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I think it makes sense to get started exercising, using any kind of good program at all, and to pay attention to technique. I don't have injury stats on machines versus free weights. Almost all the serious lifters I knew (bodybuilders or powerlifters) did plenty of free weight work. This included one 67-year-old bodybuilder in amazing shape who'd been injury-free for decades. He used a mix of free weights and machines, but he didn't squat the kinds of weights the serious powerlifters did, either. You can make yourself a lot stronger than the average person with pretty low risk of injury, if your technique is good. As far as I can tell, you can do it pretty safely with a squat rack, some safety bars, a bench, a bar, and some weights. According to BroScience(TM), lol, the advantage of free weights is that if you have good technique, then you wind up working large parts of your body as a unified system, or something. (Bro science is like blog posts on unit testing; everyone's got a theory and almost nobody has numbers.) But once you hit "a lot stronger than the average person", where do you go next? Do you maintain? Do you keep trying to lift more? Do you decide to go for a bit of hypertrophy? And that's where I think it makes sense to talk to the old lifters, and look for patterns. Don't believe me. I'm just some guy on the Internet. Go talk to the old guys who've been doing it for 40 years and who aren't wearing tons of wraps and tape. By the time you need to make these decisions, you'll likely know some old guys at your gym, anyways. |