Fitness facilities and free weights
8 September 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Back in ancient times, when I was coming up in the progressive resistance game, all of our weight training was done with barbells and dumbbells and the vast majority of our exercises were done standing up on our feet. Nowadays the vast majority of exercises done by the typical fitness club member are performed on machines and done sitting or lying down. These well-intentioned fitness adherents are the worse for it. Machines primarily mimic isolation exercises that zero in on a particular muscle to the purposeful exclusion of its neighbor muscle. This makes for great ease and comfort by the user and if high repetitions and light poundage are used a pump is achieved wherein the muscle is engorged with blood and the machine user really feels it. Great for business and no messy plates or trip hazard barbells lying aroundjust be sure and wipe off the seat pad before sashaying over to the next effortless pump machine. The problem, as least insofar as results are concerned, is ease and comfort, isolation and pump, sitting and lying are in all a direct contradiction to the mission statement of progressive resistance training: make it hard! Progressive resistance training is about struggle. Sorry about that but as Ive said before the human body does not reconfigure itself in response to sameness. The human body does not reconfigure itself in response to ease and comfort. The human body reconfigures itself only in response to stress of some type or another. We self-inflict stress in the form of effort and tax muscles past their current momentary capacity in order to trigger an adaptive response.
The irreversible trend in fitness since those prehistoric days of yore has been one long uninterrupted march towards finding ways to make things easier so as to attract new clients. The harshness of barbells and dumbbells and standing up and not sitting down and sweating and grunting are too much for the average person to deal with. Those with enough disposable income to join a fitness club or spa are super-susceptible to the well-oiled sales pitch made by the perfectly coifed, tanned and fit fitness professional who tells potential clients with the smug easy assurance of the purposefully ignorant exactly what the client wants to hear: you dont have to grunt or sweat or grit your teeth, (that could be potentially injurious) machines are actually more effective than free-weights and sitting and lying are just as good as standing visa and MasterCard accepted and one of our staff of personal trainers can be hired for only $85 per session if you commit to ten sessionsAfter six months or so when the bamboozled client has made zero gains, the enthusiasm peters out and they stop going to the club even though theyve prepaid a year in advance. A few more years slip by and the client adds another 15-20 pounds of lard and they become desperate once again to do something about it. So they hear about a new facility that offers a new line of equipment and they go pay a visit and here comes a new fitness sales master with a new angle on fitness you can bet itll be easy and you can bet itll be expensive and you can bet itll involve some elaborate machines.
Machines provide a fitness facility gravitas the hardest sell in the world is to have normal civilians walk into a plain-as-milk barbell and dumbbell facility populated with freaky looking goons with muscles galore its intimidating and the potential client feels uncomfortable and out of place. Of course if the potential client took a long minute to ponder the fact that the muscle freaks were congregating at the facility with the fewest machines and guys everywhere were standing up doing weird exercises that involved tugging and pushing on super heavy barbells and dumbbells, perhaps theyd make the correlation that muscle growth is directly attributable to basic exercises done with great intensity using free weights. Sure there are flat benches and incline benches in such barebones joints but by in large the guys whove figured out how to build significant amounts of muscle and raw strength (the only goal of progressive resistance training) are relegating maybe 20-30% of total training time to sitting or lying and machines are few and far between; likely a cable pushdown/crossover apparatus, maybe a Smith Machine or perhaps a dusty nautilus chin/dip that the owner bought for $200 (original price $2,900 in 1976) from a pal going out of business. Lots and lots of fitness facilities are eternally going out of business so there are always deals to be had on cumbersome, out of date equipment.
Bottom line? Ease is to be avoided when it comes to growing muscle. Seek out compound multi-joint exercises that require we move a free weight over an extended range of motion. Isolation exercises are akin to desert: they may taste good but a diet built exclusively on isolation exercises is (in the end) unsatisfying and unhealthy. Go for heartier fare, try stick-to-your-ribs free weight exercises that satiate the appetite and tax muscles in all three dimensions of tension. If after eating you free-weight entre you find you have room left over, by all means eat a desert. But never eat desert first and relegate it to a small percentage of overall intake does that stretched analogy make sense?
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