How to Make Good Gains in Muscle With a Limited Amount of Equipment, Space, Time, and Money
There are literally hundreds of different exercise machines designed to work every body part, all claiming superiority of design and function and promising better results in size and strength.
Some of these machines are quite effective, as well as convenient to adjust and use and most big gyms are filled with them.
It seems machines are claiming more floor space than ever while the free weight sections of most gyms are shrinking.
This is due to the fact that exercise manufacturers have done their job well, both in creative marketing and playing on peoples belief that something that seems high tech with elaborate mechanisms of chains, gears, variable resistance cams, oblong pulleys, and leverage systems, wrapped in a sleek modern looking metal skin has to be better than plain barbells, dumbbells, and simple pulley and cable systems, that seem by comparison to be primitive and archaic, too simple and limiting to build a complete physique.
The gyms are aware of this notion and play it up big to convince people that their warehouses of endless shiny machines are the only way to reach their goals of real physical improvement and since all of these machines are exceedingly expensive, and to purchase enough of them to work all the major muscle groups would price them out of the reach of most trainers, the gyms position themselves as the solution.
Are big gyms the only solution? Are machines more effective than free weights and simple pulley and cable systems? Does high tech equal high effect? Do you need an elaborate home gym setup to see real gains? How far can you go in development with a simple limited amount of equipment, a small workout space with a limited amount of time and money? Are big gyms the only solution? They would like you to think so, playing up on your lack of knowledge, self confidence, and creativity.
But with a little of these three ingredients you can walk away from the big gyms forever, never paying for a membership again, never waiting for a piece of equipment as your muscles are cooling off, losing their pump, and destroying your workout's momentum.
No more wasted time driving to and from the gym.
Are machines more effective than free weights and simple pulley and cable systems? Hardly, with their systems of variable resistance by means of leverage rods, oblong cams, and pulleys, they take away and give back varying amounts of resistance as you move through the whole range of motion of a given exercise to try to counteract your body's perceived deficiency as to its inferior points of leverage, supposably leveling and equalizing the work your muscles are doing as you go from an inferior line of leverage to a superior one.
The problem is the body was not designed to work this way and this is not what is encountered in a real life situation when moving or lifting something.
The body's own leverage systems are designed to function in the real world with its own built in system of checks and balances to tackle and overcome workloads.
The second problem is the movement runs along a guided path that does not allow the body to move through a natural path from extension to contraction, moving joints out of a normal comfortable groove.
Also by guiding and controlling the path of movement, machines remove the body's need for the stabilizer muscles that help the prime movers by holding a weight from moving out of its natural groove, say as in bench press, while the prime movers, the pecs, front delts, and triceps are moving the load up and down, the lats, traps, biceps, and side delts keep the weight from drifting too far above or below the level of the mid chest or from side to side while the legs, hips, lower back, and abs create a solid base from which to push.
Machines decrease much muscle activity and do not allow the important interaction between the body's leverage and equalizing systems, causing an inferior degree of actual lifting strength and function leading to muscle imbalances between the prime movers and surrounding stabilizer muscles, retarding their development in some cases.
And since you move in a fixed line the over reliance on these machines can lead to joint and overuse injuries if the plane of movement, gripping handles, and angle of push or pull forces you to work in a path outside the natural lifting groove, putting undue strain on the joints.
Free weights and simple pulley and cable systems more closely mimic the the way the body was designed to handle workloads, allowing freedom of movement, heavy involvement of all muscles associated with a given exercise, a wide variety of angles, grips, arm, leg, and foot placements, allowing you to hit every conceivable part of a muscle group while moving in a muti dimensional pathway conducive to the natural functioning of the joints and leverage systems of human physical movement.
So does high tech equal high effect? In the area of human physical improvement the answer is no because as I stated earlier the body was designed to work in the real world and the real world has been primitive up until a couple of centuries ago and that is the environment it thrives in and grows bigger and stronger to compensate for the work given it.
Just because technology has made giant leaps does not negate the fact that the human body is of ancient descent and design and is adapted perfectly to meet the demands of moving and lifting things with its differing points of inferior and superior leverage within a given range and path of movement.
Do you need an elaborate home gym setup to see real gains? Not at all, just a few pieces of equipment are needed, a way to do chins and dips, an adjustable bench with a simple lat tower attachment, a five or six foot bar, two adjustable dumbbell bars, a couple hundred pounds of standard barbell plates broke down into 1 1/4, 2 1/2, 5, 10, and 25 pounds, a wooden calf block, a leather lifting belt, an adjustable ankle cuff and some strong yellow poly rope.
If you are creative and have some mechanical ability and knowledge of workload capacities, you can construct some simple pulley and cable machines out of wood with vinyl coated cable and nylon or steel pulleys with ball bearings.
I have built many home gym applications over the years and have spent most of my training career working out on such limited systems.
I chose to do this out of some of the same reasons given earlier and to avoid being interrupted in my workouts because of the constant barrage of questions by individuals as to training and diet advice and the meat head mentality and antics of certain patrons who seem to spoil the atmosphere of any gym they frequent.
In your home gym you won't have any such distractions or deterrents hindering your concentration and efforts.
How far can you go in development with a simple limited amount of equipment, a small workout space with a limited amount of money and time? As far as you want to go, you are only limited by your creativity and imagination.
In the most cost and space limited scenario with only a adjustable bench with a simple lat tower attachment, a six foot standard bar, two adjustable dumbbell bars, a couple hundred pounds of standard barbell plates, a wooden calf block, leather lifting belt, an adjustable ankle cuff and some strong yellow poly rope, you are looking at a one time cost of around four hundred dollars that will keep you the rest of your life.
The space needed is a 10x10 or 12x12 area.
Years ago I had these identical setup and space limitations and when a friend of my brothers came over and saw what I had he asked how could I get anything approaching a decent workout out of what appeared to be a hopelessly ineptly limited amount of equipment and space.
Even after I explained the variety and diversity of exercises possible on such a limited setup he couldn't see it and walked away shaking his head.
He had no imagination or creativity and had stopped training a few years before because he didn't have the time to go to the gym and figured he couldn't get a productive workout at home, so let his body go to pot and even though seeing my level of development, it still didn't register he could do the same.
With this simple setup you can do incline, flat, and decline dumbbell and barbell presses and flys, parallel dips, as most of these benches have short parallel bars attached to the backside of the uprights, dumbbell pullovers, behind the neck pulldowns, wide, medium, and close front lat pulldowns with an over or under grip, 90 or 45 degree barbell row with wide, medium, and close over or under grip, one arm dumbbell row, one end of barbell row, behind the neck or military presses, dumbbell presses, side and bent dumbbell laterals, dumbbell and barbell front raises, dumbbell high pulls, barbell upright rows, dumbbell or barbell shrugs, close grip bench press, lying and standing dumbbell and barbell frenchpresses, dumbbell kickbacks, cable pushdowns, close grip pushups, bench dips, standing, seated, or incline barbell and dumbbell curls, standing and bentover calf raises, standing one leg curls, stiff legged deadlifts, rope squats, dumbbell squats, and one leg squats, seated cable crunches, floor crunches and reverse crunches, leg raises, jackknives, roman chair situps, and leg raises.
That is over sixty exercises including all the variances in grip, hand spacing, dumbbell and barbell choices that work every single major muscle group, not to mention the array of intensity principles and exercise sequences that can be applied to up the ante, allowing for a tremendous amount of deep muscle fiber stimulation within a very limited amount of sets and time.
It doesn't take expensive equipment, a lot of space, money, or time to get a quality workout.
It just takes a good knowledge of the function of each major muscle group and proper form when working them and a little imagination and creativity and you can accomplish a lot with very little.
Some of these machines are quite effective, as well as convenient to adjust and use and most big gyms are filled with them.
It seems machines are claiming more floor space than ever while the free weight sections of most gyms are shrinking.
This is due to the fact that exercise manufacturers have done their job well, both in creative marketing and playing on peoples belief that something that seems high tech with elaborate mechanisms of chains, gears, variable resistance cams, oblong pulleys, and leverage systems, wrapped in a sleek modern looking metal skin has to be better than plain barbells, dumbbells, and simple pulley and cable systems, that seem by comparison to be primitive and archaic, too simple and limiting to build a complete physique.
The gyms are aware of this notion and play it up big to convince people that their warehouses of endless shiny machines are the only way to reach their goals of real physical improvement and since all of these machines are exceedingly expensive, and to purchase enough of them to work all the major muscle groups would price them out of the reach of most trainers, the gyms position themselves as the solution.
Are big gyms the only solution? Are machines more effective than free weights and simple pulley and cable systems? Does high tech equal high effect? Do you need an elaborate home gym setup to see real gains? How far can you go in development with a simple limited amount of equipment, a small workout space with a limited amount of time and money? Are big gyms the only solution? They would like you to think so, playing up on your lack of knowledge, self confidence, and creativity.
But with a little of these three ingredients you can walk away from the big gyms forever, never paying for a membership again, never waiting for a piece of equipment as your muscles are cooling off, losing their pump, and destroying your workout's momentum.
No more wasted time driving to and from the gym.
Are machines more effective than free weights and simple pulley and cable systems? Hardly, with their systems of variable resistance by means of leverage rods, oblong cams, and pulleys, they take away and give back varying amounts of resistance as you move through the whole range of motion of a given exercise to try to counteract your body's perceived deficiency as to its inferior points of leverage, supposably leveling and equalizing the work your muscles are doing as you go from an inferior line of leverage to a superior one.
The problem is the body was not designed to work this way and this is not what is encountered in a real life situation when moving or lifting something.
The body's own leverage systems are designed to function in the real world with its own built in system of checks and balances to tackle and overcome workloads.
The second problem is the movement runs along a guided path that does not allow the body to move through a natural path from extension to contraction, moving joints out of a normal comfortable groove.
Also by guiding and controlling the path of movement, machines remove the body's need for the stabilizer muscles that help the prime movers by holding a weight from moving out of its natural groove, say as in bench press, while the prime movers, the pecs, front delts, and triceps are moving the load up and down, the lats, traps, biceps, and side delts keep the weight from drifting too far above or below the level of the mid chest or from side to side while the legs, hips, lower back, and abs create a solid base from which to push.
Machines decrease much muscle activity and do not allow the important interaction between the body's leverage and equalizing systems, causing an inferior degree of actual lifting strength and function leading to muscle imbalances between the prime movers and surrounding stabilizer muscles, retarding their development in some cases.
And since you move in a fixed line the over reliance on these machines can lead to joint and overuse injuries if the plane of movement, gripping handles, and angle of push or pull forces you to work in a path outside the natural lifting groove, putting undue strain on the joints.
Free weights and simple pulley and cable systems more closely mimic the the way the body was designed to handle workloads, allowing freedom of movement, heavy involvement of all muscles associated with a given exercise, a wide variety of angles, grips, arm, leg, and foot placements, allowing you to hit every conceivable part of a muscle group while moving in a muti dimensional pathway conducive to the natural functioning of the joints and leverage systems of human physical movement.
So does high tech equal high effect? In the area of human physical improvement the answer is no because as I stated earlier the body was designed to work in the real world and the real world has been primitive up until a couple of centuries ago and that is the environment it thrives in and grows bigger and stronger to compensate for the work given it.
Just because technology has made giant leaps does not negate the fact that the human body is of ancient descent and design and is adapted perfectly to meet the demands of moving and lifting things with its differing points of inferior and superior leverage within a given range and path of movement.
Do you need an elaborate home gym setup to see real gains? Not at all, just a few pieces of equipment are needed, a way to do chins and dips, an adjustable bench with a simple lat tower attachment, a five or six foot bar, two adjustable dumbbell bars, a couple hundred pounds of standard barbell plates broke down into 1 1/4, 2 1/2, 5, 10, and 25 pounds, a wooden calf block, a leather lifting belt, an adjustable ankle cuff and some strong yellow poly rope.
If you are creative and have some mechanical ability and knowledge of workload capacities, you can construct some simple pulley and cable machines out of wood with vinyl coated cable and nylon or steel pulleys with ball bearings.
I have built many home gym applications over the years and have spent most of my training career working out on such limited systems.
I chose to do this out of some of the same reasons given earlier and to avoid being interrupted in my workouts because of the constant barrage of questions by individuals as to training and diet advice and the meat head mentality and antics of certain patrons who seem to spoil the atmosphere of any gym they frequent.
In your home gym you won't have any such distractions or deterrents hindering your concentration and efforts.
How far can you go in development with a simple limited amount of equipment, a small workout space with a limited amount of money and time? As far as you want to go, you are only limited by your creativity and imagination.
In the most cost and space limited scenario with only a adjustable bench with a simple lat tower attachment, a six foot standard bar, two adjustable dumbbell bars, a couple hundred pounds of standard barbell plates, a wooden calf block, leather lifting belt, an adjustable ankle cuff and some strong yellow poly rope, you are looking at a one time cost of around four hundred dollars that will keep you the rest of your life.
The space needed is a 10x10 or 12x12 area.
Years ago I had these identical setup and space limitations and when a friend of my brothers came over and saw what I had he asked how could I get anything approaching a decent workout out of what appeared to be a hopelessly ineptly limited amount of equipment and space.
Even after I explained the variety and diversity of exercises possible on such a limited setup he couldn't see it and walked away shaking his head.
He had no imagination or creativity and had stopped training a few years before because he didn't have the time to go to the gym and figured he couldn't get a productive workout at home, so let his body go to pot and even though seeing my level of development, it still didn't register he could do the same.
With this simple setup you can do incline, flat, and decline dumbbell and barbell presses and flys, parallel dips, as most of these benches have short parallel bars attached to the backside of the uprights, dumbbell pullovers, behind the neck pulldowns, wide, medium, and close front lat pulldowns with an over or under grip, 90 or 45 degree barbell row with wide, medium, and close over or under grip, one arm dumbbell row, one end of barbell row, behind the neck or military presses, dumbbell presses, side and bent dumbbell laterals, dumbbell and barbell front raises, dumbbell high pulls, barbell upright rows, dumbbell or barbell shrugs, close grip bench press, lying and standing dumbbell and barbell frenchpresses, dumbbell kickbacks, cable pushdowns, close grip pushups, bench dips, standing, seated, or incline barbell and dumbbell curls, standing and bentover calf raises, standing one leg curls, stiff legged deadlifts, rope squats, dumbbell squats, and one leg squats, seated cable crunches, floor crunches and reverse crunches, leg raises, jackknives, roman chair situps, and leg raises.
That is over sixty exercises including all the variances in grip, hand spacing, dumbbell and barbell choices that work every single major muscle group, not to mention the array of intensity principles and exercise sequences that can be applied to up the ante, allowing for a tremendous amount of deep muscle fiber stimulation within a very limited amount of sets and time.
It doesn't take expensive equipment, a lot of space, money, or time to get a quality workout.
It just takes a good knowledge of the function of each major muscle group and proper form when working them and a little imagination and creativity and you can accomplish a lot with very little.
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