There are many benefits to strength training: decrease injury risk, increase performance potential, to look and feel better.  Maybe you have experienced these benefits, but maybe not.  I hate to use the phrase, No Pain No Gain (it’s so two decades ago), but there is some truth in any cliché.

No Pain, No Gain

Your muscles get worked with every subtle movement you make.  Walking from the office to the water cooler doesn’t leave you burned and sore the next day, but if an elevator breaks down and you’re forced to walk 13 flights of stairs, well, consider it a free gym membership. 

Each of your 640 skeletal muscles has a threshold

 of exertion before it fatigues (i.e., gets in a workout).  Most of the time our muscles are working below threshold.  And everyday you are raising or lowering that threshold by tiny micro adjustments.  For example, if the message you send to your quadriceps today is that getting up out of a chair is their only job, then they adapt.  The body, after all, is just a factory that produces whatever you demand.  And the threshold is lowered.  Thirty years of that and you’re left with a dusty factory floor, 4 part-time workers, and an empty vending machine.

 So move already!

Snail on the move

Walk the 30 flights to your office once a week.

Close your office door and do 25 or 50 squats (no warm up required!).

Go on a walk after lunch.

Join a gym and start doing something, anything.

Don’t get stifled by the what, when, where, and why’s.           

Just Move It!

Are free weights better than machines?  Ask a group of

Dumbbells @ The DAC

muscle heads and I bet I know their answer.  But, the fact is, strength gains are the SAME (assuming the levels of intensity are equal with both modalities).  A 10-week study compared groups training three times per week with either free weights or machines.  All groups had significant increases in strength and lean body mass and a decrease in body fat.  There were no significant differences between the groups.

A muscle must experience an appropriate level of fatigue with a workload that is progressive from one workout to the next in order to increase in size

Machines @ The DAC

and strength.  Since muscles do not have a brain, or cognitive ability, they cannot possibly “know” the source of the workload.  So, it doesn’t matter whether the muscles are fatigued with a resistance that comes from a machine, a barbell, a cinder block, or a human being.  In short, there is no documented difference in relative strength gains using one form of resistance over another.  The sole factors in determining your response from strength training are your inherited characteristics and your level of intensity – not the equipment that is used.