Several good reasons to use dumbbells and barbells

A friend of ours was lying on a weight bench holding two dumbbells over his head when his cat hopped on the bench. While trying to shoo the cat away by squirming around, our friend kept the weights overhead for so long that he tore a rotator cuff muscle. The point of this story isn’t to scare you away from using free weights. In fact, the best approach to strength training combines free weights and machines. Just know that barbells and dumbbells require plenty of concentration. If you follow the safety tips free weight training is perfectly safe. Here are several good reasons to use dumbbells and barbells:

• Free weights are versatile. With barbells and dumbbells, you can do literally hundreds of exercises that work virtually every muscle group in your body. Most weight machines, on the other hand, are designed to perform only one or two exercises.
• Free weights give your muscles more freedom to move. Suppose that you’re lying on a bench pushing a barbell above your chest. You can press the weight straight up over your chest, or you can move your arms a few inches back so you’re pressing directly above your neck. Or you can position your arms anywhere between. All these movements are perfectly legitimate ways of doing the exercise and working your pecs, and some motions may feel more comfortable to your body than others.
• Free weights involve several muscle groups at once. For example, chest press movements work your chest, shoulders, and triceps. However, when you perform these movements with a barbell, you also call on your abdominal and lower back muscles to keep your body still and to keep the bar balanced as you press the weight up. With the equivalent weight machine, you don’t have to worry about holding the bar still, so your abdominal and back muscles don’t get much work.