the object level of stupid top-performers:

I think you'd need a weird combination of circumstances to create stupid top-performers. A few things that might cause it (in order of importance):

  1. The benefits to intelligence in the given endeavor are zero or negative. (even a small benefit to intelligence can compound at the top levels of performance).
  2. Depending on how you define the field, maybe the "top level" performers actually have another level that they can graduate to, and only the idiots are unable to do that graduation, and only people that truly love the minor leagues are unwilling to do the graduation.
  3. There is a huge base of people to pull from, such that the effects of low intelligence on other aspects of life won't screw over potential top performers before they become top performers.
  4. Top performers are created young and early, before bad real life decisions from low intelligence can screw them over.

Knowing all this. The best real world example I can think of is Michael Phelps. He isn't stupid by any means. But he also isn't some kind of recognized genius like other top athletes. Despite being a swimmer, I think the sport of swimming fulfills all 3 criteria (running probably fills it too, does anyone know how smart Usain Bolt is?).

For swimming and running being able to empty your mind and just do the thing for hours on end is important. As long as you are smart enough to learn good forms, and follow a diet plan no more intelligence is needed. But if you are too smart, cardio sports can be incredibly dull and boring. Which means there is a potentially negative return on intelligence.

For both swimming and running the people who are the best at it are also good athletes in general. And unless you are literally the world's best at those sports you can earn a lot more money as a professional athlete in other sports. So smart athletes can "graduate" from swimming and running into other better paying sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket, or football.

Finally, they are both basic sports with very few barriers to entry. Swimming and running both require minimal equipment for training. The sport of swimming generally requires a lap pool, but those are plentiful in western nations. Elite athletes can also be created in both by the time an adult male is fully grown.

I think (2) is the area most people would cite. Examples like top nurses not being Doctors.

Someday I would like to be credited or just know I created an original thought.

I think for (2) people can quibble a lot about the definition of the field. Like is "nurse" the category or "medical field".

Last time

We are at about 16 lbs of weight loss today, making for a current average of about 2lbs of weight-melt a week. I was hoping for 3lbs/week, but if I eat any less, I'm concerned it will eat into muscle instead of fat. I've begun adding some small amounts of weight training to hopefully stave that fear off.

Intend on weaning off of semaglutide soon, to see if I can maintain the new diet, curious about how that will go. With christmas and other holidays rolling around, I am going to be bombarded with so much sugar that I don't think it would be wise to fully get off semaglutide.

We will see.

2 lbs a week is fine if you're obese, probably too fast if you're overweight.

I'll keep that in mind. It's only been 2lbs/week for the last month, and I've been on sema for two, so I expect it to naturally taper. I'm still eating 3 meals a day, the portions and sugar content is mostly what's dropped.

I'll provide a counter-opinion, that 2 lbs a week is probably fine even if you're just overweight, not obese. I lost an average of 10 lbs per month, so a little less than 2.5 lbs per week, for 4 months straight back when I was going from a BMI of around 30 to around 24, and the vast majority of that was when I was in the overweight bracket, not the obese bracket. By the time my BMI was around 25-26, it did taper off and I was losing only around 1 lbs a week for a while, and I'm guessing that trying to maintain 2 lbs a week loss at that point might have been too aggressive. But I didn't suffer any ill effects from that 4 month period of 40 lbs weight loss (again, all but the very beginning of that was when I was overweight, not obese). I was also fairly physically active at the time, running around 2-3 miles 5-6 times a week, running at a pace in-line with my typical pace (8-9 minutes/mile); this isn't elite or even high level amateur athlete levels, but certainly the high calorie deficit wasn't having meaningfully negative impact on my energy.

That was over a decade ago, and I've yet to go back into the overweight range, much less obese, and so there also wasn't any rubber-band effect from the relatively quick loss of weight. I was also in my low 20s at that time, which is definitely a factor, but I don't think it's that big of a factor when it comes to the healthiness of losing 2 lbs/week. My opinion is that the general recommendation to limit oneself to 1 lbs/week loss if you're merely in the overweight range is mostly optimized around providing a number threshold that is both not too difficult to achieve and provides the person with satisfaction of having accomplished meaningful progress, rather than actual health effects. Someone who feels like they maximized the weight loss they can healthily take on at 1 lbs/week might be more encouraged to keep it up for long periods of time than someone who feels like they're falling behind what they realistically could healthily achieve. But if the ability to control that caloric deficit isn't a factor, I don't think 2 lbs/week for someone who's overweight is much of a concern.

Now, what about 3 lbs/week or 30 lbs/week? Clearly at some point the rate becomes much higher than is healthy (or biologically possible short of amputation). I'd personally guess it varies based on person, but that for most overweight but not obese people, 3-4 lbs/week is probably quite fine, presuming that they're eating a nutritious 500 Calories or whatever they're limiting themselves each day. You can't maintain that kind of weight loss very long while staying within the overweight bracket, anyway.

Thanks, that definitely tempers it.

A quick google had said 1-2lbs a week was healthy for people to lose weight. I'm sure it will level off as it keeps going, so not worried. Human caloric intake used to fluctuate incredibly wildly in the ancestral environment, so it would be extremely strange if a fluctuation of 2+ pounds was unhealthy, especially for humans that have a considerable body fat %.

At any rate, the target is to be able to easily maintain the new diet and weight for once I wean off semaglutide. Under the practical lens, 3+ lbs just isn't something I want to put the effort into achieving. I was perhaps a bit too hopeful about my chances naturally getting it, considering others' stories of loss of diet. I did consider adding adding quite a bit of cardio to the mix. But, since the goal is to be able to maintain homeostasis with the base routine, and not lose muscle mass, I plan to stick with the most basic low-intensity training for the time being.

Gym question: why is it that online gym experts always recommend bench press, squats and deadlifts over any of the other machines in the weights room?

My gym is relatively empty when I go in the middle of the work day, I see a trainer once a week and go one other time (and do pilates on another day, guys I’m trying here). I say this because the reason he has me doing machines doesn’t appear to be that the bench press rack is always busy or something. I can do all three of the above exercises (with embarrassingly low weights, but still). But he almost always has me doing other stuff, particularly for legs where we do leg extensions and leg press and just do some squats at the end. For arms and back we usually use cables(?) (I don’t know what it’s called but it looks like this).

So is my trainer just a schmuck who knows nothing and should be putting me on the basic 5x5 or whatever? Are gym owners idiots for spending all this money on machines when all the weights room needs is squat racks, benches and free weights? Or do they do so solely for the unenlightened who don’t know that squats and deadlifts are all you need? Enlighten me.

Some bodybuilders swear by machines if they are designed to isolate muscles, maximize time under tension throughout the lift, and reduce injury risk.

I can do all three

If you can do those lifts competently, you may not need a trainer. If a trainer is why you show up, you can ask a program based more on free-weights. Many trainers are schmucks. Good trainers can design you an evidenced based program, and help you track results.

Evaluating a proposed program from your trainer can filter out most schmucks. Example: if your goal is adding muscle tissue (ie hypertrophy), the program should know, in advance, your approximate target weights (percent of estimated max. this may take a take to figure out), rep-ranges (6-30 for hypertrophy), target reps-in-reserve (RIR) (1-4), progressive overload, weekly volume, and exercise selection. In theory, trainers exist to do this, motivate you, watch your form, give you tips, and critically assess your true RIR (to make sure you're approaching physical - and not mental - failure). Different numbers if your goal is strength.

Note: if you are approaching true physical failure with good isolation on your cable work, while in the proper rep rangers, then it produces the same result. Compound lifts are often better loading the muscles as you get stronger. Back, and especially leg muscles, are the most powerful so eventually cables and some machines shouldn't be optimal. Approaching true physical failure with progressive overload is how we add new muscle tissue. Good trainers should be assessing this along the way. Good trainers should instruct you to lift X weight isolating Y muscle until you are Z reps away from total failure, based on the previous week. Less good trainers say things like "today we're gonna do this for 10 reps".

Diet is half the picture, but that's not what they do.

Are gym owners idiots for spending all this money on machines

They're catering to the largest customer base.

all the weights room needs is squat racks, benches and free weights?

Gyms like this exist and I like them. Different customers.

(with embarrassingly low weights, but still)

Unless you're just being modest,or humorously self-deprecating, don't worry about this. Many studies show weight lifting and strength training works for the vast majority of people. Over 20 years of lifting I've pulled in plenty of friends and got them stronger than they ever thought possible. "All" it takes ~6 months of steady progressive overload, 2-3x/week, a decent diet, and injury avoidance/prevention. I love it more than most, so I keep up with it.

Spending the money on machines is not a schmuck move. After all, it's good business sense to put the money where people can see it, and it's quite hard to replicate machine setups in a home gym, whereas anyone can s/b/d in their garage. Your personal trainer might see it that way, or perhaps he's just lazy and doesn't want to do the slightly harder job of teaching you compound lifts. Frankly I really don't see any value in a personal trainer that just walks you from the pec machine to the leg extension, and if I paid money for a personal trainer and he did that, I would feel scammed and even insulted.

I don't think exercise selection is as important as people make out, but bench/press/squat/deadlift is a fairly well accepted way to cover all your bases. They're technically interesting, allow you to work with heavy loads, and involve muscles of the body beyond prime movers.

(Anyway, good on you for getting into the gym)

So is my trainer just a schmuck who knows nothing and should be putting me on the basic 5x5 or whatever?

The training regimen that "works" doesn't always make the most money for the trainer. If they put you on a standard 5x5 linear progression program, after the trainer teaches you the lifts, you would quickly wonder why you were paying the trainer $$$ and you would stop paying them. Also, barbell's are harder than machines and most clients don't like doing hard things so the trainer may have learned that the machines have better client retention. Overall, the trainer has a bias toward programs that have more variety and that are more fun and less hard.

Gym question: why is it that online gym experts always recommend bench press, squats and deadlifts over any of the other machines in the weights room?

Probably efficiency of some combination of time and learning curve as those exercises hit a bunch of muscle groups, and build a foundation to transition to other exercises later on. I often skimp on leg exercises altogether as they make no difference to my attractiveness unlike big arms, capped delts, and 3D traps (strength/dominance signals that chicks love).

A common argument for free weights, especially dumbbells instead of barbells when relevant, is stabilizer recruitment and operating in a 3D as opposed to 2D plane. However, personally, I'm not convinced stabilizer recruitment is a plus, as it just means more imprecise targeting of muscles. What I like about free-weights (especially dumbbells) is the increased range of motion and greater flexibility in defining the start point, end point, and traveling path of the exercise. Using machines can be pretty awkward relative to free weights once the weights get heavy enough.

Another argument for dumbbells is symmetry, which I agree with. With barbells and machines oftentimes peoples' dominant sides are leading their weak sides. It's harder to cheat with dumbbells in this manner. Safety can also be a concern. It's generally easier to bail out of exercises with heavy weights using dumbbells than barbells.

However, personally, I'm not convinced stabilizer recruitment is a plus, as it just means more imprecise targeting of muscles.

I think this depends on your objectives: if your goal is to maximize something very specific like bicep size or a very specific motion for a sport (I've heard of swimmers doing some particularly funky lifts to recreate specific stroke mechanics), you are probably right. But for a random person looking for "fitness", those stabilizer muscles kick in for plenty of real-life scenarios: when you have to awkwardly lift something, or stumble on uneven terrain. When I lift I want stability because I'm really training for other sports, but your mileage may vary.

For anyone either unfit or inexperienced, really any (non-injuring, gradually ramped up) work is good.

Most women who go to the gym are afraid of "getting big", they want to look "toned", not "muscular", even though practically none of them will ever get past "toned" without steroids. Compound exercises with free weights are associated with bodybuilders and powerlifters, so most trainers simply don't offer them to women at all, maybe some hip thrusts in a Smith machine or some squats with a body bar on a Bosu ball. My trainer has also complained about women who avoid all leg exercises except those that isolate the glutes, even though there are compound exercises that really hit the buttocks.

Squats and deadlifts and bench presses and barbell rows and pullups are all you need if you don't have much time per session but have enough time to do many sessions. Machines are great when you are limited by a specific muscle or want to train the muscle at peak contraction or extension. For example, if your bench press (pecs + front delts + triceps) is limited by your pecs, you can follow it up with overhead cable triceps extension with a heavier weight that will fry your arms and lighter sets on the pec deck or even lighter, embarrassingly lighter, sets on the cable crossover machine that will test your pecs at peak extension.

Most women who go to the gym are afraid of "getting big", they want to look "toned", not "muscular", even though practically none of them will ever get past "toned" without steroids.

I knew one woman that this happened to - she was stocky and spent a summer lifting weights and wound up with stretch marks and broad shoulders. It ran in the family; her brother and father were extremely strong. She's the exception that proves the rule.

Is she single?

For most people most of the time, the compound free weight lifts like bench press, squats, and dead lifts are great because they have good coverage of muscle groups. However, some people need special work on certain parts because they're, for whatever reason, underdeveloped in some areas, or they're injured in a way that prevents them from doing the free weight lifts safely, or something. That's where machines, especially ones that isolate muscles like the leg extensions, can be very useful.

For commercial gyms, I'm sure some of the machine purchase is driven by the fact that lots of casual gym-goers find free weights intimidating and find the machines to be more comforting (despite the fact that these tend to be the people for whom the free weights would almost certainly be more beneficial than machines from a pure physiological fitness perspective), but a lot of it is also driven by the fact that they do have important, though usually niche and highly specific, roles to fill in building muscle through resistance training that free weights can't fill or don't fill as well.

Can't really say why your trainer is having you do machines specifically. Might as well just ask him.

Squat, deadlift, and bench press plus pull-ups and/or chin-ups are a pretty decent and somewhat fool-resistant training program. They will get most people stronger.

Unless you are focusing solely on powerlifting, it's generally a good idea to include a vertical press and upper body pull, probably a vertical and horizontal pull. So really at least five, probably six exercises. Bench honestly kind of sucks as an exercise, but everyone knows about it, so it's embarrassing to have a bad bench if you regularly lift weights. Weighted pushups and dips are probably better if you think you'll never get asked how much you bench.

The basic reasoning for free weight over machines is that to lift a free weight you have to control all six degrees of freedom, whereas for a machine you only have to control one. Squats also require you to practice loading the whole kinetic chain, rather than just the legs as in a leg press or leg extension. In terms of "functionality," that has much better carryover to general physical preparedness. Cables are somewhere in-between, but harder to load heavy enough to provide a near-maximal load for a healthy average-sized adult.

Machines sell memberships and do "work," especially for hypertrophy, but it's very rare to see someone get legitimately strong on only machines.

Epistemic status: Uncertain

My lifting plan is centered around barbell work with some dumbbell accessory movements. I don't use machines at all. The reason to use free weights rather than machines is that you activate all kinds of smaller stabilizing muscles that aren't hit when using a machine because the machine guides the path of the weight for you. The advantage to using a machine would be to target your larger muscles in a very specific way.

My guess would be that gym owners invest in machines because:

  • They are safer; you can seriously hurt yourself on a bench press if you don't have a spotter and don't have safety rails set up. You can't hurt yourself with a chest press machine.
  • They're more user friendly; any schmuck can walk into a gym and immediately start using a machine rather than having to futz around with getting the settings right on a power rack and making sure they have good form etc.
  • They're more sexy; newbies love using machines

But no, you don't actually need them and in my opinion you're better off not using them ... but really as long as you're getting in the gym consistently and pushing yourself hard you will progress (especially at first); the specifics aren't really that important.

The reason to use free weights rather than machines is that you activate all kinds of smaller stabilizing muscles that aren't hit when using a machine because the machine guides the path of the weight for you.

Why do so few people take this to its logical conclusion and use dumbbells instead of barbells for presses? Dumbbells require more stabilization than a barbell does. At some point you get too strong for the heaviest dumbbells at your gym, but most people never get there.

To add to the other comments, it's far easier to injure yourself with dumbbells rather than a barbell. For DB bench you need to know how to fail safe and be ready to do it even at the limits of exertion, for BB bench you just need to not drop the bar on yourself. They also exert more force on your shoulders in a dangerous position, particularly in incline bench, which is good for training stabilizers but also carries a higher risk if you ego lift.

Requiring more stabilization means you're usually lifting less weight, meaning that in turn, there is less absolute load placed on the muscles. Though the precise mechanisms that drive adaptations aren't that well understood yet, load very definitely is one of them.

Why do so few people take this to its logical conclusion and use dumbbells instead of barbells for presses?

  1. Because you can lift more total weight with barbells, which means your entire kinetic chain is doing work. If you can bench press 150 LBS, you may only be able to dumbell press two 60 pound dumbells for a total of 120.
  2. It's easier to do progressive overload in small increments with barbells. At most gyms, you have to increase the total dumbell weight by 10 pounds each increment. That can be a really big jump. With barbells, it's easier to add 5 pounds or even 2.5 pounds at a time.
  3. Many people do both, since each has its benefits.

This is actually indeed a reason why some people use dumbbells instead of barbells for presses. Increased range of motion, increased engagement of stabilizers, and greater flexibility to perform the exercise how you feel most comfortable. A popular one is dumbbell bench instead of barbell; some claim it allows them greater ability to recruit the pecs (as opposed to the triceps and anterior deltoids dominating too much in the barbell bench). However, it comes with tradeoffs—dumbbells can more quickly deplete your grip strength and subtly tire you out through stabilizer recruitment. People have different preferences and Goldilocks zones for what feels just right.

I use dumbbells for presses! I can't get my friends to do it with me. It also has the added bonus that I probably won't be able to crush myself to death with them. It's great!

I guess it must vary by gym? I would guess there are at least as many people in the average gym using the dumbbell rack vs the barbell benches.

I mentioned above that I think bench press is a sub-optimal exercise, I probably should have specified barbell bench press. I do think there is a place for both bilateral and unilateral exercises though. A lot of real world horizontal pressing involves using both arms. I also think the average gym has 100's as the heaviest dumbbells which is not really that much above the level of all the people you see barbell benching 225. You do see 120's in some gyms, but in most gyms big enough to have them you see people benching at least 315 on the barbell.

For overhead press I am actually pretty certain I see more people using dumbbell vs barbells.

Edit: Also, which muscle do actually get more engagement in dumbbell bench? If your lats are fully engaged aren't your scapula constrained by the bench anyway? Substantial loading of the rotator cuff during the bench press doesn't sound like a great idea.

It's easier to unrack a barbell than to kick dumbbells into the starting position with your knees. Otherwise dumbbells are the shit, a 40kg barbell is nothing, while 20kg dumbbells tucker me out every time.

I completely forgot not everyone has dumbbell hooks. It's a real game changer not to have to kick up heavy dumbbells.

smaller stabilizing muscles

I think I would argue that it’s not that you can’t target the “smaller” muscles in the body with a machine, it’s that a machine that travels in a fixed path requires less firing of multiple muscle groups synergistically.

For example, for a high bar back squat, the prime movers are the quadriceps, but the synergists include the gluteus maximus, which is a “big” muscle group. The hamstrings are considered a dynamic stabilizer in the movement but should not be “small” and should be trained to fire in coordination with the quadriceps. A leg extension removes much of the requirement for the coordinated contraction between the quadriceps and hamstrings.

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