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