By: Chris Gates
Are free weights better for building muscle than machines? Or vice versa?
It’s a great question, and something a lot of people try to figure out when they step into a gym full of equipment.
Well you’re in luck, because in this article I’m going to give you the exact answer to the question, are free weights better than machines for building muscle?
In order to answer that question, let’s first dive into what exactly free weights and machines are. Then we can talk about the purpose of each and determine which one is going to be best for building muscle.
Free Weights and Machines, Defined
When you walk into any gym, you’re greeted with a sea of iron as far as the eye can see.
Viewing it from the front doors of the gym can be a bit intimidating at first, with barbells, and plates, and dumbbells, and machines, poking up and out from every angle.
It’s a lot to unpack, but I’m going to simplify it for you here. You can view all of the strength training equipment in your gym in two categories:
- Free Weights
- Machines
Free weights are defined as weights that are not attached to an apparatus. This means they can move freely—not in a fixed plane of motion.
Some examples of free weights include:
- Dumbbells
- Barbells
- Kettlebells
- Medicine balls
- Sandbags
Basically anything that you can pick up and move at your own will is considered a free weight.
Here are a couple of examples of free weights in action, just so you can visualize what lifting free weights looks like:
Machines are, in a nutshell, all of that other stuff in the gym. Typically, machines offer you the ability to select a specific amount of weight that you want to lift, and then you lift the weight in a fixed plane of motion.
These could be pin-loaded machines, where you stick a pin in the weight stack to select how much weight to lift; or these could be plate-loaded, where you physically place weight onto the machine and lift.
Machines come in all shapes and sizes. Here are some of the machines you’ll commonly find in most gyms:
- Leg press
- Lat pull down
- Cable cross over
- Chest press
- Seated row
- Seated shoulder press
- Seated biceps curl
- Seated leg extension
- Seated leg curl
Once again, here are a couple of examples of lifting with machines so you can visualize moving weight in a fixed plane of motion:
Advantages to Lifting with Free Weights
As mentioned above, lifting with free weights gives you the ability to lift more freely. You aren’t restricted to the motor patterns that using a machine dictates.
This means you have the ability to customize each exercise.
Not everyone has the same biomechanics. Yes, we all push, pull, and squat similarly, but every person has distinctly different limb lengths, muscle insertion points (where your muscles connect to your bones), and other factors that make each exercise better, or worse, for YOU.
Your friend may get just an incredible mind-muscle connection and stimulus from one exercise, and you may get next to none.
That’s just how it goes. It doesn’t necessarily mean what you’re doing is wrong. It just means the two of you are different, and what’s optimal for your friend may not be optimal for you.
Each training program, and in a lot of cases each exercise, can and should be customized to YOU. Free weights allow for more of that customization and freedom to lift efficiently.
Free weights also tend to recruit more musculature throughout your body to perform each exercise.
For example, when you perform a barbell or dumbbell bench press, you’re not only recruiting your chest to lift the weight, but you’re also engaging your triceps, shoulders, back, core, hips, and legs to stabilize the weight and perform each rep.
That’s much more muscle recruitment than, say, a machine chest press would cause. In a machine chest press, you’re targeting the same primary muscle group (chest), but you’re fixed into a seat and the weight can only go in one direction—straight. That limits the amount of effort and muscle recruitment your body needs to create in order to perform each rep, as the weight can’t possibly move left, right, forward, or backward.
This comparison is common for most muscle groups when you compare free weights to machines for building muscle.
And finally, there’s a level of creativity that you have with free weights that isn’t quite possible with machines.
You can grab one dumbbell and use it for an entire workout. You can move that one dumbbell in a variety of ways to challenge the musculature throughout your body, which isn’t quite possible with machines.
Most machines target one specific muscle and/or muscle group. Thus, you’d need access to a variety of machines to challenge the muscles throughout your body and stimulate muscle growth.
Advantages to Lifting with Machines
While it may seem like I just threw machines under the bus, let’s be clear: Machines are great for building muscle!
They’re different than free weights, but that doesn’t mean they’re worse or worthless. In fact, machines offer several distinct advantages.
For starters, if you’re a beginner to lifting weights, using machines presents the opportunity to learn the major motor patterns. Since machines put you in a fixed plane of motion, you can learn how to press, and row, and squat, and curl, and move all of the joints throughout your body optimally and engage your muscles.
Stimulating the target muscle for each exercise is really important for building muscle. When you first get started, this can be a struggle. Machines will teach you how.
They’ll also teach you how to lift weight safely, which can’t be understated. One of the biggest inhibitors of progress with building muscle is getting hurt, because it forces you to stop lifting. And if you have to stop lifting, then you won’t be effectively building muscle.
When using a machine, you’re in a fixed plane of motion and the machine has built-in safety mechanisms to help you lift without fear or danger.
For instance, doing a barbell bench press presents quite a few dangers—most notably the possibility of your muscles failing, and the weight crashing back down on your chest, neck, or head. If you’re a beginner, you’d probably be better off doing some type of machine chest press to build some muscle and get acquainted with the pressing motor pattern before getting started with the barbell bench press.
A machine chest press will allow you to lift all the way to failure without any danger of the weight crashing back down on your body. The machine has a built-in stopping point, and if you fail while performing the exercise the handles and weight stack will crash back down on the machine itself, not you.
And finally, another advantage of using machines centers around the ability to directly target a certain muscle and/or muscle group. I know I kind of mentioned that as a disadvantage to using machines earlier, but hear me out…
Not every exercise needs to be as fatiguing as possible. In fact, it would probably benefit you to have a mix of high-fatigue and low-fatigue exercises in your program for building muscle.
So while free weights offer the distinct advantage of being able to recruit muscles throughout your body, constantly engaging everything can sometimes cause too much fatigue. And what I mean by that is your performance in each workout may go down as the workout goes along, and you won’t stimulate your muscles as effectively as you get more and more tired.
It could also lead to issues with recovering from the session as a whole, and you could go into your next training session under-recovered.
By using machines, you can directly target specific muscles, while not taxing your entire body. That’s a big win when you look at your program as a whole.
Are Free Weights Better Than Machines for Building Muscle?
Ok, so now you’ve got a ton of background information on both free weights and machines. So let’s answer the question of the day.
Are free weights better than machines for building muscle?
Well… The answer is both “yes” and “no.”
In regards to muscle recruitment, yes. Free weights are going to help you recruit and engage more of the musculature throughout your body than machines.
But as you just learned, that doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing. More isn’t always better.
In reality, a mixture of both free weights and machines is going to be best for building muscle, in most cases.
There is some research on this topic that can guide us. Along with what we know about muscle recruitment and engagement favoring free weights, there’s also this 2020 study that found free weights and machines to be “equally effective for increasing muscle thickness and strength.“
At the end of the day, the biggest determining factors for building muscle, regardless of whether you use free weights or machines, comes down to:
- Are you lifting with adequate intensity? Are you regularly lifting within 1-4 reps of failure on each set?
- Are you doing adequate training volume? Most people can experience optimal progress by doing 10-20 hard sets per muscle group each week.
- What is your mind-muscle connection like for each of the exercises you perform? The more you feel the target muscle working, the better chance you have of stimulating muscle growth.
- Are you doing what’s necessary for recovery? In other words, are you eating enough calories and protein to grow muscle? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you managing stress levels?
- And are you doing all of these things consistently? Building muscle takes a lot of time, so it’s imperative that you commit to these principles for months and years to experience the most progress.
If you’ve got those factors dialed in on a consistent basis, it shouldn’t matter whether you use free weights or machines to build muscle.
So play around with both free weights and machines as you prepare your strength training program. Take a hard look at your goals, the muscle groups you want to grow, and the demands your training program creates for your body and recovery from session to session.
And figure out what makes the most sense for YOU.
For example, if you do barbell squats to start off your lower body day you might want to incorporate machine work into the back half of that training session. Barbell squats are highly fatiguing, so doing exercises like seated leg extensions and leg curls may be great options to get a high level of stimulus on your quads and hamstrings without causing too much additional fatigue that you have to recover from.
At the end of the day, a mixture of free weights and machines will probably be most sustainable and beneficial to provide a well-rounded stimulus to each of the muscle groups in your body.
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I hope you found this article helpful! If getting customized coaching is something you’re interested in to design a program with exercises tailored to YOU and your goals, please submit a coaching application form and I’ll reach out to you so we can talk more about your goals! Coaching is great for taking the guesswork out of the equation for you, so that all you need to worry about is training hard and making progress.
Thanks for reading!
~ Chris