Squats don't cure cancer, and, in my experience, should not be readily prescribed to beginners whose background is middle-aged middle-class office-worker with mortgage, 2.1 kids, a tyre swing in the front yard and no history of training for the last 20 years. People who don't know how to move their bodies suck at squatting, and need to learn how to move in order to do even vaguely passable squats.
Leg presses teach you foot positions, to drive your feet and knees out, and to use the glutes, hamstrings and quadriceps.
Calf raises teach you bar placement. Gastrocnemius, the upper-most superficial calf muscle, just jack diddley squat during squats. Squats do not give you big calves, calf raises give you big calves.
Hyperextensions teach you glute drive and to keep your chest up, core tight and torso in a rigid position, thus hinging at the hips rather than rounding the lower back to bend over. Most people associate hyperextensions with hyperextending the lower back. Don't do this. Keep the back rigid. However, there is something that should get hyperextended (assuming your body is in good, working order), and that's your hip. Your hips should normally be able to hyperextend by 10-15 degrees, and achieving this hyperextension forcibly will give your glutes a very powerful contraction, which can't be achieved through squats and deadlifts due to ROM restrictions.
In 9 years of training, I have had no experience to suggest that pull ups and barbell rows are superior to lat pull downs and seated rows, yet I have a whole lot of anecdotal evidence that the opposite is true.
Somewhere along the lines, people seem to have gotten it into their heads that barbells and dumbbells = compound and machines = isolation. Thus, according to these people, cable rows and leg presses are isolation exercises. Isolation means it works around a single joint, compound means it works around multiple joints, regardless of whether an exercise is free weight or machine.
The more general an exercise, the less specific it is. That may be obvious, but somehow people manage to ignore the implications here. It means that back squats work the quads, glutes, hamstrings, core and lower back...but lunges and front squats work the quads better, RDLs work the hamstrings and lower back better, hip thrusts work the glutes better, and weighted sit ups work the abs better. General exercises are great at doing a lot of stuff in one fell swoop, while specialised exercises hone in on one or two key things and do them really well. One is not inherently better than the other; both are highly valuable.
To the guys, circuit training won't cause you to grow female sex organs. A well-designed circuit, if geared towards strength/hypertrophy, can have you doing about as much work per exercise as you would otherwise, while getting a handful of exercises done in 10-15min rather than spending 45min on them. An example would be overhead press / row / lateral raise / triceps extension / bicep curl. The big kick here is that volume is one of the key ingredients to hypertrophy, so doing a circuit like the one just stated would leave you open to doing several more exercises within a gym session, accumulating much more volume, thus stimulating lots of growth and strength.
Fitballs and bosus are useful. No really, they are. The world does not revolve around bodybuilding and powerlifting, and even if it did, bodybuilders and powerlifters can use fitballs and bosus productively.
For the last 5 years, I've been told that free weights are better than machines because they work the "stabiliser muscles." No one seems to know what muscles they're referring to when they talk about "stabiliser muscles," and everyone seems to be suppressing the truth that stabilisation is a matter of team-work, not a job left to a certain muscle group.
Leg presses teach you foot positions, to drive your feet and knees out, and to use the glutes, hamstrings and quadriceps.
Calf raises teach you bar placement. Gastrocnemius, the upper-most superficial calf muscle, just jack diddley squat during squats. Squats do not give you big calves, calf raises give you big calves.
Hyperextensions teach you glute drive and to keep your chest up, core tight and torso in a rigid position, thus hinging at the hips rather than rounding the lower back to bend over. Most people associate hyperextensions with hyperextending the lower back. Don't do this. Keep the back rigid. However, there is something that should get hyperextended (assuming your body is in good, working order), and that's your hip. Your hips should normally be able to hyperextend by 10-15 degrees, and achieving this hyperextension forcibly will give your glutes a very powerful contraction, which can't be achieved through squats and deadlifts due to ROM restrictions.
In 9 years of training, I have had no experience to suggest that pull ups and barbell rows are superior to lat pull downs and seated rows, yet I have a whole lot of anecdotal evidence that the opposite is true.
Somewhere along the lines, people seem to have gotten it into their heads that barbells and dumbbells = compound and machines = isolation. Thus, according to these people, cable rows and leg presses are isolation exercises. Isolation means it works around a single joint, compound means it works around multiple joints, regardless of whether an exercise is free weight or machine.
The more general an exercise, the less specific it is. That may be obvious, but somehow people manage to ignore the implications here. It means that back squats work the quads, glutes, hamstrings, core and lower back...but lunges and front squats work the quads better, RDLs work the hamstrings and lower back better, hip thrusts work the glutes better, and weighted sit ups work the abs better. General exercises are great at doing a lot of stuff in one fell swoop, while specialised exercises hone in on one or two key things and do them really well. One is not inherently better than the other; both are highly valuable.
To the guys, circuit training won't cause you to grow female sex organs. A well-designed circuit, if geared towards strength/hypertrophy, can have you doing about as much work per exercise as you would otherwise, while getting a handful of exercises done in 10-15min rather than spending 45min on them. An example would be overhead press / row / lateral raise / triceps extension / bicep curl. The big kick here is that volume is one of the key ingredients to hypertrophy, so doing a circuit like the one just stated would leave you open to doing several more exercises within a gym session, accumulating much more volume, thus stimulating lots of growth and strength.
Fitballs and bosus are useful. No really, they are. The world does not revolve around bodybuilding and powerlifting, and even if it did, bodybuilders and powerlifters can use fitballs and bosus productively.
For the last 5 years, I've been told that free weights are better than machines because they work the "stabiliser muscles." No one seems to know what muscles they're referring to when they talk about "stabiliser muscles," and everyone seems to be suppressing the truth that stabilisation is a matter of team-work, not a job left to a certain muscle group.
