Exercise Machines are Not Fraud

Why Are We Here

The other day an article appeared on my twitter feed. In the accompanying tweet, writer Hamilton Nolan summed it up by saying “Exercise machines are fraud.” I read the article and got annoyed; it was smug in tone and wrong in substance. Of course, an obnoxious article coming across my timeline is not a notable occurrence. We are, after all, living in the Engagement Economy, an environment in which internet platforms have trained us implicitly, if not incentivized us materially, to seek attention above all else.

I generally try to limit my participation in this kind of thing; I don’t think anyone, least of all me, will benefit much from me giving my two cents. And yet, here we are. I’m making an exception in this case for a few reasons: First, many of the other criticisms of this piece I saw were right, but for the wrong reasons. They correctly identified some of the flaws of the article, but still perpetuated common misconceptions. And perhaps more significantly: This essay is one which, a decade or so ago, I would’ve enthusiastically agreed with, if not written myself. It is the product of a milieu which I watched and participated in for a long time. So I’m going to tell you exactly what it gets wrong. But first, we must establish some history.

21st-Century Training

Sociologists have long observed that exercise varies along socioeconomic lines. And it’s not just the amount of exercise; different types of exercise tend to be viewed as more palatable by different groups. In 2005, Carl Stemper wrote the following in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport:

“Like golf and tennis, the patterns in weight-training fit the dominant classes’ tendency to establish distinctions by restraining physical domination in their sporting practices. Weight-training is about building strength, a traditionally or stereotypically masculine and working-class trait. … [T]he upper middle class also avoids excessive displays of strength. For many upper-middle-class men, bodybuilder-type bodies appear too vulgar, represent an overemphasis on the body (vanity and wasting time), and suggest overcompensation for a wounded manhood.”

Bodybuilding — which is, broadly defined, an exercise and diet regimen undertaken with the primary goal of developing a lean, muscular, proportional physique — emerged as a distinct discipline just before the turn of the 20th century in Europe. It has had various surges of mainstream popularity in the western world, one of which began in the US in the late 1970s. Arnold Schwarzenegger, then bodybuilding’s biggest star, became a household name after the success of Pumping Iron (1977). He would transition to Hollywood megastardom, with his Austrian accent and heroic physique becoming his signatures. Other action stars of the ’80s, like Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude van Damme, followed in a similar mold.

But by the ’90s, the mass appeal of bodybuilding had waned. Approaching fifty years old, Schwarzenegger was still muscular but far slimmer than in his bodybuilding prime, and was taking on less brawny roles, like in Junior (1994) and Jingle All the Way (1996). The sport of bodybuilding hadn’t found another crossover star. Perhaps it was just the nature of the arms race (forgive the pun); in an effort to outdo those who had come before, competitive bodybuilders turned towards more advanced drug regimens, resulting in champion physiques so extreme that the average Joe could no longer see them as aspirational. The Mr. Olympia contest, held annually since 1965, is the pinnacle of professional bodybuilding. Schwarzenegger won from 1970 to 1975, then again in 1980. But among Lee Haney, winner of the contests from 1984 through 1991; Dorian Yates, winner from 1992 through 1997; and Ronnie Coleman, winner from 1998 through 2007; none achieved anything like the popular recognition of Schwarzenegger. This mainstream shift away from musclemen was also apparent in Hollywood: the top-grossing action films in the first years of the ’90s were Total Recall and Terminator 2; at the close of the decade it was Godzilla and The Matrix.

But in the world of fitness, everything that’s old will one day be new again. Philosophies go in and out of style — yesterday it was minimalism, today it’s maximalism, etc. Of course, collective knowledge progresses over time, as in any field. But as far as popular conceptions of exercise go, most “new” ideas are just old ones with a fresh coat of paint. And around the turn of the 21st century, a new weight training culture was beginning to foment with the help of online forums. These message boards, which predated the mass social media platforms of today, allowed communities to form around niche interests, each with their own customs, their own consensus reality, and their own micro-celebrities.

The year 2000 saw the founding of CrossFit, which would eventually have a massive influence on the fitness industry, as well as a popular internet forum. Combining elements from gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting, and powerlifting, CrossFit first became a hit with law enforcement and military personnel in Santa Cruz, CA, but remained a niche phenomenon for the better part of the decade. CrossFit emphasized a “back-to-basics” approach with minimal equipment: barbells, kettlebells, pull-up bars, and gymnastic rings. CrossFit gyms, referred to by its practitioners as “boxes,” largely contained these simple implements rather than exercise machines.

In 2005, when CrossFit still had only 13 affiliate gyms, the BeachBody company released its P90X program. It was heavily marketed via infomercials and featured high-intensity exercise circuits which could be performed at home. P90X became a huge hit, selling more than 3.5 million copies by 2012. Its emphasis on intensity differed from earlier infomercial-based fitness phenomena, like the Thighmaster, which was promoted on the basis that it was easy to use while doing something else. The success of P90X helped set the stage for CrossFit’s continued growth, with the latter expanding to 8,000 affiliate gyms by 2013.

Meanwhile, online fitness communities continued to grow and multiply. Bodybuilding.com, whose forums would become extremely popular, was founded in 1999. The fitness subforum of 4Chan, /fit/, was founded in 2008, just a few months before reddit’s r/Fitness, which now boasts 11.4M members. And the pendulum was beginning to swing back in popular culture, too. Zack Snyder’s film 300 was released in 2006, and much was written about the lean, muscled bodies of its stars. The image below is often used to illustrate changes in Hollywood’s portrayal of the male physique during the early 2000s, as comic book-based films began to dominate the box office. On the left is Hugh Jackman in his first appearance as Wolverine, in X-Men (2000). On the right is him playing the same character in The Wolverine (2013).

According to Google Trends, 2013 was also the peak of search activity for CrossFit. The actors in 300, as well as in other superhero films like Man of Steel (2013) and Batman vs Superman (2016) were trained by Mark Twight, founder of the Gym Jones training facility. The “300 workout,” as described to Men’s Fitness magazine, was a circuit consisting of various bodyweight and barbell exercises, to be completed as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t have been out of place in any CrossFit gym. Twight has described his training philosophy by saying “appearance is a consequence of fitness.” The idea that the best way to produce a good-looking body is to increase athletic performance, and that aesthetic improvements would come about indirectly as a result, was key to the mindset of people like Twight and the CrossFitters. 

As it continued to expand, CrossFit needed subject matter experts to consult and advise in each of the training disciplines it melded. When it came to the barbell exercises often utilized in CrossFit workouts, they found their man in Mark Rippetoe.

A gym owner, strength coach, writer, and former competitive lifter, Mark Rippetoe was officially associated with CrossFit only from 2006 through 2009, but its rapid growth gave him a much larger platform than he’d ever had running a gym in Wichita Falls, TX. Rippetoe had published the first edition of his book Starting Strength in 2005, along with co-author Lon Kilgore. The subtitle of that edition was “A Simple and Practical Guide for Coaching Beginners.” Rippetoe clearly saw his primary audience as trainers rather than exercisers. The book was successful enough to lead to a 2nd edition, published in 2007. The subtitle for that edition was changed to “Basic Barbell Training,” which indicates a slightly different idea about who would be reading it.

At 320 pages, Starting Strength 2nd edition is a textbook. Its length is primarily devoted to proper technique, biomechanics, and coaching methodology for a handful of barbell strength exercises: the back squat, the bench press, the overhead press, the deadlift, and the power clean. It also includes a relatively shorter section concerning the structure of a beginner training program based around those exercises. This is the “Starting Strength program,” which involves lifting weights three times per week (doing squats each time), sticking to sets of 5 repetitions, and (for trainees on the young and skinny end of the spectrum) drinking a Gallon of Milk a Day (“GOMAD”). The other main principle of the program is “linear progression:” increasing the weight lifted in every exercise, every session, until that’s no longer possible.

The program spread through internet word of mouth, and was discussed and adopted by many who had never read the book. It was frequently recommended to beginners on /r/Fitness, and was the obvious inspiration for the Stronglifts 5x5 website and beginner program, created in 2007. Stronglifts slightly repackaged the content of Starting Strength in an SEO-friendly way, and also found purchase among message board power-users. The 3rd edition of Starting Strength, weighing in at 347 pages, was published in 2011.

The ideas of Starting Strength weren’t especially novel, but Rippetoe never claimed them to be. He often cited Bill Starr, the lifter, author, and coach who wrote The Strongest Shall Survive: Strength Training for Football in 1976, as a mentor. Starr’s work was informed by his time as a competitive weightlifter and an employee of York Barbell, which put on the first national powerlifting meet in 1964.

But Starting Strength was more than just an instruction manual for lifting; the book and its author also put forth a more holistic worldview. Rippetoe presented barbell training as an antidote to the ineffectual trends gripping the rest of the fitness world. He looked at society and saw people who were too soft to do anything physically hard. He thought that to move the world of fitness forward, we had to look backward, and rediscover the no-nonsense methods of the old-school lifters, like Bill Starr. He looked down on any alternative approach to exercise, whether that meant jogging, yoga, or simply different styles of weight training, and accused their practitioners of seeking an easy way out. He scoffed at the pursuit of “six-pack abs,” and dismissed any form of training that prioritized appearance rather than strength as contemptible vanity. He preached that in order to qualify as an “adult male,” one needed to weigh a minimum of 200 pounds. 

The following quotations from Rippetoe sketch out this worldview:

“People seem to have acquired the idea that they have the inalienable right to stroll through life without either having sweated, picked up anything heavy, worked hard, or eaten less than they wanted at every meal. This approach is, of course, wrong. And it has resulted in a lot of expensive, unattractive, and entirely preventable problems amongst people who seem puzzled about why things aren't going well.”

“Only people willing to work to the point of discomfort on a regular basis using effective means to produce that discomfort will actually look like they have been other-than-comfortable most of the time. You can thank the muscle magazines for these persistent misconceptions, along with the natural tendency of all normal humans to seek reasons to avoid hard physical exertion.”

“You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong — you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advocated by all the national exercise organizations is that they fail to recognize this basic principle: the body best adapts as a whole organism to stress applied to the whole organism. The more stress that can be applied to as much of the body at one time as possible, the more effective and productive the adaptation will be.”

“There are few things graven in stone, except that you have to squat or you're a pussy.”

When I visit the Amazon page for the 2nd edition of Starting Strength, an info box helpfully notifies me that I purchased this item on November 13, 2008, which is a nice benchmark for how long I’ve been doing this stuff. But, to come back at last to the ostensible subject of this essay, someone else seems to have encountered Rippetoe’s work around that time, too: Hamilton Nolan. Nolan was publishing pieces online which name-dropped Rippetoe while advocating an old-school approach to fitness as early as 2009. In this 2011 article, Nolan refers to Rippetoe as “America's foremost weightlifting coach,” which is a bigger stretch than you’re likely to get from a yoga class, but I digress.

Nolan has been writing essentially the same thing about exercise ever since then, which he acknowledged in a follow-up tweet. At a certain point, it seems like he stopped citing Mark Rippetoe or Starting Strength by name, but the philosophy has been consistent: you should get strong like the men of the past, by lifting barbells. You don’t need anything fancier than that; in fact, any other approach but this one will be less effective at achieving your goals (whatever they may be); and moreover, if you have different goals or want to achieve them through different means, it’s probably because you’re a pussy.

This is not to accuse Nolan of plagiarizing Rippetoe; as I’ve established, none of this stuff is ever wholly original. But it’s to point out that, for one thing, Nolan is offering Rippetoe’s ideology without any of his accompanying technical depth; and for another, that ideology is not much more than the now-familiar exhortation to “RETURN TO TRADITION,” popular in the past few years among the online dissident right. Rippetoe is a self-described libertarian, and it’s easy to spot the conservative streak in his fitness writing. He believes in self-reliance and grit developed through hard work. His public views on gender and sexuality could not be described as “woke.”

CrossFit reached a high point of around 15,500 affiliated gyms in 2018. However, by 2021, that number had fallen to 9,400. Some of that reduction can be attributed to COVID-19 forcing gyms to close. However, many gyms disaffiliated from CrossFit due to the increasing controversies surrounding the company. The program’s early association with police and military members remained part of its culture; while each CrossFit affiliate is run independently, the parent corporation has maintained a militaristic, right-wing bent. Its leaders faced multiple backlashes in the wake of their public statements, which included anti-LGBT positions as well as criticism of the 2020 George Floyd protests. The latter was the last straw for Reebok, which had been a major sponsor.

Hamilton Nolan, meanwhile, is a leftist. Much of his non-fitness-related writing is about the labor movement — and to be clear, I have no bone to pick with his labor writing. But I do see some irony in someone like him espousing this philosophy of exercise, which rests largely on traditionalism and appeals to nature. Publications like Slate, in which his recent piece appeared, or Gawker, where he had a long-running fitness column, would seem far less likely to feature the writings of Rippetoe, or CrossFit founder Greg Glassman, or any number of popular right-wing twitter accounts who teach their acolytes that we must go back to the old ways because good times make weak men, and so forth.

But that’s also what has made this a productive well for a writer like Nolan. When building a brand, whether for a consumer product or the “personal brand” of a content creator, it’s helpful to establish a lane. “RETURN TO TRADITION” — but for The Left! — is a lane. And in the Engagement Economy, brashness and hyperbole provoke responses, which brings in more eyeballs, which means better business. Rippetoe clearly understands this, as does Nolan. And so the latter has managed to keep finding publications to run his takes on training, which consist largely of the warmed-over opinions of other, less-progressive writers. To those of us who got our start in these online communities, reading Nolan on the subject is like reading Rippetoe in translation; rather than the dialect of a Texas conservative, it’s a New York redditor.

Barbells and Dumbbells

“So,” you might be thinking, “that history is all terribly fascinating” (or awfully boring, as the case may be), “but what about the specifics of the argument? What’s wrong with what he said? Are exercise machines bad, or not?” Thank you for keeping me on track. So, to refocus ourselves, let’s recap Nolan’s argument. He inveighs against exercise machines for being an expensive waste of space. He says that the gym-industrial complex lies to us all so that we’ll purchase these machines, which we do not actually need, and in fact provide an inferior workout to a more rustic approach. He makes three references to exercising with a sandbag as resistance rather than using a machine.

Let’s get the really obvious objections out of the way first. As many other people noted on Twitter in response to Nolan’s piece, even if one prefers to do all their cardio workouts outdoors, sometimes that’s infeasible or unsafe due to e.g. weather conditions, so machines like the treadmill provide a useful solution. Aside from that, the vast majority of Nolan’s audience who will come into contact with the machines he describes will do so in the context of a gym facility to which they pay a membership fee, rather than by purchasing such a machine outright. He quotes the price tags of several machine varieties as though those have any relevance to gym goers. This attempt to shoehorn an anticapitalist bent onto his traditionalist argument is gallingly stupid, but also probably drives up engagement.

But that’s not the part that really interests me. What I want to answer is the question of whether using machines actually means getting an inferior workout, and how exactly we ought to measure that. But — and you’ll just have to bear with me a bit longer here — we first have to answer a more basic question: what is a machine? The answer may seem obvious at first, but I think it’s important to investigate more closely.

It’s not necessarily clear in this particular essay, but Nolan, like Rippetoe, is not actually opposed to exercise equipment in general. He clarifies as much in this twitter exchange:

Barbells are not an exercise machine, therefore Nolan’s criticisms of exercise machines do not apply to them. We can see, then, that Nolan is not a bodyweight-training-only purist. That type of dogmatic approach would also be flawed and quite limited, but at least it would demonstrate an internally consistent principle. But venerating barbells while scorning “exercise machines” does not.

There are many variations of the barbell, but today the term most commonly refers to a metal implement roughly 7 feet long and 45 pounds in weight. The central shaft is knurled to facilitate grip, and the sleeves on either end spin freely and have a two-inch diameter. Weight plates of various denominations can slide onto the sleeves in order to produce the desired load. Barbells were being used in Europe by the middle of the 19th century, although the barbells of that time had fixed spherical weights at the ends. Barbells would later be made with hollow spheres, which could be filled with sand or lead to vary their weight. In 1902, the Milo Barbell Company was founded in Philadelphia, PA, and would soon begin selling plate-loaded barbells similar in form to the modern version.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I will highlight an important fact about barbells: they are a specialized piece of exercise equipment. They do not serve a purpose other than the one for which they are manufactured. So if we believe it’s better to do things “naturally,” why lift barbells rather than rocks, or heavy furniture, or whatever objects happen to be within reach? Proponents like Rippetoe or Nolan could tell you it’s because barbells are ergonomic — they are designed to be grasped by human hands — and they are precisely adjustable.

The latter is very important on account of one of the most fundamental principles of weight training: progressive overload. The story of Milo and the calf is often cited as the origin of this principle. Milo of Croton was a renowned Greek wrestler circa 600 BCE. Legend has it that Milo became strong by carrying a calf daily from its birth until it became a full-sized ox. As the calf increased in size and weight, so did the strength required to carry it, which meant Milo got stronger. That’s progressive overload: We get stronger not by lifting the same load time and again, but by lifting steadily increasing loads. And in order to intelligently plan an exercise program, we must be able to prescribe specific weights which increase (or decrease) as needed to create an appropriate challenge. This same logic points to an advantage that barbells have over bodyweight-only training as well. Without equipment to either add external load or provide counterweight, the only way to scale the difficulty of a bodyweight movement is to vary leverage by changing positions, which is challenging to do with precision.

So these are a few good reasons to use a barbell rather than random objects or bodyweight. “But,” you might now ask, “what about dumbbells? Those are also old-school. Are those better or worse than barbells?” This is an astute question. Dumbbell-like implements have in fact been used much longer than barbells; the halteres, handheld weights used by athletes in ancient Greece, are one antecedent. Modern dumbbells are typically made with fixed weights, although plate-loaded varieties exist as well. So why not stick with the even-older ways? Why not use dumbbells instead of barbells?

The Rippetoe approach doesn’t scorn dumbbells; it views them as a useful tool, but one of unquestionably secondary importance to barbells. The Rippetoe follower would justify this by pointing out that barbells provide more stability compared to dumbbells, which also makes them easier to load and thus more convenient to use. In a barbell squat, the single exercise given the most emphasis by Rippetoe, the weight is placed on top of the shoulders. The lifter bends the hips and knees until the former is lower than the latter, and then they stand up straight again. Doing the same movement with dumbbells is much more awkward. If the weights are held at the lifter’s sides, they’ll often hit the floor before a full range of motion is achieved. Holding the weights in the hands as opposed to balancing it across the shoulders would tax the lifter’s grip; if the grip gave out first, the movement would effectively become a grip exercise rather than one for the lower body. Trying to squat with dumbbells resting on top of the shoulders is similarly difficult. 

So yes, dumbbell squats can be accomplished. But the inherently less ergonomic dumbbell version dictates that less weight can be used compared to the barbell version. And, all other things being equal, we want to lift as much weight as we can, because a heavier weight means a larger stimulus, and a larger stimulus means we get stronger. This is important to understand; while this philosophy views a more difficult task as a better one, the dumbbell squat is not more difficult because it requires the relevant muscles to produce more force, but because it’s simply awkward for the human skeleton to negotiate.

It’s similarly instructive to look at other exercises and their variations. Take the bench press, for instance. Just about anyone who sets foot in a gym these days will see a bench press being performed, but it’s a much more recent invention than some of the other movements discussed here. The sport of weightlifting, which has been competed internationally since 1891, consists of two movements: the snatch and the clean and jerk. (Until 1972 it also included the clean and press.) So while weightlifters do not directly compete in the squat, both of the lifts they do compete in involve a squatting motion; thus all competitive weightlifters train the squat. They do not typically train the bench press, however. The bench press didn’t come to its current prominence until after the sport of powerlifting, in which the squat, deadlift, and bench press are competed, began in the 1960s. This is one reason why bodybuilders in the early years of the sport — Eugen Sandow, for instance, considered the father of modern bodybuilding — had relatively little chest development compared to lifters in later eras: They weren’t benching. So what’s the difference between the barbell and dumbbell versions of the bench press? Rippetoe addresses this at the beginning of Starting Strength’s chapter on the bench press:

“The dumbbell version of the exercise, which actually predates the barbell version due to its less specialized equipment requirements, involves a greater amount of instability, which is inherent in having two separate chunks of metal waving around in the air over your chest. … [It is] performed on a simple flat bench, and the lifter has to take the dumbbells out of the rack or off the floor, get into position on the flat bench, do the set, and then get off the bench with them after finishing it. … Because dumbbells are not tied together between the hands as a barbell is, dumbbell bench presses require more active, conscious control, are harder to do, and are therefore less commonly done. The problem with dumbbell bench presses is that the equipment provides its own limitations in a progressively increasing program. Most dumbbell racks are not graduated in fine-enough increments due to the expense of having twice as many dumbbells as most gyms have the money or space for. Plate-loaded dumbbell handles that would permit such loading are not widely available … and with heavy weights, getting on and off the bench becomes such a large part of the task of completing the set that the logistics are a giant pain in the ass.”

In short, even though the barbell version involves more specialized equipment, we do it because it’s more stable and more convenient. You may begin to see where I’m going here, but let’s continue down this path. Proponents of so-called “functional fitness” might say that the squat is a natural human movement pattern. We do it often in our everyday lives, as well as in many athletic contexts, so it makes sense to load that movement pattern in order to strengthen it. But that logic doesn’t hold for the bench press. The act of applying force horizontally with the upper body may occur in various sporting contexts, but the trunk is generally not braced against an immobile surface. So why bench press? Barbell fans will tell you that it’s pretty simple: Because the muscles of the shoulder, chest, and upper arms are potentially very strong, and the bench press is an effective way to load and strengthen them.

You’ll note as well that the bench press requires more than just a barbell and plates to perform. It also requires more than just an ordinary bench; it calls for a specialized bench with built-in uprights for holding the bar. Here’s Starting Strength again:

“The modern version of the bench press, like the squat, depends on an additional piece of equipment other than the bar for its execution. Until the upright support bench came into widespread use in the 1950s, the lifter had to lie on the floor and pull the bar into position, or lie on a flat bench and pull the bar up from the floor, over the head, and into position over the chest. … Nowadays, the bench-press bench — the upright support bench, as opposed to the plain flat bench — is standard gym equipment, and only a few innovative thinkers in the powerlifting community bother with doing the exercise the old, harder, and probably better way. After all, the more involved the exercise, the more the exercise involves in terms of muscle, nerve, and control.”

Rippetoe is trying to demonstrate consistency to his espoused principles with this paragraph, but it seems like little more than lip service. I don’t believe he has ever seriously recommended the barbell bench be performed without the use of uprights, and neither does any other modern writer I’ve seen, because that version of the movement would seriously limit the amount of weight a trainee can handle.

Now let’s return again to the squat. This, too, implicitly requires more than just a barbell and plates. A barbell squat is typically performed with the aid of a squat stand or a power rack, the purpose of which is to hold the bar in a convenient position for placing it across the shoulders at the beginning of the set (and for returning it at the end). Powerlifting gyms sometimes take this principle a step further by offering a monolift; this device holds the barbell on retractable hooks, which remove the necessity for the lifter to step back or forward with the bar at the beginning or end of the set. This is not a common piece of equipment in gyms, however, and while competition rules vary between powerlifting federations, many require the lifter to perform this “walkout” with the bar.

In the absence of squat stands, power rack, or monolift, the trainee has a couple of options for performing the squat. They can clean the bar to the shoulders and squat it from there, or they can perform the “Steinborn lift,” in which the barbell is tilted to vertical, the lifter bends sideways to place it on their back, and then they straighten the trunk while performing a partial squat. Both of these approaches are more “old-school” and minimalist than squatting the bar out of a rack. There are proponents of these styles today, but they are few and far between. With either of these methods, the difficulty of getting the bar into place will tend to become the limiting factor of the exercise, rather than the ability to perform the squat. And so we end up using specialized equipment because it’s ergonomic and convenient.

The common power rack also offers a safety benefit in the form of its adjustable pins: The pins can be lowered to a point just below the bottom of the lifter’s active range of motion. That way, if they descend into a rep but can’t complete it, the bar can be safely lowered to the pins without the lifter having to risk injury or dump it to the floor. This same benefit applies to the bench press, which can be safely performed in a power rack without a spotter. 

Rise of the Machines

So we’ve now established some of the tradeoffs between two different old-fashioned exercise implements, the barbell and the dumbbell, and also brought the definition of “exercise machine” under scrutiny. Let’s examine the latter question just a bit further. If a plate-loaded barbell doesn’t qualify as an exercise machine, where do we draw the line? Is it a machine if we add squat stands? What about a power rack with adjustable hooks and safeties? What about a monolift? Is a bench-press bench with attached uprights a machine? What about a barbell landmine, which puts a hinge on the end of the bar, thus allowing different movements to be performed? Is a preacher curl bench a machine? It merely provides a platform to brace the upper arms against while performing a biceps curl with a barbell or dumbbells. Does attaching a handle to the bench really put the exercise into an entirely different category?

Rather than getting Talmudic about it, it’s much simpler to realize that this is a distinction which does not matter in and of itself. Barbells and dumbbells were not handed down from God on Mount Sinai. They are specialized pieces of exercise equipment that evolved over time, just like so-called “exercise machines.” And, just like any piece of equipment, they have their own particular advantages and disadvantages in different contexts.

We’ve already examined the way that using a barbell instead of dumbbells means increasing the stability of the movement. This allows heavier weights to be used, and for the resistance to be more focused on the targeted muscles rather than some other link in the chain. It can also change the dynamics of a movement in other ways; in a dumbbell bench press, the hands can translate from outside the shoulders towards the midline of the body, since the dumbbells are able to move freely. This motion is called horizontal shoulder adduction, and is one of the roles of the chest muscles. Thus a dumbbell bench press, despite providing less stability, can involve a greater percentage of contribution from the chest as opposed to the shoulders and triceps. Moving between a barbell squat and a Smith machine squat, or a leg press, or a hack squat machine, involves similar tradeoffs.

An oft-repeated misconception about machines is that they necessarily involve isolation movements while free weights are for compound movements. This is incorrect: A “compound movement” is one in which motion occurs around multiple joints, while an “isolation movement” only involves one joint. A curl is an isolation movement regardless of what equipment is used to perform it — barbell, dumbbell, or machine. The exercise consists solely of elbow flexion. A lateral raise is also an isolation movement which can be performed with dumbbells or a machine. Conversely, a squat doesn’t turn into an isolation movement because it’s being performed with a machine. Any type of squat will still involve movement at both the hips and the knees. The same applies to a leg press, another compound movement. A machine chest press is a compound movement for the same reason a barbell bench press is: It involves movement at both the shoulder and the elbow. But a dumbbell fly, involving motion only at the shoulder, is an isolation movement, just like a machine fly.

Rather than necessarily providing isolation, the machine version of a movement will tend to provide better stability in much the same way that a barbell provides better stability compared to dumbbells. What is the best amount of stability? That cannot be answered universally. It depends on context. What are the trainee’s goals? What are their needs at this moment in their training? For example: if you’re training for a circus act, your need to produce force under unstable conditions will be very different from someone who’s training in order to get bigger shoulders. Lifting weights on “unstable surfaces” — e.g. a Swiss ball or BOSU ball — experienced a surge in popularity in the early 2000s. However, that popularity seems to have faded, perhaps because many exercisers and trainers have realized that adding instability did not help them achieve their goals. In fact, for the lifter whose objective is muscle hypertrophy, instability is directly contrary to their goal. Less stable movements mean less load can be lifted, and less activation will be observed in the “prime movers;” that is, the muscles responsible for moving the joints directly involved in the exercise.

Continuing on the subject of stability: Another common refrain when discussing the tradeoffs between machines and free weights is that machines neglect “all the little stabilizer muscles,” and so using them will result in a body riddled with imbalances, and eventually injury. The first question for anyone repeating this line should be: Which muscles, exactly, are we talking about? As we can see in the studies linked in the preceding paragraph, bench pressing on an unstable surface means less recruitment of the pectorals, deltoids, and triceps, but more recruitment of the abdominals. When performing a bench press, is my goal to train my abs? Maybe, but often not.

Rather than just being a question of “stabilizer muscles” being neglected or not, the difference between a more and less stable version of a movement also comes down to the nervous system. It is the central nervous system (CNS) that must coordinate and activate the various muscle groups to perform an exercise. The more complex the movement, whether due to the involvement of multiple joints or difficulty in maintaining balance, the greater the demand on the CNS. And the more taxed the CNS is by balance demands, the less able it is to recruit the “prime movers” in an exercise. So if you do your curls standing on one foot, you’ll get better at balancing on one foot than somebody who does them the normal way. But they’ll get a better biceps workout.

Again, the value in imposing a stability challenge by selecting a less stable exercise will depend on context. Some years ago I was very interested in achieving feats of gymnastics strength. When I was training to perform a front lever, I had a need to specifically challenge my ability to keep the abs and hip flexors rigid against gravity. But if your goal is simply to have well-defined abs, this is not necessary. And besides, it’s arguably worthwhile to separate your ab training from your chest training in order to appropriately challenge both, rather than combining them and thus training them both poorly. The same goes for many other “combo” exercises that have been performed in gyms since CrossFit and other circuit-based programs helped popularize them.

We must also acknowledge the fact that the distribution of forces in a free weight exercise, and thus the relative contributions of various muscle groups, will vary based on the skeletal proportions of the lifter. This is especially true of multi-joint exercises. This insight is, in my view, one of the most valuable lessons imparted by Starting Strength. For example, the uprightness of the torso at the bottom of a squat or deadlift will depend on the relative length of the femur. A lifter with long legs will necessarily have a less upright torso in these positions. Many people, including certified trainers, give poor exercise instruction because their static mental model of the exercise cannot account for this fact. As the joint angles involved in the movement dictate which muscles are stressed the most, this can have important training implications. Because the short-legged lifter will be better able to remain upright at the bottom of a squat, more torque will be placed on their quads and less on their lower back, with the opposite being true for the longer-legged trainee. Therefore the latter may find it valuable to use a machine like a leg press to train his quads, in addition to or in place of the squat, thereby removing the lower back from the kinetic chain.

On the subject of difficulty, it may be true that doing harder exercises builds character. And it’s tough to deny that free weight exercises like the squat or the deadlift are more subjectively uncomfortable than machine-based alternatives. There’s something primal and singular about the sense that the bar may crush your body, and the feeling of committing your entire physical being to complete a rep. But the idea that machines are “easy” comes from people who are simply not pushing themselves on machines, and probably wouldn’t be doing so with free weights, either. Most exercisers performing the leg press use a minimal range of motion and stay far away from maximal effort, but the same is true of most squats performed in gyms. Done with a full range of motion and taken all the way to muscular failure, a leg press is a brutally difficult exercise, as can be almost any movement, regardless of apparatus.

Now, let’s look at some things which machines can do that free weights simply cannot. Apart from mimicking free weight exercises but with added stability, machines can provide different resistance curves from free weight movements. To illustrate, let’s look at a popular free weight exercise, the lateral raise:

In this exercise, dumbbells are held at the sides, then raised outwards. This primarily loads the lateral deltoid, one of the shoulder muscles. When we refer to the resistance curve of this movement, we’re talking about the fact that it is not equally challenging to the deltoid through its range of motion. Towards the bottom of the movement, when the hands are by the hips, there is zero torque on the shoulder. The first few degrees of the range of motion are very easy to perform. As the top of the range is approached, the leverage against the shoulder increases, and becomes maximal when the shoulder is at 90 degrees to the torso, as in the second photo above.

We notice a similar curve, but inverted, when we look at the dumbbell fly:

The image on the left shows the bottom of the range of motion. At this point the torque on the shoulder is maximal. At the top of the movement, seen on the right, the torque drops to near zero, as the weights are stacked directly above the shoulder joint.

A machine can provide a smoother resistance curve with tension at both the top and bottom of the movement. A common way to accomplish this is via cable machines. Cables do not provide the increased stability often associated with exercise machines, as the end of the cable can move freely through space. Of course, a cable exercise can be performed with the aid of a bench in order to provide that stability if desired. But the main advantage the cable exercise offers is the ability to change the resistance curve and shift the portion of the movement where peak tension occurs. The potential benefits of training through different muscle lengths and ranges of motion are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say that this can be a valuable training variable to manipulate, and certain arrangements are only achievable with the use of machines.

Finally, a note on injuries. Here is Rippetoe in Starting Strength again:

“Exercises that use only one joint, and that usually require machines to do, are non-functional in the sense that they do not follow a normal human movement pattern. They also quite often predispose the joint to overuse injuries, and the vast majority of weight room injuries will occur on machines. This is true not only by default, since it is obvious that in a world where most people only use machines, most of the injuries will occur on machines. Isolation exercises cause tendinitis because human joints are not designed to be subjected to the stress of movements in which all of the shock, moment force, tension, and compression are applied to one joint.

Exercise machines have made several people a lot of money, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, they have been a very large diversion from more productive forms of training. The pendulum swings, and barbell training is once again being recognized as the superior form of exercise.”

First, let’s note the similarity of this segment to Nolan’s piece in its portrayal of exercise machines as a money-making scheme. Next, let’s examine Rippetoe’s claim about injuries. We’ve already established that machines do not necessarily isolate. His argument sounds intuitive, but it does not seem to be true. Although there are a number of reasons that we could imagine for data on this subject to be less-than-fully reliable, the data we do have indicates that most weight-training related injuries occur with free weights. However, the majority of injuries apparently occur because somebody dropped a weight on themselves. Personally, I don’t believe that safety is a good blanket argument for one or the other.

It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Let’s sum up: Hamilton Nolan, in an echo of Mark Rippetoe and other “traditionalist” fitness writers, argues that machines are a scam because they provide an inferior workout compared to free weights. But this is not the case. Neither machines nor free weights are universally better or worse, and they do not even belong to entirely distinct categories. Machines are not simply free weights with training wheels, and they don’t necessarily isolate, although they do tend to provide more stability and allow for different resistance profiles. All pieces of exercise equipment exist on a multi-dimensional spectrum, and the ideal choice will depend on many different factors, including the trainee’s goals, skeletal proportions, stage of training, and subjective preferences. In the context of constructing a home gym, the versatility offered by free weights may make them the best value. But with all other things being equal, every piece of exercise equipment has its own advantages and disadvantages when compared to alternatives. While Starting Strength and its ilk have many valuable insights to offer, rigid ideological approaches will only lead trainees to miss out on potential benefits.

I will give Mark Rippetoe the last word:

“You are right to be wary. There is much bullshit. Be wary of me too, because I may be wrong. Make up your own mind after you evaluate all the evidence and the logic.”