The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For most people most of the time, the compound free weight lifts like bench press, squats, and dead lifts are great because they have good coverage of muscle groups. However, some people need special work on certain parts because they're, for whatever reason, underdeveloped in some areas, or they're injured in a way that prevents them from doing the free weight lifts safely, or something. That's where machines, especially ones that isolate muscles like the leg extensions, can be very useful.
For commercial gyms, I'm sure some of the machine purchase is driven by the fact that lots of casual gym-goers find free weights intimidating and find the machines to be more comforting (despite the fact that these tend to be the people for whom the free weights would almost certainly be more beneficial than machines from a pure physiological fitness perspective), but a lot of it is also driven by the fact that they do have important, though usually niche and highly specific, roles to fill in building muscle through resistance training that free weights can't fill or don't fill as well.
Can't really say why your trainer is having you do machines specifically. Might as well just ask him.
Squat, deadlift, and bench press plus pull-ups and/or chin-ups are a pretty decent and somewhat fool-resistant training program. They will get most people stronger.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link