- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Machines are great if used right. If you're doing 30 reps of tricep pushdowns with god awful form, they're not gonna do shit, just like doing bench press with bouncing it off your chest and pushing your entire body off the floor.Not necessarily. Machines are a good way to avoid injuring yourself. I lift heavy and used to do 50kg dumbbell shoulder presses...until someone dropped a dumbbell into my hand at the wrong angle and I tore my labrum from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock and peeled it off the bone. That injury cost me a lot of money in surgery fees and I'll never have the same range of motion again. I also can never go rock climbing or hang off a bar at full extension. If I had been using a seated shoulder press machine, I would never have had that injury.
Interestingly, the two most successful, competitive bodybuilders I knew at that time both used machines and both said it was specifically because they could avoid serious injuries.
Having said that, I still do a lot of free weight training now, but I'm making the point that machines absolutely do have their place and they are great for training safely.
I think most IFBB pros do the basic compounds and then a lot of machine work. Then again, they're juiced to the gills which helps a lot