Weights Equipment - Do You Need The Machines?
There are a lot of people who will argue that muscles grow better when using machines. However in my opinion free weights are a lot better for building muscles, as they offer a lot more flexibility in your workout.
Muscle building machines keep your body to very restricted movements. This can cause your muscles and joints to become stressed from doing the same thing over and over. What lots of people don’t realize is that when you are using free weights, your body will naturally compensate for the stress without you realizing it, keeping your joints and muscles safe from harm.
Free weights also allow you to build up more muscles. When you are lifting with free weights, you need to be able to also stabilize that weight. This makes sure that not only the muscle you are trying to target gets built up, but also all the supporting muscles for that exercise.
For example take the squat against the leg press. In the leg press you are just exercising the quadriceps, but that is about all the muscle that you are building up. When you do a squat, you need to keep yourself stable as you do the lift, so you are using a lot of other muscles in your body to help do this.
People think that these muscles you use for stabilizing aren’t important, and don’t add to muscle mass. But think about it, if these are the muscles you use when building up the target muscle, then these stabiliser muscles help support the target muscle. You need this support in order to help build your muscles.
Also this way of building muscles is a lot more natural. It means that not only will you have big large muscles, but you will also be strong. I’ve seen a scrawny guy lift up more weight than a bodybuilder with lots of muscles, and it was embarrassing just to which. Simply this scrawny guy may not have had the muscle bulk, but his muscles were all working together to lift the weight.
Now a lot of people advocate that machines are safer than free weights. Although it’s true that it’s harder to screw up on a machine (because you are not free to hurt yourself however you like), the reality is they are about as safe as each other. When lifting using free weights you need to make sure to start off with lighter weights and get the proper form and technique, before moving on to heavier weights.
Machines do have their place in building up muscle mass, especially as a supplement to free weights to help add variety to your workout (or when you just don’t want to put in the concentration for free weights).
Overall however free weights are more effective at building up muscle fast, and allow you the flexibility to build up a lot of muscles at once, rather than restricting you to one muscle as machines do.
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