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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.
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.
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