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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2134 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:

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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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