3 Reasons to Forget Weight Machines and Forget Spot Reduction

(Photo by Method Fitness on Flickr>/a>)

This isn’t going to be an ultra-scientific article explaining exactly why spot reduction and exercise machines don’t need to be part of your routine. If you want ultra-specific, technical information, there are plenty of other places online for that.

No, this is an article that is going to explain, in three easy-to-understand steps, why using free weights and compound exercises is something you should really think about doing. That’s it, nothing more, nothing less.

Here they are.

#1: Machines Don’t Challenge You Enough

When you only work out with fixed-position exercise machines, you’re getting a workout. You’re burning calories and working muscles — there’s no denying that. But there are a couple reasons that these machines should be left behind as soon as possible, and they all have to do with the machines not challenging you enough:

1. You’re Almost Always Sitting Down: There are too many little muscles that keep our hips flexible, or that keep us balanced, or that help us get stronger in little places we didn’t even know about — and machines just can’t work all these. You’re sitting down and really limiting your exercise to a very small group of muscles.
2. Your Range of Motion is Super-Limited: Machines that do, for example, a chest press, might claim that they work other muscles, too — but there’s only one way to do that chest press. You’re on a track, and you can never get off that track until you move to free weights.

#2: Spot Reduction (of fat) Is a Myth

There is no such thing as spot reduction. This is the only science I’m going to bring in here — study after study has proven there’s no way to tell your body where you want to gain fat, and the opposite is just as true.

Your body loses fat exactly where it wants to. What you can do is tell your body where to build muscle. So all those abdominal crunches you’re doing won’t specifically eliminate the fat on your belly, but they will build your abs beneath them. The fact that you’re burning calories and converting fat into lean muscle (which you can do in an absolute myriad of ways) is what reduces the belly, not the fact that you’re “working” the fat somehow. Fat is fat. It’s not a muscle and it doesn’t respond to you “exercising” it. It’s stored fuel that your body will use when it needs it.

With this in mind, you really want to be working as many muscles as possible, and really doing as much as you can to get your body converting those fat reserves into lean muscle. And this just isn’t done with spot reduction, because it doesn’t exist in that way.

#3: Free Weights Have a Learning Curve That Your Body Needs

After a while, you can’t really “improve” how you work out on a machine. You can just up the weights and get a little tougher, do some harder reps or more of them.

Only with free weights and compound exercises can you start to really improve, get better at your workouts, and see fundamental differences in your approach to fitness. Machines just don’t have that room. They provide a too-instant plateau. There’s no question people have got in shape and lost weight using machines, but it’s fundamentally inefficient compared to how much better your workouts can be when you use those free weights.

Hearing From You

Tell me about your experiences with free weights! Have you moved from machines to the free weight section, even if it seemed intimidating at the beginning? I want to hear your stories!