http://www.elitefts.com/documents/i_hate_fitness.htm

All decent enough reasons I think. I found this interesting:

Reason #1:
...
No matter how you look at it, you get more bang for your buck doing the traditional, feet on the floor exercises. No machine can mimic the amount of stability it takes to walk a heavy squat out of a rack. Likewise, if you’ve ever struggled to lockout a heavy push press, you know that there isn’t any seated shoulder press machine that even comes close. The bottom line is if your goal is to get stronger, build muscle, or lose fat, most machines are a waste of time.

Good machines—the ones that most fitness places have but rarely use—are those that involve multiple planes of motion and have the feet in contact with the floor. These can be purchased from any major manufacturer.

Id agree with his last bit - I think he is talking about the Jones Machine which does exactly that; but at £1600 a pop Id say thats why many dont have it over here.

Dont really agree with the rest of his stuff though as he doesnt really provide anything aside from the typical nonsense people who dont know how to use machines to there advantage say.

Walking out of a squat? How about the fact that without walking out of it - youll get more reps targetting your legs without the waist of energy?

Why cant someone just get a little experiment set up using a EMG machine and prove all this bollox that people say without any evidence. Like they did in the decline bench press experiment

kp1512 wrote:the decline bench press experiment

What was that mate?

The exertion verus effeciency arguement for free weights and machines is a well troden path and I have to say that I tend do start with free weights, the go onto machines as this to my mind is safer and more productive, but one cannot say that machines are not valuable althouh we would all agree if the choice was one or the other, free weights win.

There is a paper somewhere [which I cant find right now] that lists all the movements for the bodypart which recruited the most muscle fibers using an EMG machine. For chest Decline Bench hits the entire chest region the most out of any movements both on a free bar and a smith.

If anyone has it - link it here - but ill try and get it.


What I think also has merit is that we all have different size of bodyparts. Ive thought about this for a while now and even spoken to a few peeps across the pond on how to do this propley; but someone needs to create a system where they call people in charge like £250 or £500 and put there entire body through a session and measure there muscular contractions against an EMG machine. This would be a truely tailored service and would allow every single person to have a training plan design for their body type.

Actually - it may have to be more than that - maybe £500-600 over x session as a decent EMG machine is around £2500-£5000 and youd probably need to do a few movements per bodypart at a decent effort to get a realist output. Depending on how profitable you want to make it - without bloods you could probably even charge £250 and go the other way.

Follow that up with detailed blood work and you have a top service I tell you.

Id pay for that!

I've seen this EMG report too on muscle activation % although I don't remember whether it includes secondary/acillary muscle activation for the same exercise which would more accurately meaure this. For example Decline may also use more Tricep activation over Flat Press for example so you'd want to subtract the Tricep activation from Chest activation for both Flat and Decline to get a true figure.

Free weights are cooler. I can feel hardcore and look condascendingly at people using machines.

What more reason do you need than that?