Why Free Weights?

Just wrote this piece for my health club. Hope you enjoy:

1. Mimic Daily Movement Patterns- Show me a machine that can mimic carrying grocery bags, picking up your little ones, or putting an object onto a shelf in your pantry. Simply put, machines don’t mimic activities of daily living (ADLs) as well as their free weight counterparts. Machines are less like real-life activities, since they typically provide a great amount of support in a coordinated fashion and don’t challenge you the same way free weights (dumbbells, barbells) do.

2. Body Position- Take a look around at the strength training machines in the gym. Do you see the same thing I see? Almost everyone it SITTING DOWN! We know we’re too sedentary as a society and need to get off our butts and start engaging them. The best exercises (squats, push-ups, pull-ups to name a few) are all done without sitting and offer incredible benefits. One of the reasons we lose so much of our glute (buttocks muscles) function as we age is because we’re sitting on something we should be using. You sit all day at work, in the car on the way here, and at home on the couch. Why are you sitting at the gym?!?!

3. Diversity- Free weights take up less space, are A LOT less expensive, and require minimal maintenance. In addition, machines are typically specific to one exercise. For example, too many people flock to the seated chest press machine. Sure it may improve upper body pushing strength, but not nearly as much as dumbbell bench presses. Furthermore, I can create a routine of over 100 exercises performed with those dumbbells. How many exercises can you do on that chest press machine- one! ‘Nuff said. Ditch the machine and pick up a pair of dumbbells for a more challenging, diverse routine.