Podcast 27

Free Weights vs. Machines: Which One Is Better?

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SHOW NOTES

Amy and Bryan settle the age-old debate of which one is better: free weights or machines? Learn about some common misconceptions about machines that prevent people from getting the fitness results they want in the timeframe they want, and why free weights can lead to reduced strength gains and a higher risk of injury.

• Spoiler alert: You’re not going to find any free weights at any of the Exercise Coach locations and for good reason.
• There is a significant strength training advantage to using machines over free weights and it has to do with the purpose of exercise.
• The results we want from exercise are muscle and neurological adaptations, and that happens when we expose the body to the right type of muscle loading for the right length of time. You can get those results from free weights, but they come with tradeoffs, whereas machines minimize what you need to learn so you can focus on what matters most.
• Your body doesn’t know or care if you’re lifting a dumbbell, or you’re working on a weight machine, or an isokinetic high tech strength machine, lifting a bag of dirt, or bodyweight exercises. It all has to do with muscle activation and fatigue.
• The Exercise Coach uses machines because it helps people focus and feel confident in what they are doing without having to worry about the risk of injury.
• Using a machine will position yourself specifically to do that exercise. You won’t have to worry about the variables and skills associated with using free weights.
• Machine weights create an on-ramp for anyone to begin exercising and democratize high-intensity strength training.
• Research shows that high intensity strength training is safe for anyone and targets what matters most, which is age-related skeletal muscle loss. When we effectively and optimally work our muscles, every system of the body gets better as well.
• Using biomechanically correct machines is the easiest way to introduce people to high-intensity strength training. Many of the conventional exercise methods don’t make it possible for the vast majority of people to safely and confidently engage with high level strength training.
• One of the objections that people will bring up against using machines has to do with stabilizer muscles, but it’s actually an argument against free weights. The requirement of balancing free weights prevents you from actually applying the optimal stimulus to your muscles.
• Every muscle in the body can act as a stabilizer muscle. Machines can help you target those muscles directly, instead of relying on free weight exercises to hit them as a side effect.
• There is no such thing as muscles specific to “real world” applications. There are just muscles, and research shows that strength gains generated from machines do transfer to other types of activities.
• At the College of New Jersey, researchers found that people using Exerbotics machines developed strength that transferred to free weight and calisthenic exercises as well. The reverse is not always true. There is a lot of skill involved in moving free weights around, that it doesn’t necessarily transfer to other areas of life.
• Strength Coach clients often report back that they have noticed that everyday activities like carrying the groceries or golfing get so much easier, which are great examples of how strength changes everything.
• People don’t want to spend a lot of time at the gym and they don’t have to. With a science-based approach to strength training, people can get the results that matter most to them in brief and safe training sessions.

The reason that we like machines versus free weights is we feel that they give the most people the best chance of applying the right type of muscle loading to all the muscles of their in the safest and most effective manner possible.

Welcome to the strength changes, everything podcast, your host with you today, our exercise coach, co -founder and CEO, Brian Sagan and me exercise coach franchisee, Amy Hudson. We’re here to give you information about living a healthy lifestyle. So today, Brian, we’re going to talk about free weights. Versus machines when it comes to strength training is one really better than the other. And. Why when you walk into an exercise coach, don’t you see any free weights anywhere sitting around in the studio?

Brian, let’s hear your thoughts on this.

I guess you gave away my answer, right?

Spoiler alert.

Apologize for that.

Yeah, you don’t. It’s something we probably take for granted, right? We’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. The exercise coach franchise has been around for 10 years. We’ve got 120 locations right now open across the country.

and we’re the fastest growing personal training company in America, and you won’t find a freeway. at any one of these locations. So I appreciate you saying it in that way. That was pretty, pretty interesting. But you don’t find a freeway. And so yeah, the answer, the reason is, yes, we think that there’s a significant advantage to using machines versus freeways.

And this is something that’s been a debate in the industry for a while, but one that we settled on a long time ago. And it’s not really that it’s not really that you can’t get a result with one you know versus the other it just has to do with our overall. which has to do with what we’re trying to do when we exercise. What’s the purpose of exercise? So just even again, as probably I do too often, but to answer the question, I want to take a step back from the question a little bit and ask a question. What is the purpose of exercise?

And when we think about the purpose of exercise, Exercise is just the intentional application of demand of physical exertion on the body that we do in order to hopefully stimulate the body to produce an adaptive result. These are the results that we want from exercise. And that happens when we expose the body to the right type of muscle loading for the right amount of time. And You can get a result using a free weight. Many athletes all over the world do it every day. But there are some trade -offs and some challenges.

And what we like about machines is It really minimizes what people have to learn in terms of skills and balance and manage during exercise so that they can focus all of their attention and effort and energy on what really matters. And that is quality muscular loading to a point of deep, meaningful muscular fatigue in order to serve as a stimulus to trigger the body to produce these beneficial adaptive responses. in reality your body doesn’t know or care if you’re lifting a dumbbell or you’re working on a weight machine or you’re working on an isokinetic high -tech strength machine or you’re lifting a bag of dirt or doing bodyweight exercises it doesn’t really matter it has to do with muscle activation has to do with do we stimulate activate and fatigue as many of the right muscle fibers as possible to get all the results that we want from exercise. And so we use again machines to help people focus and be confident and feel free of the risk of injury. so that they can perform quality muscular loading at a high intensity of effort, not have to worry about controlling speed, controlling movement, controlling form as much and focus more just on getting the types of great results that we’ve talked about on the podcast before.

Certainly. And that makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the idea that sitting on a machine, like a chest press machine is going to position your body very specifically to do that exercise versus using a free weight and making sure that free weight moves exactly through space where it needs to be to make sure your muscles are in the right alignment and your shoulders are the right height and your elbows are the right height and your back isn’t arching. Free weights have an awful lot of variables that somebody who may be new to exercise may not understand or accidentally do incorrectly and then get injured. Whereas a machine takes a lot of those variables away. And like you were saying, focuses the whole experience on that stimulus that we’re going for.

So that makes a lot of sense. One thing our clients really like about the exercise coach studio when they walk in and they, they tell me this all the time is the fact that everyone in the studio, if you look around and you see various people exercising, that may be various ages, various strength levels, various ability levels. Everyone looks the same doing the exercises as they sit on the machines, they’re working hard, but. the way they look doing the exercise is all the same and nobody’s showing off and nobody’s doing it wrong and nobody’s over here struggling. It’s a very kind of uniform experience for people and it takes some of the intimidation away. I would say going through it.

Yeah, that’s a great point. It creates really an on ramp for anybody, regardless of their current fitness level or experience with exercise, it really democratizes high intensity, high level strength training, because that’s really what we’re doing. This is science based, high intensity strength training. But what the research and our experience shows is that high intensity strength training is safe for anybody. And it’s the most effective way to target what matters most. And that is the age related loss of skeletal muscle is the window to the rest of the body.

When we effectively and optimally work our muscles and and cause them to improve and grow stronger, every system of the body gets better as well. And using well designed biomechanically correct machines is actually the most efficient way to introduce people to high intensity strength training, high effort strength training. And again, anybody can really do that. But when you’re using dumbbells and barbells and jumping off of things and throwing things around, Not just anybody can do that. Some people get away with it and they get good results and they enjoy what they do, but a lot of the conventional methods that are used out there really don’t make it possible for the vast majority of people to safely and confidently engage with high level, really optimal strength training.

So what you’re saying, Brian, is I can throw away the box of dumbbells that we bought 25 years ago off of Amazon that are sitting in my basement, collecting dust and just join an exercise coach near me.

You can do that and get all the results that matter most to you from just two 20 minute workouts per week. Absolutely. And one of the things people bring up though, related to machines and free weights is this objection that you’re not working certain muscles. When you use machines, people will talk about. sometimes they’ll call them stabilizer muscles, for example. So I wanted to just address that one, because I know somebody out there is thinking that, you know, because when you use the free weights, they say you really have to, to work hard to balance the weights.

And we say exactly, that’s what we see as the problem. It’s actually distracting you from the most effective loading of the muscles in the most effective application of a high level of effort, because you’re being distracted by the need to balance the weights, it actually pulls the rug right out from underneath you in terms of your ability to apply the most effective stimulus. And I would argue this is true for the novice and for the most advanced elite athlete or strength trainer. And you don’t have to perform these types of movements to work what are called stabilizer muscles by some people. I actually make the point and argue that there’s no such thing as a stabilizer muscle, meaning that every muscle in the body can act as a stabilizer or what’s known as a mover. So for example, someone might say doing dumbbell bench press, you’re going to work the rotator cuff, but you’re not going to work the rotator cuff muscles as much if you do a machine bench press or chest press.

And what I would say is we’re going to address those muscles in a more effective way. than just balancing dumbbells by actually performing rotator cuff exercises and actually isolate and specifically target and load those muscles with, again, a high quality, high effort stimulus to get the best results and not just rely on the instability of a dumbbell exercise to try to get some benefit to the rotator cuff. So again, we would say that those terms really, mover and stabilizer are context specific. All the muscles of the body can be strengthened most effectively if we isolate them, target them, load them, apply a high level of effort and do that across all the muscles of the body.

Oh, thanks for that. That makes a ton of sense. And I get that. I think that makes sense. And of course, that’s what we want. We want to properly and most effectively work each of the muscle groups in our body and not in a way that is only in the stabilizing capacity, but effectively and thoroughly each one without the risk of injury or as safely as possible too.

So yeah, that makes a great deal of sense. Thanks for explaining that.

And then the final question, I guess, that I hear when people bring up the machine versus free weight debate is just, will the strength that you generate using machines transfer? Is there a transfer of strength to what they’ll call real life activities? Now, again, I’ve got a little different take on this. I started out as a strength and conditioning coach and have applied really the same philosophy since those days. So for the last 20 years, I think when you look at anatomy and physiology and biomechanics and the science of strength training, I land on the conclusion there’s no such thing as a quarterback muscle or a basketball muscle or anything like that. There’s just muscles and muscles just

contract to generate force and what we’re doing with strength training is improving someone’s potential to use a certain muscle. And then they need to go and and practice the skill of different sports and movements to refine and optimize their ability to apply force using those muscles in certain movements. But what research shows is that yes, the strength that you generate on machines does transfer to other types of activities. So for example, at the College of New Jersey, Some researchers completed a study, they’re actually using exerbotics machines. So the machines that we use at the exercise coach, an isokinetic type of technology. And what they saw was that when people develop the type of strength that they develop using exerbotics machines, that strength actually transferred to the free weight exercises and not only free weight exercises, but other more calisthenic type movements, so push ups, etc.

So people got stronger on the free weights from doing the machine exercises only. And not only that, but they could do more push -ups. So absolutely, it’s real strength. It’s not just strength developed on the machine, you don’t just get better at generating force while you’re sitting on an exerbotics machine, you’re actually making your muscles better. Now, on the other side, I wouldn’t say that’s as true. When we’re performing movements with dumbbells and bodyweight exercises that involve a lot of skill, you can actually get much better at them, even though you may not be developing the muscles as much.

There’s actually a lot of skill involved in throwing weights around and doing different calisthenic type exercises.

Interesting. No, I think a lot of our clients would agree and can attest to that in their own life is that getting your muscles stronger through full body strength and interval training, such as we do at the exercise coach does translate into a lot of other areas that they feel stronger, biking up a hill, lifting groceries, golfing, all these other surprising things where all of a sudden they feel so much easier to do than maybe the last time you did it because you’ve added all this strength in your muscles. And. Again, it’s one of those little examples of how strength changes everything, but it truly does. And that’s quality of life stuff right there.

And it’s just so simple. That’s really largely what we’ve been trying to do at the exercise coach for many years and I think have done a pretty good job of is just trying to remove barriers and eliminate anything that’s unnecessary because people are busy and most people don’t want to spend a bunch of time at the gym or spend a bunch of time working out and they don’t have to with a science -based approach. that applies the science of strength training, people can get the results that matter most to them from brief, infrequently performed strength training sessions that are safe. And it just translates to better health, better quality of life, better ability to move and enjoy doing the things that you love doing most. And you don’t have to waste a bunch of time working out five days a week or more for the health, fitness and lifestyle results that you want.

Absolutely.

And if you are just joining us on the strength changes, everything podcast, we go into this topic in much more detail in the first five episodes. So episodes one through five of the strength changes, everything podcast, we really break down all of the research behind the approach to exercise. delivers the most profound benefits for health, strength and longevity, and all of the research and the science behind it. And so if you’re curious on some of that science and some of that background, I encourage you, if you haven’t listened, to go back and listen to the first five episodes of the Strength Changes Everything podcast. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Brian, it was great talking with you as always, and we will see you back next time on the Strength Changes Everything podcast.

Have a great day, everybody.