If your gym has a good selection of machines, you can totally get really jacked just using them, see my above comment for Barbells vs Dumbells. My first questions to you would be how you’re training your legs and abs since machines for those can be rarer.
I should double down on the point that injury should not be on my mind. Here are some factoids since I can’t tread them into a coherent narrative very quickly: * When the median american lifts weights, aka someone who is much more careless than yourself, he gets injured way less often than in any other sport. * Even for injuries that happen in the gym, accidents like tripping and weight falling on you make up a bigger share than what we think of as “injuries”. Wear shoes, don’t walk around weights looking at your phone, be sensible etc. * Injuries are most often not a consequence of “misperforming an exercise once”. They are rather the result of bad programming. Every rep you do with your legs hurts your knee a little bit, and it can heal some amount per week. Injury comes when you do more (load, reps, sets, speed) in aggregate than you can handle, which is really difficult for a beginner, and for someone training for not that much per week. * Acute injury, aka when you break something during a lift, should be a worry only for the strongest among us. It’s just math. Your muscles can produce some amount of force, which your tendons must be able to transfer without snappin. For normal humans, your muscles are nowhere near strong enough to do this. WIth years of strength training (and PEDs which strengthen your muscles without strenghtening your tendons), you can maybe get there.
My advice is to be mindful of technique when learning a new lift, film yourself or ask someone to watch if you can, and make sure it looks the same as in the video.
Advice for moving from machines to free weights? Pick like 2 or 3 free weight exercises that look cool to you / are hard do do with machines and swap them into your program. Rinse and repeat after months. You may have many worries, and I can dispell most of them if you lay them out.
I also use strong, I have the premium membership. I looked into all the other apps, their features are not beter tracking afaik, but algorithms that create programs for you, or just access to pre-made programs
I think the reason I worry about injury is because I am far, far more clumsy than average, am really bad with form in general (I am in a theatre troupe and we often have to learn choreographed movement or rarely simple dances and I’m always the worst at it), and when I did running I ended up with a hip injury that still gives me grief (that said I am trying to build back up to hopefully running 10-20k a week again as I did really love it).
So, yeah, essentially, I’m terrified of baking in poor form and then injuring myself over time, as well as terrified of dropping a weight on myself (that said, I have never dropped a weight on any machine, so maybe that’s a good way to update myself).
The lower body exercises I do on the gym are the leg press, hip abduction/adduction, leg curl, leg extension. They also have an ab and back machine but to be honest I hate them and only use them rarely (once a month when I’m having a good week and want to do everything). But I do alternate between leg-focused machines and arm-focused machines when I exercise. Sometimes I do split sets between two machines if it’s quiet but that’s obviously rare because I want to be courteous. I aim to do 7 rep sets, and will lower the weight if I can only get around 4 and raise the weight if I can get 10+.
Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly didn’t occur to me that I could just add in one or two free weight exercises and use the machines for everything else.
My fitness goals are “have nice buff looking arms”, “do a pullup” and “lift up my husband (~80kg) in the traditional wife-carrying pose”, though I’m not pursuing them relentlessly or optimally, they’re just milestones I want to reach.
What free weight exercises might be best for getting me there, and have the most straightforward technique?
Those are great goals. If you want to be “lifting your husband” strong, look up the starting strength squat and deadlift guides. For upper body exercise suggestions, I think the list above is great.
For injury risk, I would really not worry, given the injury statistics are so low, and they are from people who DON’T focus on technique. The median gym goes is a 30yo guy swinging as much weight as possible around, and he’s mostly fine.
As far as technique goes, define failure as “I can’t do another rep without changing technique” and you reduce your chance of injure drastically.
For the exercises you’re doing now, I’d say there is a lot of “redundance / over-optimization”, e.g. the leg press will train both your adductors and abductors. If you want to do 2 leg exercises instead of just one (like I suggested in the post), I’d pick one form each category): [squat] : Leg press, Back Squat, Front squat, split squat, hack squat, smith machine squat, dumbell-on-shoulder squat, goblet squat [hinge] : Deadlift, Romanian deadlift, good Morning, reverse lunge.
If your gym has a good selection of machines, you can totally get really jacked just using them, see my above comment for Barbells vs Dumbells. My first questions to you would be how you’re training your legs and abs since machines for those can be rarer.
I should double down on the point that injury should not be on my mind. Here are some factoids since I can’t tread them into a coherent narrative very quickly:
* When the median american lifts weights, aka someone who is much more careless than yourself, he gets injured way less often than in any other sport.
* Even for injuries that happen in the gym, accidents like tripping and weight falling on you make up a bigger share than what we think of as “injuries”. Wear shoes, don’t walk around weights looking at your phone, be sensible etc.
* Injuries are most often not a consequence of “misperforming an exercise once”. They are rather the result of bad programming. Every rep you do with your legs hurts your knee a little bit, and it can heal some amount per week. Injury comes when you do more (load, reps, sets, speed) in aggregate than you can handle, which is really difficult for a beginner, and for someone training for not that much per week.
* Acute injury, aka when you break something during a lift, should be a worry only for the strongest among us. It’s just math. Your muscles can produce some amount of force, which your tendons must be able to transfer without snappin. For normal humans, your muscles are nowhere near strong enough to do this. WIth years of strength training (and PEDs which strengthen your muscles without strenghtening your tendons), you can maybe get there.
My advice is to be mindful of technique when learning a new lift, film yourself or ask someone to watch if you can, and make sure it looks the same as in the video.
Advice for moving from machines to free weights? Pick like 2 or 3 free weight exercises that look cool to you / are hard do do with machines and swap them into your program. Rinse and repeat after months. You may have many worries, and I can dispell most of them if you lay them out.
I also use strong, I have the premium membership. I looked into all the other apps, their features are not beter tracking afaik, but algorithms that create programs for you, or just access to pre-made programs
I think the reason I worry about injury is because I am far, far more clumsy than average, am really bad with form in general (I am in a theatre troupe and we often have to learn choreographed movement or rarely simple dances and I’m always the worst at it), and when I did running I ended up with a hip injury that still gives me grief (that said I am trying to build back up to hopefully running 10-20k a week again as I did really love it).
So, yeah, essentially, I’m terrified of baking in poor form and then injuring myself over time, as well as terrified of dropping a weight on myself (that said, I have never dropped a weight on any machine, so maybe that’s a good way to update myself).
The lower body exercises I do on the gym are the leg press, hip abduction/adduction, leg curl, leg extension. They also have an ab and back machine but to be honest I hate them and only use them rarely (once a month when I’m having a good week and want to do everything). But I do alternate between leg-focused machines and arm-focused machines when I exercise. Sometimes I do split sets between two machines if it’s quiet but that’s obviously rare because I want to be courteous. I aim to do 7 rep sets, and will lower the weight if I can only get around 4 and raise the weight if I can get 10+.
Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly didn’t occur to me that I could just add in one or two free weight exercises and use the machines for everything else.
My fitness goals are “have nice buff looking arms”, “do a pullup” and “lift up my husband (~80kg) in the traditional wife-carrying pose”, though I’m not pursuing them relentlessly or optimally, they’re just milestones I want to reach.
What free weight exercises might be best for getting me there, and have the most straightforward technique?
Those are great goals.
If you want to be “lifting your husband” strong, look up the starting strength squat and deadlift guides.
For upper body exercise suggestions, I think the list above is great.
For injury risk, I would really not worry, given the injury statistics are so low, and they are from people who DON’T focus on technique. The median gym goes is a 30yo guy swinging as much weight as possible around, and he’s mostly fine.
As far as technique goes, define failure as “I can’t do another rep without changing technique” and you reduce your chance of injure drastically.
For the exercises you’re doing now, I’d say there is a lot of “redundance / over-optimization”, e.g. the leg press will train both your adductors and abductors. If you want to do 2 leg exercises instead of just one (like I suggested in the post), I’d pick one form each category):
[squat] : Leg press, Back Squat, Front squat, split squat, hack squat, smith machine squat, dumbell-on-shoulder squat, goblet squat
[hinge] : Deadlift, Romanian deadlift, good Morning, reverse lunge.