Yes, Weight Machines Can Absolutely Have a Place in Your Fitness Routine
Rep per rep, nothing beats free-weight, compound movements. Think: squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and rows. These weight room staples tap multiple muscle groups at once, hike up your heart rate, and even train those little stabilizer muscles that help keep everything in alignment and working properly. They are efficient, effective, functional (meaning they prep you to be stronger in everyday movements)—basically everything you want when you’re grinding it out in the gym.
So then why would you ever want to sit your booty on a weight machine and perform teeny tiny biceps curls or knee extensions? Well, that’s exactly the sort of thinking that has led to many gyms’ weight machines gathering dust, certified personal trainer Rain Burkeen, owner of POP Fitness and resident fitness expert for the Trainerize personal training app, tells SELF.
She says that while that thinking isn’t completely wrong—yes, compound, free-weight movements should be the bedrock of most people’s strength routines—weight-machine moves that isolate specific muscles also have their benefits.
After all, even though sitting on a bench and straightening your leg (knee extensions, anyone?) is about the least functional move you can perform in the gym—seriously, when do you actually sit on a bench and straighten your knees in real life?—a paper published in the Strength & Conditioning Journal suggests that exercises like these can, in fact, improve total-body function both in and out of the gym. The authors of the paper found that performing single-joint isolation exercises in conjunction with compound movements could help people increase their strength and performance more than doing functional, compound exercises alone.
“Free-weight lifts are great because they activate more muscles, but sometimes you just want to really focus in and hone in on one group,” adds Beverly Hills-based trainer Mike Donavanik, C.S.C.S.
When’s that exactly? Here, experts share when you should integrate some machinery into your strength routine.
1. You want to grow bigger muscles.
Muscle hypertrophy, or increasing the size of a muscle, hinges on putting a lot of stress on the exact muscle fibers you want to build, Donavanik says.
Let’s say you’re trying to grow your glutes: Squats and lunges will work the three muscles (maximus, medius, and minimus) that make up your glutes, but they will also work your quadriceps, hamstrings, inner-thigh adductors, and even the erector spinae and transverse abdominis, which are core muscles that help stabilize the spine. So even if you can squat a barbell loaded with your bodyweight equivalent, all of that work isn’t going toward your glutes, he says.
“Even though a free-weight exercise may be quad-, glute-, or hamstring-dominant, other muscles are still always working,” Donavanik says. “That’s not a bad thing, but if you’re looking to isolate, you need to hit the machines.” Maybe you want to use the knee-extension (quads), glute kickback (glutes), or leg curl (hamstring) machine.
That explains why, for instance, you may be able to leg press more than you can squat. Even though you are performing the exact same movement, the leg press takes the smaller stabilizer muscles out of the equation by fixing the weight’s movement path. And if your joints aren’t also devoting some strength to stabilizing the weight, you’re able to move more weight—and build more muscle size.
This is especially important if you want to train until (or even close to) failure, or the point at which you physically cannot complete one more rep. “When your muscles are fatigued from bigger, heavier, more exhausting lifts, machines allow you to isolate and target a given muscle until you’ve sufficiently fatigued it, without compromising form,” Donavanik says.
2. Your grip strength or bodyweight are limiting factors.
In an ideal situation, your grip strength wouldn’t limit how much weight you can lift, and your bodyweight wouldn’t stand in between you and your first pull-up. In reality, though, that’s not usually how it goes.
Poor grip strength is pretty common, and most often caused by weakness in the hands and forearms—we don’t gain muscle mass in these areas as easily as we do in other muscles. As a result, our hands and even forearms often give out before our arms and legs do. And when it comes to an exercise like the pull-up, if your bodyweight is greater than what you are able to pull, getting over the bar just isn’t going to happen.
In both scenarios, machines can help. “For example, one of my favorite exercises to perform on machines is the calf raise, which can be loaded with enough weight to be effective without the usual limiting factor of grip strength,” Burkeen says. “I also love lat pull-downs, which can effectively fatigue the musculature of the back regardless of an individual’s bodyweight, which is often a limiting factor for completing pull-ups.”
3. You’ve got some glaring muscle imbalances.
Unless you’re working out in a lab, chances are that you have some type of muscular imbalance. For example, if you spend a lot of your day sitting, it’s likely you could use more back and glute strength relative to chest and hamstring strength. And if you find your knees cave in a bit when you’re performing squats, it probably means your hip abductors, like the glute medius muscles in the outside of your hips, aren’t strong enough compared to your adductors, or inner-thigh muscles.
Machines are incredibly useful for strengthening the specific muscles you want, while leaving the rest, says Donavanik, explaining that machines are commonly used in physical therapy settings for this reason.
4. You’re trying to “work around” an injury.
Sometimes, you really want to perform that big, compound lift, but you just can’t...or at least shouldn’t if you don’t want to worsen existing injuries. So, unless you want to sit out on workouts completely and risk detraining, you’ve got to work around your injury.
“For example, individuals with poor core support due to a back injury can still fatigue their lower body with the use of machines even though it is unsafe for them to squat,” Burkeen says. Or, if in a slightly more extreme case, you break your leg, you can sit on a machine and work the other. If you’re injured, always talk to your doctor or physical therapist before doing any exercise to make sure the work you’re doing is safe and that you’re managing the risk of creating imbalances.
Here’s how to add weight machines to your strength routine:
When it comes to free weights and machines, the answer is rarely—hardly ever, really—to choose between one or the other. The vast majority of the time, the answer is to perform both. For overall strength, muscle gains, and health, most people’s workout routines should be based on compound, free-weight exercises like the squat, deadlift, press, and row, Burkeen says. Machines have a place, but they should generally take up a much smaller percentage of your routine. And you should also always perform compound, free-weight exercises at the beginning of your workouts to ensure you’re performing these more energy-intensive, technical exercises when your energy levels are at their peak and your form won’t fail, she says. After performing free-weight compound exercises and then any free-weight isolation exercises, you can turn your energy toward machine exercises as a way to hone in and further isolate, says Burkeen. (Exactly how much time and how many reps you give to each depends on your exact goals, current fitness level, and preferences. After all, if you really don’t enjoy machine exercises, forcing yourself to do them isn’t the best method for reaching your long-term goals.)
That said, there are a few different ways to work in machines. You can perform a machine exercise immediately after working the same muscle or body part with a free-weight move. For example, do machine biceps curls immediately after pull-ups and dumbbell rows to really fatigue your biceps. Or, you can leave all of the machines until the end and alternate between opposing muscle groups (like the chest and back, for example).
You should also always master proper exercise form with your bodyweight and free weights before hopping on a machine and going to town. Because the paths of machine weights are fixed, they force your body into a pretty controlled motion that could theoretically reduce the bad form that leads to injury. But, if you don’t know how an exercise should feel first, it can be difficult to recognize when the machine settings are off. They all have settings to adjust for height, but they still aren't designed to fit every body perfectly. Ask a trainer at your gym to help you set yourself up if you have any concerns, but if a machine ever doesn't feel right, stop using it.
The bottom line is that you have a lot of options with weight machines—the key is to use those machines as a tool, and a refining one at that, rather than relying on them to improve your strength and overall fitness.
