I signed up for a two week free trial at my local gym today and used the weight machines. It was fun! If I sign up for a membership I’ll get a training session to make sure I’m using the machines correctly.
I think this was shared here before but worth again. A little on those machines go a long way, especially for women!
In dose-dependent analyses, men derived the greatest mortality benefit from engaging in 3 sessions/wk of muscle strengthening PA with a 14% lower hazard in all-cause mortality; women derived equivalent or greater benefit by engaging in only a single muscle strengthening PA per week (Figure 2). For women compared with men engaging in 3 sessions/wk of muscle strengthening PA, there was ∼2-fold greater relative reduction in all-cause mortality.
And the machines, particularly ones with cables, can build a high level of strength without using any barbells, which are more efficient but only slightly better and only with experience. Machines are safe and easy to use, and almost any meathead in the gym would be happy to help you out if a question arises. The three things you must do: show up regularly, put a moderate or high level of effort into each workout, and generally try to make the next workout more difficult in some way than the last workout which was similar, usually by increasing weight but sometimes by increasing repetitions or other things.
The only other factor is the design of the workout - when do you use what machine on which day? This takes a little experience, but beginners will gain much strength doing almost anything. A trainer will likely recommend a workout design, and there are a million web resources. The workout design should be changed every few months.
Highlighting this and the overwhelming importance of this:
I’m strongly on team Play! It is fun! And having fun helps accomplish that first on the list:
Enjoy yourself and the future hike!!!
We did another fairly rigorous hike today and my legs are definitely getting stronger from just hiking alone. Weights should help even more. I’m not sure I actually have trouble gaining muscle given my age and gender. I just haven’t been a consistent exerciser. Having the trip as a motivation is really helpful.
A question on the weight machines. For an upper body workout, should one start with the machines that mainly affect one set of muscles–say triceps or biceps–and then move to the ones that affect multiple muscles–say chest presses? Or the other way around? Don’t know if I expressed that clearly.
It doesn’t matter much. If you are new you might choose to have two strength training days a week, and do upper body exercises on one day and lower body exercises the other day. Also effective (both better and less boring) would be to divide into pulling and pushing muscles and do these for alternate workouts. With that, you would do chest, quads and triceps one day (pushing) and back (including rows or deadlifts), biceps and hamstrings the other day (pulling).
Thanks!
I might have slightly misread your question.
Say you did an upper body workout. In general it is slightly better to do exercises that use a lot of muscles before exercises that target one muscle. This is because complex exercises share loads widely and small muscles tire before larger ones. (Instructors are fond of calling these “stabilizer muscles” but this is only true some of the time). Once the small muscles are exhausted, you have to decrease loads or the bigger muscles have to work harder.
For many people who use machines, the order does not much matter. Machines take away some of the balance component of getting a weight into position, which tires smaller muscles.
For many years, many lifters thought barbells were much better than machines because of this. They are better, but the difference is more modest because machines have improved, are easier on joints, and studies show machines can still build great strength. Newer machines like reverse hypers, cables and pelvic thrusts use movements hard to do with weights. Newer machines also credibly mimic rope climbing and squats and Smith machines can be used to safely do some row, squat and deadlift variations.
TL; DR: Machines can do most of what barbells do. The order for beginners is not very important. Weightlifters love discussing unimportant things anyway. You will get strong quickly just by lifting twice a week if you eat enough and work fairly hard. Remember, the goal is not just to increase muscle size and strength, but the following also happens:
- Bones become stronger because bone strength is proportional to applied stresses, much more in those who lift. (Wolff’s Law)
- Ligaments and tendons become stronger and more resistant to injury, and often more resistant to arthritis (the plural is arthritides) and range of motion limits
- The body makes more mitochondria. This improves your ability to use oxygen, and keeps you younger on a cellular level through several mechanisms
- Exercise improves blood flow, skin and heart function. It lessens unhealthy fat around organs, and has salutary effects on hundreds of conditions
- People often stay the same weight, by losing fat but gaining muscle
- Increased strength improves quality of life, allowing you to do much more as you age, and be more resistant to falls and fractures
Huh. I have always thought big compound exercises first then do the supplement exercises that focus on particular individual muscles. Partly because the big compound ones are the ones that matter most. Partly because the supplement ones can isolate the weakest links for extra work. And partly because the risk of significant injury from overdoing it is less that way.
My own preference also is for the time saving of pairing a push alternating in sets with its complementary pull, using the rest cycle time of one to do the other (bench/row or dip/pull up on rings for examples). But as established strength training is more the addition to my biking/running/other cardio focus, not my main course.
Possibly stupid questions regarding push pull using with free weight exercises lower body - What is pull for legs? What are the complementary pairings? It seems to me that quads and hamstrings are both used during the big exercises that hit lower body, but I think I must be missing something very basic.
Yes and no. Every lift has a concentric (muscle shortens to generate force) and eccentric component (lengthens, but the antagonist shortens) - so works more than the advertised muscle, as you say. It is easier to think of the part of the lift that goes against gravity.
Primarily quad exercises, like leg presses, squats and leg extensions are considered “push” (describing the tough part of the exercise working against gravity). Primarily hamstring exercises like lying leg curls, deadlifts and glute-ham raises are considered “pull”. It makes sense if you picture or do the exercise.
The classification is impure and occasionally arbitrary, but it is a decent way to organize things. Other approaches include push-pull-legs where there is no such problem because most leg exercises have their own day. Because some people like to do many exercises, another option is to do upper body-lower body-push-pull-legs which allows for a wider choice of exercises while keeping daily volumes reasonable.
To further clarify things, consider a preacher curl. The tough slog is using your biceps to raise the weight against gravity. You use your triceps to lower it - but everyone considers arm curls a biceps exercise since it is tougher to go against gravity. Though you could just drop the weight and not much use the triceps (especially if using bumper plates and platforms). You can often lower weights more than you can raise, just because you are not working against gravity; on the order of 15% fir some exercises.
It makes sense from the perspective of what my upper body is doing? But I guess to me not from the leg POV?
I guess that makes more sense to me. Dead lift and squats seem too overlapping to have them potentially on consecutive days, one as a pull and another as a push day. Again not relevant for how I do my thing but wanting to understand. Thanks.
Yes, this is more what I was getting at. Given my goals, I think I won’t worry overly much about order at this point. Establishing a consistent habit seems more important for now.
Pushing and pulling - you can think of the component of the lift which works against gravity.
The ratio of which leg muscles are worked depends on the position of the load. A front squat works the quads more than the posterior leg compared to regular squats since the load is more anterior.
But it might be easier for you to just look at the EMG data., which suggests how much different muscles work for various lifts.
That does help. Thank you.
Simplistically deadlift is much more hamstring predominate, and squats more quads, which are the biggest and most straightforward antagonists moving the upper leg relative to the hip, with much closer muscle activation in regards to glutes and adductors. I guess that makes deadlift push and squat pull? And if doing them as push/pull split sets one should definitely do more front squats to minimize the overlap as much as possible?
In my sort of application, doing push pull as time saving “supersets”, no rack, and not that heavy, matching deadlift with goblet squat would be the closest to it? But still seems like I’d need more rest between them than doing push pull superset upper body exercises?
Or on reread you said
So I am hopeless at having it make sense to me! I mean I get it from a perspective of pulling the weight off the ground or pushing it farther away from the ground. And of course many exercises and movements fall out of easy push pull classification … Probably I am just overthinking it!
I’ve been getting in more bike rides this week and it occurred to me why this push pull bit confused me … riding my bike my down stroke is clearly a push action, and is clearly mostly using my hamstrings … snapped in and my up stroke, is clearly pulling the pedal up, and using mostly quads. So it seems natural to me to think of hamstrings as push and quad as pull - even though it seems to be the reverse with dead lift and squat.
I have an engineering background so can picture the force vectors in my mind. It also seems obvious to me from doing the exercise which muscles hurt more later, but it is certainly somewhat arbitrary - you use lots of muscles on big lifts. However, it isn’t that important, it is just a way to divide up muscles to allow greater rest between workouts. The link showing which muscles are activated using signal strength gives an approximate experimental ratio, but you probably aren’t going to do much better.
it just bores me. would rather ride a bike or take a walk, and observe my surroundings, for exercise. or swim in a pool. way more fun than repetitive motion in place.