You Should Use Gym Machines to Build Muscle

You Should Use Gym Machines to Build Muscle 1
I am a marketing and project management professional from New Zealand with a real passion for health and fitness.

There seems to be a mentality in parts of the lifting community that you shouldn’t be using machines.

Machines are sub-optimal for increasing our functional strength. This is probably true — just pick up something heavy and lift it, right?

I had this attitude myself for a lengthy period. If an exercise didn’t use dumbbells or a barbell, I didn’t think it would help me reach my strength or athleticism goals.

But I’m here to tell you that I was mistaken.

In this article, I discuss how using gym machines and other equipment, along with an explanation of what each gym machine does, can help us achieve our fitness goals, especially when it comes to building muscle.

I finish the article with five of my favourite muscle-building machine exercises.

Strength vs hypertrophy

There are fundamental differences between training for strength and building muscle (hypertrophy).

There’s some overlap — you will build some muscle and increase your strength with any style of resistance training. But, the best way to build muscle differs from the best way to get stronger.

Some of these crucial differences between strength training and bodybuilding are:

  • Free weights vs machines and cables
  • Compound exercises vs isolation exercises
  • Low volume vs high volume
  • Low reps vs high reps
  • Long rest periods vs short rest periods
  • Heavy weights vs light weights

Bear in mind that there will be some crossover, but these rules stay true most of the time.

I explore these in more depth in the below article.

Stimulus vs Fatigue

Resistance training provides a stimulus to grow but also generates fatigue.

Strength training is highly fatiguing, meaning we can’t do much without compromising recovery. If recovery is sub-optimal, we will experience reduced performance.

Thus, we should consider what exercises will best activate a target muscle vs. how fatiguing it is.

For example, the barbell squat will highly activate many muscles in our legs and core but also generates a tonne of fatigue.

On the other hand, leg extensions highly activate one group of muscles in our legs, the quads, and won’t generate much fatigue at all.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t squat (you should) — I’m just saying to limit your squatting and include other exercises targeting different leg muscles.

Mind-muscle connection and time under tension

Although two different concepts, the mind-muscle connection and time under tension should be in the same conversation.

Time under tension is the length of time that we apply force to a targeted muscle or muscle group during an exercise set. Muscles contracting through force generation and stretch provide tension, known as the concentric and eccentric phases.

Theoretically, the longer a muscle is placed under tension, the more metabolic stress we create to force an adaption—growth.

To maximise this mechanical tension on a muscle, we need to complete the reps of an exercise in a controlled manner.

Our range of motion here is crucial to maximising time under tension and feeling a stretch and contraction in the targeted muscle.

This is where a developed mind-muscle connection comes in. Think of it like connecting our brain to the targeted muscle fibres with a conscious and deliberate muscle contraction.

Research indicates that concentrating hard on the physical activity we’re trying to master will make us better at it. When isolating muscle groups with resistance training, we use an internal focus to concentrate on the specifics of our bodily movements.

Bonus: five of my favourite machine/equipment exercises

The number of machines can seem overwhelming when you’re new to the gym. How do you know what the most effective exercises are?

A lot of this knowledge comes from research and trial and error. But to save you some time, here are five of my favourite machine exercises in the gym.

1. Shoulders — Smith machine shoulder press

A machine that I tend to avoid in the gym is the Smith Machine.

The Smith machine uses a counterbalanced bar fixed within steel rails, allowing only vertical or near-vertical movement. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people for squatting; however, the Smith Machine is excellent for a seated shoulder press.

You can load shoulder press on a smith machine relatively heavy and the bar path is suited to vertical pressing.

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A Smith machine press will target all three heads of the deltoid, but the anterior (front) and lateral (side) heads will receive the most activation.

Set up a bench/seat with an angle of around 70–80 degrees. The lower the incline, the more we will activate our chest, which we don’t want.

Keep should shoulder blades and lower back firmly against the bench and slowly bring the weight down to your upper chest before a more explosive movement up to lockout.

Aim for around 8 to 12 reps.

If your gym has a plate-loaded shoulder press machine, that’s a great alternative.

2. Chest — Pec deck fly

I struggled to establish a mind-muscle connection with my chest for a long time. My front deltoids (shoulders) and triceps would always take over a chest exercise, especially a press.

It has been a concentrated effort to grow my chest — particularly my upper chest.

A fly movement is fantastic for targeting the upper chest because of the direction in which the upper chest muscle fibres run. These fibres contribute more to shoulder flexion, meaning we activate them by bringing our arms up and across the body.

Which is precisely what a pec deck (chest fly machine) does. Because our elbows are up high and our arms are locked up and out, we’re forced to squeeze them across the body, strongly contracting the chest.

We’re locked into place, meaning a consistent path throughout a set, reducing the ability of other muscles to take over once our chest fatigues.

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Keep your back hard against the pad, keeping your scapulae (shoulder blades) retracted to put the pecs in a mechanically safe and strong position.

Aim for around 10 to 15 reps.

Think about pushing from your elbows to initiate the movement. Pause momentarily to squeeze before slowly releasing the weight through the eccentric phase.

Try to really milk the negative.

3. Biceps — TRX curl

I love using the TRX because I can feel an intense mind-muscle connection with any pulling exercise, whether for my back or biceps.

No other exercise quite gives me the bicep pump of a curl on the TRX.

Mechanically, our biceps have three functions — elbow flexion (curling), forearm supination (turning palm up) and shoulder flexion (lifting shoulder). One thing that I love about the TRX is that we have complete control of how our body moves and, therefore, the path of the curl. So, we can incorporate all three of these bicep-activating functions.

Some machines can have a severely limited and awkward range of motion. Often, we can only follow a movement path, which might not be right for us based on our anatomy.

Our biceps muscles have two heads — the short head on the inner portion of the upper arm and the long head on the outer.

Curls with the upper arm in front of the torso tend to stimulate more of the short head, also known as our “bicep peak”.

I can really zone into the mind-muscle connection on the TRX by squeezing the bicep hard on each contraction and slowly releasing my weight to feel a deep stretch.

Remember to keep your elbows up and core engaged.

4. Back—Lat pulldown machine

Most gyms will have cable equipment, often with a dedicated lat pulldown. Some gyms will also have a plate-loaded lat pulldown machine.

Both are great options.

As the name implies, this exercise strongly activates our lat muscles. But, by changing hand position, we can target slightly different back muscles or even more of our biceps.

What I like best about pulldowns is the fantastic stretch in the lats we experience when slowly releasing the eccentric portion of the exercise.

A huge mistake I often see people make with pulldowns is loading the movement too heavily. If we cannot properly control the weight, our lower back and momentum will take over, reducing tension on the targeted muscles.

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Choosing a weight that you can do for 10–15 reps, grip the bar with a medium overhand grip.

Ensure your knees are tucked under the pads slightly to lock your torso in place. With your core engaged, hold the bar with your upper back starting with thoracic extension.

As you pull the bar down for the concentric phase of the lift, retract your scapula by tucking your shoulder blades down as you pull your elbows down and in towards your sides.

At the bottom, pause momentarily with the bar on your upper chest. Release the weight slowly, resisting the negative to feel the stretch in your lats. This eccentric phase should last around 3–5 seconds on each rep.

5. Quads — leg extension machine

I couldn’t recommend five machine exercises without including one for the legs!

Our quads (quadriceps) are probably the most noticeable muscles in our legs — at least from the font. Our quads comprise four muscle heads (as the name implies), the three vastus muscles called the medialis, lateralis, and intermedius, and the Rectus femoris muscle.

If we’re squatting (which you should be, unless you physically can’t) with a barbell or on a hack/pendulum squat, our quads are firing. But we’ll be highly fatigued if all we do is squat.

The three Vastus muscles function to extend the knee, while the Rectus femoris also crosses the hip joint, controlling both knee extension and hip flexion. And because all four heads contribute to knee extension, targeting our quads through an exercise that extends the knee makes sense.

Enter leg extensions!

According to a 2016 study, leg extensions have similar activation of the quads to a heavy back squat, despite using a much lighter load.

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Our key focus with leg extensions is squeezing our quads at the top of the movement.

The pad should be on your shins. Move the pad up and down and play around with your foot position until you find something that gives you maximal power and helps you create a mind-muscle connection.

Hold the handles tight, firmly locking your body into the seat to prevent power from leaking out of the movement.

With a slight pause, lock out your legs at the top before slowly releasing the eccentric. Don’t choose a weight that’s too heavy to perform reps with a full range of motion, and don’t bounce the weight with excessive momentum.

Control each and every rep.

Final words

In this article, we’ve explored some of the benefits of using machines in the gym to build muscle.

One key benefit of using machines is that they reduce fatigue, meaning we can train harder for longer without compromising our recovery and, therefore, future performance. Another key benefit of using machines in the gym is that they are fantastic for isolating a specific muscle group, providing a strong stimulus for growth.

I’m not saying to avoid strength training with free weights if your core goal is to build muscle. Strength is complementary to building muscle. Being strong provides the foundation to grow muscle.

But as I’ve just outlined, specialised hypertrophy training has real benefits if your main goal is to shape your physique.

All the best!

Thank you for reading.

Note:

The original post was published on https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/you-should-use-gym-machines-to-build-muscle-42014aedf1b, and we have gained access to repost.

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