Or just look at the turkish get up. That's all stabilizer.
Of course, there is no substitute for squats and deadlifts. The closest is pistol squats which are great for advanced athletes, but pistol squats are very hard to do if you haven't done a lot of barbell squats first.
I did dumbbell bench exclusively for close to a year, and got to the point that I could get 5 reps with the 120 pound dumbbells. However, when I moved over to barbell bench, there was surprisingly litte transfer - no real difference from where my barbell bench was before I started doing dumbbell.
Absolutely agree on squats and deadlifts. Squats should be the cornerstone of a strength program.
They are certainly different and have a different emphasis and limitations, but for a lot of training goals they can do the job very well. And even the mini-gyms found in hotels and apartments tend to have some dumbbells, while the same access isn't there with barbells.
Untrue. Dumbbells offer a completely free range of motion, which is what activates the stabilizer muscles.
(source: google for "stabilizer muscles dumbbells" and you'll find a ton of information on the subject.)
The exercise also makes a big difference. Doing chest flys with dumbbells may feel like you are using a lot of stabilizers but actually you are no where near using as many as a free standing squat.
And of course you're using bigger muscles when doing more compound exercises so correspondingly the weight have to be bigger. I believe that's why in general most people would say barbells > dumbbells.
According to "starting strength", at some point you can't hold the dumbbells due to limitations in grip strength.
They're worried about a different kind of injury than you are.
The problem with Smith Machines is that the movements are all linear, e.g. perfectly straight. NOTHING in your body moves in a perfectly straight line, there is an arc to almost everything you do.
Frequently people do squats with smith machines which will eventually hurt their backs from bad form.
(Indeed, I wince in pain sometimes watching people do horrible things to their backs in smith machines, holy crap!)
Now you CAN do things wrong with barbells of course, but many of the things done with a smith machine cannot be right at all!
> (if I had the money...),
My small local gym costs $200 a year.
Find a small local neighborhood gym (even if it isn't in your neighborhood!), they are always affordable!
And hey, body weight exercise programs are free. :)
Bodyweight exercises can be extremely frustrating when you are really just starting out. When I first started, I couldn't do more than 5 pullups or about 20 pushups, which made it unnecessarily hard to progress. I switched to weights so that I could lower the load and do 3 sets, and immediately made much better progress.
Pullups I don't know how to adjust.
Also nice to essentially do a pull-up strip set. (Get a few extra pull-ups in when your muscles are fatigued and can no longer lift your whole weight.)
And this is the point where I see the problem with 'diet advice' given online (and not online, too, but a lot of it is online): It's overbroad and not broad enough, because it focuses on the wrong things. Bread is processed, but saying bread is bad is idiotic on its face. Meats are largely unprocessed, but a diet that's all meat is not a weight loss plan unless you live in the high Arctic and/or are doing an immense amount of exercise.
No food is bad in and of itself. It might be unhelpful in achieving a certain goal, but it is not bad. Trying to pigeonhole foods into 'good' and 'bad runs into the basic fact all foods are made of the same components and every component has its use. Yes, even fats. Yes, even carbohydrates.
It's possible to lose weight eating Twinkies in massive amounts. It even improved cholesterol levels.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
He just got all his carbs from twinkies, and used willpower to force himself to not eat when he was hungry. His "massive amounts" are the same that many people eat, plus they eat MORE other foods.
A bad food is something that doesn't satiate you as it gives you calories and fat, so you need to do other work to force yourself to not overeat. Example: twinkies
OK, this is a reasonable first step. My point, really, is that even 'bad' foods can be part of a healthy diet, because health is determined by the overall diet.
Demonizing food leads to unhealthy psychological results in the form of the sin-guilt-redemption cycle, when what you really need to lose weight is a clear-headed appraisal of your current state and what you're capable of doing to reach your goal.
>Habit First
Absolutely agree, especially when you're trying to get out of morbid out-of-shapeness. I personally find that mixing it into a pre-existing daily routine works well. I personally do core work and pullups/chinups before my morning and evening showers, and stretch exercises while I'm in the shower.
>Diet
IMO the Diet section is way too detailed as a first step. For someone who is trying to improve from very poor nutrition, I would advise the following:
1. Get rid of all processed sugar products from your house: candy, juice, soda, cookies, etc. (imo all processed items are bad, but again it's about keeping the barrier low)
2. Only walk around the outside lanes of a Grocery store (where the meats, dairy, and vegetables are). Don't go into the middle aisles where they have all the sugary, salty, processed goodies. Keeping bad food out of the house is the easiest, lowest friction way to keep a healthy diet.
> Dumbbells first
Totally disagree with this one. Compound lifts using Barbells are vastly superior to isolation lifts using dumbbells, particularly for beginners. And for beginners, Starting Strength has proven time and time again to be the most effective program. [1]
If you're "starting out", then bodyweight exercises like pullups, chinups, bodyweight squats, planks, pushups, situps, are going to be low barrier to entry, good-habit inducing work that can be leveraged to take the person to the next level when they're comfortable. Once they're at this stage, they can buy whatever barbell setup they're comfortable with (I personally really want an Olympic Lifting platform in my garage...), which is going to be much much cheaper than that complicated Nautilus weight thing anyway.
>Safety
>Even with dummbells, I was able to put loads on my back that felt uncomfortable within about three months.
That' because dumbell lifts don't engage the stabilizer muscles. As a result, those support muscles are going to be underdeveloped and you won't have developed the coordination to engage them when you need them.
> Padded lifting gloves with wrist support helped keep my wrists in a stable, safe position and alleviated wrist pain.
IMO using outside assistance like this promotes bad form and bad habits.
>Str training machines
Ugh these machines are terrible. They (a) don't engage your auxiliary muscles well, and (b) move weights in an unnatural path relative to your body and tend to cause more injuries than just plan barbell work. A great example is squatting on a smith machine, which puts you into very dangerous positions. (yet every single small'ish gym believes that they are somehow safer than regular squat racks)
---
I find it odd that the article started out with the premise of helping very novice people get into a healthier routine wrt both diet and exercise, yet evolved into a fairly intermediate article. IMO most people don't need to optimize strength training to this extent. Just getting in any kind of routine and eating well will go a lonnggggg ways.
[1] http://startingstrength.wikia.com/wiki/The_Starting_Strength...