Oddbean

GM. The stabilizer muscle is a made up fiat science term. You gain no additional benefit in doing a bench press that requires you “stabilize” a bar vs using a machine chest press. It just adds more injury risk. You also don’t ever need to lift heavy. You can use a moderate weight on a machine at a slow and controlled pace until you reach momentary muscle failure. Both methods effectively stress your muscles but one approach reduces wear and tear on your joints and requires less time. I highly recommend following Jay Vincent, he’s a great resource for info on high intensity training and fitness science. https://video.nostr.build/1d64c5af8670883c3bb68010e3c6bc3041036b7788e4c66a29e101cf6fe1c0f0.mp4 https://youtube.com/shorts/3VbY4CLckOE

Bro deserves it while using clips, no spotter, and no safety hooks. I’ll push back on your wear and tear on joints point. Somebody can flat barbell bench with great form and “wear” their joints no worse than a great form smith machine bench. Somebody can also use poor form on a smith machine bench and “wear” their joints worse than a good form flat barbell bench. Maybe you’re implying good form is a minimum expectation across all exercises. I agree with the rest.

Using clips for heavy weight without a spotter in a home gym is actually retarded lmao But it’s not the form that is really the problem. It’s the amount of tension placed on the joints. A machine like a chest press puts tension on your joints too but if you follow high intensity training, the tension is minimized since you’re not using heavy weight. Power cleans are a good example of an incredibly dangerous exercise for your joints without providing any additional benefit to just doing different exercises using moderate weight to failure. Doing it slowly like in this video is harder and more beneficial. And no one is going to tear their shoulder labrum at this pace lol https://youtu.be/iTrmSpU0OCw?si=

I know very little about Olympic lifts but aren’t some of them training “explosiveness”? I think the speed aspect is deliberate. And the injury risk is understood and accepted. I imagine the avg gym-goer doesn’t understand that, to your point about safety and injury avoidance. In other words speed ≠ power ≠ strength ≠ hypertrophy. There are different ways to prioritize each of those 4 with tempo, load, rest, RPE, etc

Training for explosiveness isn’t a thing. You can make your muscles stronger and that can make you more explosive in certain sports or activities. But if you want to be more explosive in basketball and dunk on people, you need to practice the dunks and develop your body. Doing a power clean isn’t necessary for that.

That’s a hyper-specific example. I agree power cleans are not applicable to dunking. I’d argue they are applicable to American football lineman. But that is outside of my point. Training fast twitch muscles is definitely a thing. Which is what I meant by explosiveness. But to circle back, it depends what you want to get out of the gym. I’m probably being that “ackshually “ asshole. My intention is to highlight edge cases of goals at the gym. At a macro level, most people are at the gym for strength and aesthetics. I agree injury prevention is extremely important to avoid major setbacks or worse.

High intensity training targets the fast twitch muscle fibers better too. The explosiveness that American football athletes get is from practice and muscle growth. https://youtube.com/shorts/41sx6OtWBOM?si= https://youtube.com/shorts/choGmv5Ms9M?si=

Is this guy your boyfriend that you’re obsessed with? Just teasin 😂 I would definitely learn new things from his videos. I wasn’t aware you can target fast twitch fibers with slow tempo reps.