Four Weight Machines that Are Essential to Your Workouts

There are many reasons why you need to get better acquainted with the exercise machines at the gym. These machines can bump up your metabolism by nearly 20% for at least two hours after your workout, leading to better weight loss. These machines also provide heart health benefits, as studies show that circuit training twice a week may lower your blood pressure. Plus, weight machines are good for your emotional wellbeing, with one recent study finding that women who regularly lifted weights felt healthier and had a more positive body image. We spoke to health and wellness expert Liz Neporent for her advice on the best gym machines.

 

Neporent instructs, ‘Begin by doing one set on each machine, using a weight you can lift between eight and 15 times. If you can breeze through all the repetitions, go slightly heavier; if you’re shaking after the first few reps, lower the amount of weight. Take a 30-second break (no more!) between each exercise to give your body adequate time to recover. Aim to do the workout two or three times a week. After two weeks, do two sets on each machine; after one month, challenge yourself.’ So which gym machines should you use?

 

1. Cable Tower: According to Neporent, ‘If you had to choose just one machine to use at the gym, this is it. That’s because the cable tower – which features several weight stacks, adjustable cables, and a whole bunch of attachments – offers dozens of exercises to target all of your major muscles. With a mere flick of a clip, you can easily go from doing curls to kickbacks to rows. To work your arms, stand facing one of the low weight stacks and clip a short, mustache-shaped bar onto the end. Grip the bar, placing hands near ends, palms up, arms extended, with hands in front of thighs. Curl the bar toward shoulders, keeping elbows close to sides. Lower slowly back to starting position and repeat.’

 

2. Lat Pull-Down: ‘A strong back will help you stand taller, reduce injury risk, and look seriously sexy in a strapless dress,’ Neporent asserts. ‘Clip the long bar onto the cable attachment and grip the bar with your hands 1 or 2 inches from the centre on either side, palms facing forward. Lean back slightly, keeping your arms straight, abs engaged and chest lifted, then pull the bar to the chest. Hold for 1 count; slowly return to starting position.’

 

3. Leg Press: Neporent explains, ‘Because [the leg press] keeps your body in a stable position while targeting your butt and thighs, you get an amazing workout. Adjust the seat so the thighs are parallel to the foot plate when you recline; keep the feet hip-width apart. Pressing the feet into plate, straighten the legs; don’t lock the knees at the top. Bend the knees and lower until the weight hovers just above the stack; repeat.’

 

4. Smith Machine: ‘The chest press is an incredibly effective way to work several muscles at once,’ says Neporent. ‘It looks a little scary at first, but the Smith has a safety net – if the weight should suddenly feel too heavy, you can plant the bar in the nearest set of holes on the frame. You can also use the Smith for standing moves like squats or lunges with weights. Place five-pound weight plates on both ends of bar. Lie on the bench with the chest directly beneath bar, feet flat on the floor. Grip the bar with hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart, palms forward, and unhook the bar; straighten arms. Bend the elbows until they’re just below shoulder height, then press back up. On the last rep, bend wrists to set bar back on hooks.’

Categories: cable tower, gym machines, leg press, machines, repeat nbsp, smith machine, starting position, weight, weight machines, weight stacks

No Pain No Gain: How Mark Wahlberg Packed on 15kg in 8 Weeks

Mark Wahlberg has spent the past 20 years making a career out of flexing his muscles in music videos, on billboards and, more recently, on the big screen. In one of his most recent roles – Sun Gym Gang ringleader Daniel Lugo in Pain and Gain – Wahlberg was required to pack on more than 15kg of muscle in just eight weeks, so how did he rise to the wellness challenge?

 

For his toughest transformation yet, the 42-year-old actor sought inspiration from his past by calling on the skills of Brian Nguyen. Not only is Nguyen the fitness director at BRIK Fitness; he has also been Wahlberg’s personal trainer since they worked together on 2006’s American football drama Invincible. Speaking about Wahlberg’s fitness regime during his Marky Mark days, Nguyen comments, ‘Anybody growing up in the 1980s, especially around all those isolation machines, the era of Arnold Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding … I think once you’ve done it once or twice, you kind of fall in love with it. Getting back into it is always going to be easier considering your body has a lot of muscle memory.’

 

However, the ironic thing about Wahlberg’s Pain & Gain fitness needs is that Nguyen had to reinstate some of the outdated techniques he’d originally persuaded Wahlberg to ditch in order to get his wellbeing in shape. ‘His whole routine used to be machine after machine after machine,’ Nguyen recalls. ‘When he started working out with me [on Invincible] his body was so used to machines that when it came time to actually playing football it was a little bit unbalanced – he ended up getting some bad pulls in his quads and his hamstrings. I had to teach him about the world of functional training – the basics such as squats, lunges, pulls, carries, lifts, drags.’

 

But in order to look like an 1980s-inspired bodybuilder, Wahlberg had to train like an 1980s-inspired bodybuilder and, for Nguyen, there was unfortunately no getting around that fact. ‘He needed to maintain that look,’ he notes. ‘In order to create mass like that, especially in the biceps and shoulders, he had to go back to isolation machines. We did a scaled-down version of Mark’s old workouts. But once we did, Mark started getting shoulder problems again and tendonitis in the knees. It just goes to prove those machines shouldn’t be used too much or too often.’

 

Luckily for Wahlberg, Nguyen tailored a fitness programme to help Wahlberg avoid completely regressing to endless isolation moves. Nguyen notes, ‘He has such a good base that when it came to getting him to bulk up on top, it was easy… He did a lot of basic functional movements – kettlebell work with squats, lunges, inverted rows on the TRX – and then I started getting him into single-leg and single-arm stuff, creating more rotation’ This was alongside a diet that involved the actor ‘eating anything and everything’. However, Wahlberg needed to get big fast, so Nguyen topped off the core and isolation work with some genuine strength training.

 

Nguyen details, ‘One thing I had him doing was loaded carries. Mark has a basketball court in his house, so he would bring out the 40kg kettlebells and do a farmer’s walk for two lengths of the court, then he would do a suitcase carry – two lengths for each arm. Then after that he would do a waiter walk, with one arm up above his head, and that was a finisher – that’s how hard Mark worked. It’s ridiculous how much mass he put on.’ He adds that the bulk helped Wahlberg get into the role: ‘Mark loved to pick up his entourage, throw us around and get into little wrestling matches. All of us were scared of him when he started getting into character like that. But having that kind of beast inside just needed to happen for him.’

Categories: 1980s inspired, Celebrity Wellness, fitness, inspired bodybuilder, isolation machines, machines, Mark Wahlberg, muscle mass, nbsp, nguyen, squats lunges, wahlberg

Have a Gym Session: Why Jamming in the Gym Gets Results

Wellness experts and fitness enthusiasts alike know how beneficial music is when you workout; having an MP3 player with you on a long run can help distract you or motivate you to keep going, but according to a new study it’s not just listening to music, but making music yourself that can make exercising a whole lot easier. The research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even goes so far as to suggest that our love for music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.

 

While researchers have long-known that listening to music is beneficial to your workouts, as well as your overall wellbeing, up until now no one has even thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on your performance, or indeed whether this impact might be even better than just merely hearing the sounds through the gym speakers or your headphones. Therefore, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions invented an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes.

 

The kit, depending on how you manipulate the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms, produced a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms. This was installed in a stair-stepper machine as well as two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles. For the study, 63 healthy men and women were divided into groups, each being assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous six-minute exercise session. The sound level rose and fell with each individual’s effort, and twinned with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. According to study leader Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, ‘Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies.’ Basically, the exercisers were the DJs for their own workouts.

 

The volunteers then took part in a separate exercise session, using the same machines minus the musical add-ons. However, elsewhere, another group used the musically-equipped machines, which meant that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another. The results of the study revealed that working at the musically-equipped machines – rather than the unmodified ones – caused most of the volunteers to generate significantly greater muscular force, use less oxygen to generate that force and report that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, which resulted in a steadier flow of music.

 

Dr. Fritz explained that creating their own rhythms and melodies made exercising more subjectively alluring to participants than if they just passively listened to the same music. Moreover, making the music helped participants to lower the physiological cost of exercise. Dr. Fritz pointed out that, in a similar way, early humans may have been motivated to whistle or hum while they hunted, and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labour. Still, the exact reason as to why orchestrating your own beats has more physical benefit than simply hearing the same song is not clear. Dr. Fritz noted, ‘We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control.’ So what does that mean for you? Dr. Fritz advised ignoring the music in the gym, and instead humming to yourself or harmonising – however badly – with your workout partner. That way, he said, you’ll be ‘jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a “y” from “gym.”’

Categories: Better Performance, dr fritz, equipped machines, exercise session, fritz, machines, Making Music, max planck, music, musically equipped, planck institute, Research