Machines vs. Free Weights: Constraints and Stability

The only thing that's not that technical is machines because... Good. I'm glad you've gone here. Yeah. Because with a machine, the machine provides the constraints. Stability largely as well. External stability, you know, kind of a set movement pathway. Parameters for what you can and can't do. But for bodybuilding, that's great because you can go full Monty and you can work prime movers. You don't have to worry about all the stabilizers. You don't have to worry about center of mass. You don't have to worry about a lot. You can just go fucking full potato. But now you go to something like Olympic weightlifting, highly technical. Yes. And there's a definite very right way of doing it and a very wrong way of doing it. And that right way is going to be different depending on who you learned it from. Did you learn like Eastern Bloc style? Did you learn, you know, Russian? Are you doing Chinese weightlifting? They all have their own different ways of how they move the bar from the ground to overhead. Yeah, to do a bodybuilding machine wrong is still to do it right. Pretty much. Yeah, as long as you can fit if you long as you put the settings right way that you were meant to be Sat in it and using it for its actual purpose wrong is only so wrong. Whereas in CrossFit. It's like there is infinite There no there less parameter We moving the bar which is like I took charge to where did we go You and me and Ben went to Flex Lewis place in Dragon's Lair in Vegas. And we got him on the plate loaded chest press and he was like, for starters, he was like, why the fuck are we doing another set? We've done like all the reps here. But Chaz kept standing up in the chest press because he wants to make everything a fucking free moving, full body movement. I mean, we could talk about this all day, but I feel like for now, try not to melt anyone's brain any further. So separate conversation about this again. With the Olympic weightlifting, it's you and anything that is, I'd say, like a three-dimensional type of thing. You have to provide your own constraints. So your brain has to figure out how to make the constraints. You have to know what they were in the first place. That's right. Whereas a machine provides a constraint, a squat, front squat, clean, snatch. You have to create your own stabilization, internal stabilization, connection, your own patterns. so that everything is a place right so they're vastly different they're all exercises but they're very different in the demands that they need to do like if you're doing a snatch you're you're never doing your your muscles aren't going to be on fire you go and you do a hack squat to failure for 15 reps everything's going to be on fire it's completely different metabolic demands completely different technically different ways in which you will fail in that movement between a metabolic issue versus a neurological or strength or technique issue. So that is one of the gripes I have is they, there's not the people that go, that start CrossFit. A lot of them want to get into the groups and do their thing, but they don't want to do the prep work to understand how to do the movement correctly. It's like when I was in high school, like I was in all the honors, honors English, honors math, whatever. Can't relate. I was not. I had the worst algebra teacher for algebra one and two where he would not check your homework. He would just take it and put a check mark if he saw that you just squiggled shit all over it. When I got to college, they're like, I took entrance exams. I go, you actually don't know how to do algebra. I'm like, yeah, math's not my thing. English is my thing. And they're like, yeah, you can't go in algebra one. We got to put you in retard algebra. So I actually had to go. Algebra. I was in university. I had to take like high school level algebra test after taking it for two years and still not knowing A minus B equals C. Which isn't ideal. So that's what like a thing where it's technical lifts, you need basically your fucking retard. It's a stacking of meta skills. You've got to build the foundation.