Hundreds of people ask the same question everyday – which is more effective at building muscle? Machines or free weights?
In this article I’m going to give you some reasons why free weights are more effective at building muscle than machines. In the future I may post an article why machines are more effective, but it isn’t likely as I am a big fan of free weights.
Free weights is just a general term for any weight that doesn’t have a set motion. Example of free weights are dumbells and barbells. They can be used for a whole range of exercises to target many different muscle groups. Contrasting to this, machines are usually just made for one muscle group, or even for just one exercise.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, they build whole body strength, and gives better gains. This is because your body is supporting the weight. To keep the weight in a fixed position (even if you’re not moving it), you still have to use smaller muscle groups to support it. This is called the stabilizing muscles, and can go a long way to increasing the overall look of your body.
A second reason to use free weights over machines, is that they offer a wide range of exercises. Unlike machines, which only offer one or two exercises for one or two muscle groups, free weights can be used to build most muscle groups with countless numbers of exercises.
A third argument for the use of free weights is that they may actually reduce the risk of injury. This is because with machines, large amounts of weight can be applied, whereas if you can’t get a dumbell up, you simply can’t lift it! For example, on a chest press machine, you can pile on 100’s of Kilograms of weight, way too much for the average person. Trying to lift this lead to injury and strains. If this scenario was done using freeweights, the user wouldn’t even be able to lift the weight up, meaning he cannot injure himself. (This is assuming that no rack is being used).
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