I recently visited a new health club in our area. The architect and the interior designer had performed beautifully. Travertine and granite, stainless steel and glass; the only things more beautiful were the machines. Softly gleaming enamel contrasted with the padded cushions of the seats and body rests. The adjustments for weight changes, seat and pad heights were all automatic, controlled by the key card each member carried; insert it into the machine and you’re set. We’ve finally come down to this, a labor saving device on exercise equipment.
The free weights, barbells and dumbbells, long the stepchild of the modern health club were relegated to a small back room. The manager proudly remarked that there was a machine to exercise every body part. And that is precisely the problem. We have lost sight of both why we exercise and most importantly, how to do it.
When asked why they are at the health club, most people answer “To get fit”, “Lose weight”, “Stay healthy”. This all distills down to being better able to perform our ADL’s- the activities of daily living. Something our methods of exercising are drifting farther and farther away from.
The simple activities of our daily lives, e.g. walking down the street, swinging a tennis racket or a golf club, walking up the stairs are really very complex acts. Multiple muscles and joints move under the direction of our nervous system to create motion, something not improved upon by deconstructing the movement. We are taught to exercise individual muscles and perform isolated movements and then expect our bodies to function well as an integrated unit. It doesn’t happen that way-you “play the way you train”.
This state of affairs was a long time in coming. The American health club had its inception in 1893 in Chicago at the World Columbian Exposition. Eugen Sandow entertained the audience with feats of strength, lifting heavy iron weights and displaying his physique. The favorable response led to him opening a string of “physical culture studios”- the first health clubs. These bastions of masculinity were dimly lit arenas of sweat and grunting, frequented by “bodybuilders”. As the benefits of strength and cardiovascular training became known to the population at large, the facilities evolved in creature comforts and fancy equipment to attract an ever more upscale clientele.
The growth of machines also had a practical application for club owners. In a large urban facility such as N.Y., a club may have 80-90 personal trainers on staff. They range from highly educated professionals to moonlighting college students trained at the facility. Taking a client through a session with free weights requires a great deal of expertise, moving from machine to machine is a lot easier. The client is pre-positioned to move along a pre-determined path of motion, the more advanced machines digitally revealing the calories burned and the cumulative pounds lifted. The trainer needs less expertise, moving from machine to machine eats up the hour, and the process seems so much more scientific. While some of the machines are useful there are problems. Virtually none of them move us through the “motions of life”, the motions we do as we conduct our day, the readouts can be as much as 60% inaccurate, and in many cases place unnatural strains on our bodies. There is one additional problem.
We generally sit at work for much of the day. Then we drive to the club to exercise and burn calories. Upon arrival we to sit again. But exercise done standing uses more calories then seated workouts and utilizes many more muscle groups as we maintain our balance and stability. There is also more integration with our nervous system.
Let’s look at a typical regimen of leg exercises on machines and then contrast them with a free weight workout. Beginning with the seated calf machine, we press our feet against a levered bar, principally working our soleus and gastrocnemius muscles. Moving to the leg extension station, we sit and lift a weighted bar as we straighten out our knee joints, and then do the reverse movement at the leg flexion station. We have added the hamstrings and quadriceps to our achievements. Kneeling we next kick back our legs against a metal plate to work our gluteal muscles in our buttocks. Finally, we open and close our thighs against the resistance of padded cushions on the thigh adductor-abductor machines.
What have we done? We’ve spent a lot of time accomplishing movements of our body parts in motions not found in life. (e.g. there is no motion of our lower extremities that requires the isolated contractions of the quadriceps to straighten our knee joint.) And most importantly, we have used up far less calories then we could have. Additionally we have been given a false sense of accomplishment. Lifting 50 pounds seated at the shoulder press machine is very different from doing a standing shoulder press with the same weight. Let’s walk over to the free weight section.
Pick up a barbell and place it on your shoulders. We will now do a classic exercise, the SQUAT. Keeping our torso upright, we bend both the knees and hips, lowering ourselves toward the floor and then up to a standing position again. (As in sitting down in a chair and getting up again). We don’t even have to go all the way down, depending on our conditioning less then a full motion is fine.
In this one motion we have used all of the muscles that we worked in the prior string of machines as well as multiple stabilizing muscles in our core and back. We have also used more calories. Compound exercises, such as this one, are the most beneficial. They use multiple muscles, reinforce natural motions and burn more calories.
There are situations where machines are beneficial. For the novice exerciser, they provide a good basic framework for learning the motions of the various workouts, from which you can progress to free weights. Cable machines, since they do not lock you into tight paths of predetermined movements allow a more natural range of motion. Individuals recovering from injuries and surgeries such as rotator cuff repair can also benefit from their use.
Free weights have far more benefit. When doing the same exercises, they use more muscles, burn more calories, improve our position sense and better prepare us for the natural motions we use in our daily life. For most of what we do in the exercise room, the machine age is over, time to set yourself free.
Written and submitted by: Jerold B. Millendorf, M.D., N.A.S.M.M.