The Best Muscle-Building Machines
Which kind of strength-training equipment makes the most of your time: fixed machines or free-form gear?
Go for the free-form gear, like dumbbells or cable-and-pulley machines that allow freedom of motion. They can give you double the strength gains that fixed equipment offers.
Strength in Numbers
Fixed machines -- like a leg-press machine, where you load up a plate with weights and have a fixed plane of motion to push through -- don’t tap as many balance and control muscles as free-form equipment does. So you don’t get as buff, a recent study showed. People in the study who used free-form equipment boosted their strength by a whopping 115 percent -- versus just 57 percent for the fixed-machine users. Free-form gear boosts balance better, too.
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