Equipment Overload

On Christmas Eve, my sister, Jess, and I went to a nearby fitness center to get our lifting on. Jess was basically following my lead as we did five upper body moves - some dumbbell, some machine, some cables - and a few ab exercises. Close to the end, she looked all around the gym at the rows and rows of machines and equipment, then turned to me and asked, "Sooo, is what we did the best way to lift weights? And if it is, why are all these other machines here?"

Jess is a Columbia graduate and - ivy or not - probably one of the smartest people I know, so I find it a little bit disturbing (on behalf of the fitness industry) that all of this is so confusing to her, and others. Shedding some light on questions like these is precisely the reason I started this blog.

Most gyms are composed of two types of resistance training equipment: machines and free weights.

Machines are designed to control the body's path in space to make the movement easier and enable us to isolate a muscle or muscle groups. Most machines are selectorized and have a weight stack with a pin that moves to select a given load, thereby facilitating quick weight changes from person to person. This is typically the circuit equipment that takes up the bulk of space within a fitness center. Most people are familiar with the leg extension, leg curl, inner/outer thigh, chest press, and other weight machines. These machines are perfect for beginners who are new to movement patterns, individuals who are overweight and for whom body weight exercises are less appropriate, those who have trouble lying down to perform exercises, or intermediate to advanced lifters who want to isolate one muscle or area of the body. The biggest disadvantage with weight machines is that they only perform one movement per machine...meaning you spend $3,000 bucks on one machine that works your quads, $3,000 on one that works your hamstrings, and so on.

Conversely, free weight equipment does not dictate the body's movement path, so using it requires more integration of the body's muscle groups and stabilization at the core. Free weight equipment consists of bench/shoulder presses, squat racks, cable equipment, dumbbells, barbells, etc. This is the space in the gym where we see rows of plain benches, racks and racks of dumbbells, and weight plates that can be loaded on to barbells. As the name "free weight" implies, there is plenty of freedom here to create your own exercise for a certain body part, and to compile or select the proper weight amount.

To elaborate on this point, consider a leg press machine. You can do one thing on it: a leg press. Now consider a barbell. You can use this one piece of equipment to perform lunges, squats, deadlifts, shoulder press, biceps curls, and much more. Thus, the advantage with free weights is the ability to exercise many body parts using the same equipment, provided you know what you're doing (for many, unfortunately, this is the disadvantage). A lot of people have free weights in their homes because they are less expensive than machines and store more easily, but can still be used to exercise the entire body.

So to further answer Jess's question, we used a sprinkling of the available equipment because we wanted to exercise the upper body and I chose these five exercises to make sure we exercised each muscle group. We used the machine assisted pull-up for back and the cable tricep pressdown, which enabled us to use the pin weight stack to switch back and forth quickly without fuss over plate-loading. We used free weights for biceps curls, shoulder presses and chest flies, which enabled us to do the same exercises at the same time. We could have done free weight exercises for back and triceps, and machine exercises for biceps, shoulder, and chest, and still achieved the same goal.

It's kind of like saying, "So you made rice for dinner. Why didn't you make barley or pasta or cous cous?" I guess it just depends on what you're hungry for...