Right, but if you’re lifting a kid you’re not executing a true to form dead lift or military press et al. As mentioned before, if you’re incorporating push and pull movements in your workout, you’re working out your entire body. Your entire body. This can be done with machines. Free weights don’t call into play some magical, secret muscles.
Oh, I read them, but it’s painfully obvious that you haven’t read a single thing I wrote.
You’ve already shown yourself to be woefully ignorant on this subject, as well as recalcitrant to correction and belligerent, so there’s not much point in arguing with you. The only reason I’m responding is for the benefit of the others reading this thread.
The easiest way to refute your argument is to ask you to test it. Try free squatting a weight you know you can leg press or hack squat. Do some pull ups and see how different they are from a pulldown at your body weight. Compare a military press on the smith machine to a free standing press, or even better, a handstand pushup; I’ll be nice and let you use a wall for balance. You won’t be able to handle the same weights, your form will break down quickly, and the next day you’ll ache in all those secondary and support muscles you insist [del]aren’t important[/del] don’t exist :rolleyes:
I’ve done both machine-based workouts and free weight workouts. I dropped machine exercises because free weights better develop strength and power, as well as agility , balance, and attention to body position. None of the latter are addressed by any machine exercise. This is not just my personal opinion, but is backed up by quite a bit of research and empirical evidence.
I personally don’t do just free weights, but also work some gymnastic skills and body weight exercises. The program I more or less follow, CrossFit, has advocated occasional workouts that deliberately use objects which are awkward to handle, and which therefore more closely simulate real-life movements than even free weights; slosh pipes, sand bags, large tires, water bottles, heavy medicine balls, etc. The movements needed for handling these are very similar to those needed for free weights, but are extremely different from machine exercises.