louden_swain said:
Well I guess Dorian Yates, Chris Cormier, Flex Wheeler, Greg Kovacs, Ronnie Coleman, and Jay Cutler cant's use real weight.
These guys include hammer strength work in their routine.
What about NFL players? These guys use a lot of hammer strength equipment and a lot of these guys are pushing 550lbs on the bench press.
I don't think this statement is accurate.
I know what Oak really meant; there's a large crowd at every gym that gravitates toward machines who are simply afraid to squat, deadlift, and free weights in general. I call them the Men's Fitness bunch. They do tend to be a kind of pansy bunch in bodybuilding terms, the sort that say, "I don't want to be big!"
My uncles were like that. They exclusively trained with Nautilus machines in the early eighties. Some of those pieces were awesome--the Super Pullover machine is a fantastic lat movement, and the Duo Squat was excellent for the entire thigh--but they operated under the assumption that "free weights build a
beefier muscle." (?! Why not use free weights then?)
But they were notorious for making highly illogical statements. One of them asserts that Christianity is better than Islam because the former "never had leaders that advocated violence against non-believers." I am Christian, and I find that statement absolutely absurd.
The fact is, they were pussy trainers, and the free weight guys were serious. Muscle is muscle; the free weight crowd built it because they worked hard, and my two uncles didn't. It had
nothing to do with the fact that they wouldn't venture from their Nautilus equipment.
I like Hammer Strength pieces, myself, and evidently a lot of pros do, too. They don't have to preempt deadlifts, dips, and squats to be effective. They're just tools...and I've always thought resistance is resistance. Some machines are gold; others, you'd be better off using the old stand-bys.
Why it ever became an "either-or" scenario, I'm not sure...if the Men's Fitness crowd were snotty about it, I might understand better, but other than sneers and accusations from them that free weight guys are all juicing, I've never seen that bunch act as if their machines were superior overall to BBs and DBs. Shit, even Arthur Jones trained all of his people with a number of free-weight movements like dips, chins, squats, stiff-legged deadlifts, DB calf raises, etc.
If more people would treat the Hammer pieces with respect/take them seriously, they'd see they can be very effective. Even the more hard-core guys where I work out tend to focus on bench and incline pressing lots of weight, then they go to the Hammer Iso-Wide, put only two wheels on each side, and use it to "pump." Oh well
I do wish the Iso-Incline would allow you to get a somewhat better stretch at the bottom, but it's a tough machine. I flat benched 370 when I was 19, and I don't think I could put that much up on the Iso-Incline, five years older and 40 lbs. heavier...
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