Are machines at gym any good?

jsmoke

jsmoke

jsmoke

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I do a few miles on the treadmill them use about 4 or 5 machines. I try and do 4x10 reps increasing the weight one notch each time.

Is this worth doing, apart from the first few sessions, I don't feel any gains. Maybe this is a diet thing though or maybe my age or maybe just the machines aren't good for bulking. I'd rather strength though than bulk if I had to choose.
 
Strength -> working your muscles with heavy weights to get slow muscle growth

Bulking -> eating much more than your muscles can use so you put on quick fat gains

Initial training gives the fastest muscle increase, past that it's slow and you have to push hard for years and years to make gains that add up.
 
Hotwired said:
Strength -> working your muscles with heavy weights to get slow muscle growth

Bulking -> eating much more than your muscles can use so you put on quick fat gains

Initial training gives the fastest muscle increase, past that it's slow and you have to push hard for years and years to make gains that add up.
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What about machines Vs free weights?
 
My gym doesn't have any but when I have used them in the past I always feel the pulleys are offering some form of assistance. Ain't nothing helping you get that barbell off the floor.
 
Machines can often be better than free weights for certain things or in certain contexts, although their quality can vary wildly. Muscle gain is a painfully slow process assuming you're progressively overloading over time (and if you're actually challenging yourself you won't simply be able to add more weight a notch every day and hit every rep) and nutrition is permissive for growth insofar as you can't build something from nothing. For natural athletes strength and size are largely correlated and it's more just a case of you get good at performing in the rep ranges you mostly train in.
 
I've always think of it as free weights should be your main lifts and machines for a bit of accessory work.
As a few others have mentioned machines can vary quite widely in how they actually feel (weight wise) Design and maintenance can mean your not getting a consistent weight for the whole rep range. One set of cables in our gym you can feel this quite obviously.
 
Depends what your goals are, in general free weights are better for building overall functional strength but machines are great for isolation work and really hammering the muscle.

I was always a free weight or nothing guy up until the last year or 2 where I've started mixing in some machine work, it's worked great for an overall increase in strength as it allows me better focus on muscle groups that may be slacking when using free weights but other muscles can pick up the slack.
 
jsmoke said:
I do a few miles on the treadmill them use about 4 or 5 machines. I try and do 4x10 reps increasing the weight one notch each time.

Is this worth doing, apart from the first few sessions, I don't feel any gains. Maybe this is a diet thing though or maybe my age or maybe just the machines aren't good for bulking. I'd rather strength though than bulk if I had to choose.
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Cardio first other then to warm up is not going to be so helpful really. You likely wont be getting too much benefit out of the weights after.

You would be better off defining what you want to achieve and then working towards that with a workout plan that fits those goals.

Also a great post/topic for the gym rats thread :D
 
Syla5 said:
Cardio first other then to warm up is not going to be so helpful really. You likely wont be getting too much benefit out of the weights after.

You would be better off defining what you want to achieve and then working towards that with a workout plan that fits those goals.

Also a great post/topic for the gym rats thread :D
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Why cardio first not helpful?
 
jsmoke said:
Why cardio first not helpful?
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The question back is what do you think you are achieving by doing it first? ;)

For the record, i do cardio on a separate day.

You are tiring yourself and really a warm up/stretches at lower weights would be better. Cardio at the end would make sense for a final fat burn/keep the heart pumping a bit more.

A proper expert may be able to add more. :)
 
SideWinder said:
The question back is what do you think you are achieving by doing it first? ;)

For the record, i do cardio on a separate day.

You are tiring yourself and really a warm up/stretches at lower weights would be better. Cardio at the end would make sense for a final fat burn/keep the heart pumping a bit more.

A proper expert may be able to add more. :)
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You could be right, I am napping a lot more atm.
 
jsmoke said:
Why cardio first not helpful?
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Its partly goal dependant and partly the effect that cardio has on your body in terms energy usage and how that will impact weight training performance. Its not as beneficial to lift weights once you have burned through your energy because the intensity you can put in to that lifting is less and it will have a lesser effect on the body.

Lifting weights is good for your health as well.
 
In principle - free weights are the best for the ultimate compound exercise. A compound exercise is basically a movement where you're using more than one muscle group at a time.

Machines are better for isolation, i.e. focussing on a specific muscle group.

A blend of both is good, however, focussing only on machines will mean you miss out on a lot of of core stabilising movement and inter-muscle adaptation. Remember our bodies like to move like bodies, and how they are designed to move, locking yourself into a fixed movement is unnatural - depending on the quality of the machine of course which allows a little move flexibility in the motion of the movement. That said, nothing can beat free weights for the ultimate support to your body. Take a squat or a deadlift, both are actually very natural motions that our bodies are used to, then look at the variations, lunges, bent over rows, etc,.. they are all functional movements that you do regularly without realising.

Ideally you'd want to be doing at least 60% of your workouts based on compounds (the more the better) - compounds also burn more calories and add much more benefit to your overall strength, triggering more hormonal response. Compound movements carry over to more exercises in the long term, and offer more athletic benefit (and I don't mean you need to be athletic) it just carries over more benefits than just doing machines.

You won't build up a good solid core, and foundation for your body using only machines, if anything you can get away without ever using a machine and still have an amazing physique, but more importantly core strength and stability which is far more important that aesthetics (IMO).

you can also do cardio with free weights - you just have to create a circuit (i.e. a set of exercises you do one after another), and do half a dozen cycles of that circuit and it's akin to running 3km in terms of calories burned, but also hitting the cardio / fat burning zones.
 
I think Freefaller is spot on, asnd that's exactly what my PT told me too. Personally I do use the machines when either I'm not 100% confident in a particular free weight based move (E.g. a proper squat!) or I'm wanting finer grain control of the weight, with free weights your form is really important where as the machines kinda handle that for you.
 
Machines are a great tool if you’re not comfortable with a particular movement. The newer ones will also show the correct tempo too.


That being said, I can’t stand Life Fitness stuff - everything feels like it’s attached to a rubber band, not a weight. I.e. you get the most resistance at greatest extension


Techno gym stuff works best for me.



In reality, it isn’t a one or the other scenario. A mix of both is ideal, and understanding how you get the most of them is key.
 
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