Free Weights vs Machines in Your Exercise Program? It’s Your Dime…

Should you use free weights or machines in your exercise program? If you have spent much time in gyms, you will recognize this as one of the Great Questions. While there are definitely uses for both in your program, I recommend that you use free weights more often than machines. By using free weights you will exercise the whole body more efficiently and use the body in a more natural way.

One of the downsides to machines actually doubles as a selling point. Machines are arguably safer to use; the weights travel along a fixed path and you are pressing or pulling from a braced position. While this can make for a safer lifting experience, you’re not getting all that you can from the exercise. For example, let’s look at squats versus the leg press. With the leg press, you are using all of the muscles in your legs as you raise and lower the weight. When squatting, since you have to stabilize the load while making the weight go up and down with your body, you are using almost every muscle from the neck down. While this entails more work, you get greater benefits. Not only are you strengthening the “helper muscles” along with the target areas, you are burning more calories by recruiting the extra muscles. Surprise: you’re working harder and smarter!

Free weights also give you the opportunity to strengthen your body through familiar movements. Unless you live in a very complicated world, picking a box up off of the floor does not entail strapping cables to the weight, running the cables through a pulley system and then pressing on foot pedals with your legs from a braced position. No, you simply squat down, get a good grip and lift. While there are certainly safety concerns, these can be easily addressed by a qualified trainer like me. There are very few “dangerous lifts,” and even these can be performed safely with proper instruction and good technique.

Machines do have their advantages! They are excellent for rehabilitation work where a very high degree of control is needed and they are used extensively for isolation work (targeting one specific muscle group). They also have the time advantage. It is much faster to move a pin on a weight stack than to load and unload a bar!

In most exercise programs, my clients will spend 80-90% of their time with free weights and 10-20% of their time on machines. This allows the client to train his or her entire body for most of the session while still allowing time to address specific weak points.

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