Why You Should Work Out with Barbell Weights

While the machines at your local health club may look all spiffy and clean, if you are serious about working out, gaining muscle, and especially functional strength, you need to be incorporating barbell weights into your workouts.  You will work more muscle groups, target them better, and make your whole body stronger.  Here are the main benefits to training with barbells.

Regardless of what exercise you’re doing, even targeted workouts with barbell weights train your muscle groups together. By contrast, most machines will isolate a muscle group and work that muscle alone. While this is great for some sculpting, if you really want to have your muscle grow, you need to be lifting mostly with barbells, not machines.

This is because your muscles generally will plateau their growth when they are about to get much larget than the other muscles around them. One example of this can be seen in bicep training. If you to curls at a preacher curl machine everyday, you will be targeting your biceps very well. However, your biceps are also connected to your shoulder muscles and you are ignoring these muscles. At best, you can expect decreased growth from these muscles, but at worst you are setting yourself up for an injury as your muscles and tendons stretch to unnatural proportions.

When you train with barbell weights, you can expect to have much more explosive growth than if you train with machines as well, especially if you’re training with the big three exercises, dead lifts, squats, and bench press. This is because these exercises all involve a huge amount of large muscle in your body and engages them all directly.

Having all these muscles engaged means that you will have a much high amount of natural growth hormone released in your body than if you just train single muscles. This spurs the explosive muscle growth that you’re looking for. This is also why doing squats can help to increase the size of your upper body!

Lifting with barbells also helps to build a lot more functional strength that you can use in your everyday life than simply lifting with machines.  Think about how many times in your life you’ve been asked to just curl something and then think about how many times you’ve had to bend down and lift a heavy object off the ground.

Bottom line is if you aren’t training hard with barbells, no matter how big you are, you aren’t strong, especially if you can’t bend over to lift boxes off the ground to help your friends move.

There are literally hundreds of different exercises that you can do with a barbell and weights.  Each of these exercises has different variations and ways of performing it so that you can work almost any muscle in your body in any way you choose and constantly mix up your workout.  With normal machines your range of motion is very limited and you will only be able to limit your workout to a certain extent.

One of the most common myths about  working out using any kind of free weights is that it is very easy to injure yourself.  While it is easier to injure yourself than using a machine, free weights aren’t dangerous.  The most important thing is to keep proper form until you learn it and then try to lift heavy.  If you do this and always keep the proper form when you’re lifting, your chances of being injured when you’re lifting with barbells is almost zero.

Lifting with Olympic barbell weights is a great way to get fit, gain muscle, and  get more functional strength.  There are many different advantages to lifting with them and they are not only great to use, but also aren’t as dangerous as some people make them out to be.  Start incorporating barbells into your workout today.