A state-of-the-art health club recently opened in Rochester, Minnesota, where I live. A gleaming cathedral of exercise, it cost $22 million to build and features an expansive climate-controlled fitness floor beneath three-story ceilings and a soaring wall of windows. Like most American health clubs—a $17.6 billion industry made up of more than 29,000 clubs and 42.7 million members—the facility reserved its nerve center to house its greatest treasure: hundreds of futuristic and impossibly sleek cardio- and strength-training machines. Walking these aisles is like entering the showroom of a Mercedes-Benz dealership.
You can’t help but touch the things, to rub their cool slate-gray exteriors and to squeeze their padding. The mechanical housing has become more unisex, the digital readouts more technical, and the end result is an impressive ability to make you forget that this is the same basic collection of machines that have anchored the floors of health clubs for almost four decades. There are leg-extension, leg-press, leg-curl, and upper-body workstations in the aisles for building muscle, and treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary cycles in the aisles for developing cardio fitness.
On a recent afternoon, it thrummed with activity: Men and women logged obedient noiseless reps on a range of machines; runners banged out the miles on treadmills; and one gal raced away on an elliptical machine, legs neither running nor swinging, but doing something inexplicable in a feverish Road Runner–like blur. It’s a vision of exercise utopia that is mirrored in gyms across the country. Except that a growing chorus of critics find fault with it: The man jackknifed into the leg-extension machine could be risking knee injury; the exercisers slaving away on other stationary machines are building individual muscles in place of whole-body strength; the people slogging away on the treadmills with their eyes glued to TV screens seem like automatons.
No wonder the attrition rate for gym members hovers at 35 percent a year, according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA), and the latest estimates show that almost half of exercisers give up on a new routine within a year. It seems fair to ask if health clubs are partially responsible for the obesity epidemic, a trend that has followed the rise of the industry. Perhaps the first development has not been caused by the second, but it certainly hasn’t been helped either. With all the fancy equipment and with all the desire out there to look good, why can’t we keep the weight off? Why can’t we stick to our gym workouts? Is it our fault? Or does the fault lie elsewhere?
“The health-club culture tries to create a dependency on machines,” says Vern Gambetta, a trainer with 38 years of experience training professional and recreational athletes, and the author of
Athletic Development: The Art & Science of Functional Sports Conditioning. “If you have a limited amount of time to work out, you’re better off ditching the machine to do different kinds of body-weight and whole-body exercises. You’ll get more caloric burn for your time spent.” Critics also charge that a traditional machine-centric regimen has other downfalls. In general, it relies excessively on the discipline of the exerciser, it promotes training muscles in isolation (as opposed to how muscles really work, in a chain of movement), and it can stress vulnerable joints more than is necessary. At issue is not only the very meat and potatoes of how you work out, but also the best way to get the most out of your time in the gym.
There is potential for pain in any workout. The key to preventing injury is to find your weak links and then modify your exercise to fortify your weak links, while also not putting stress on them, says Nicholas DiNubile, MD, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine and the author of
FrameWork: Your 7-Step Program for Healthy Muscles, Bones, and Joints. The three most common strength-training-related injuries Dr. DiNubile sees are rotator-cuff problems, knee issues, and lower-back pain. While these are not exclusive to machine-based training, the nonfunctional movements that some machines require, coupled with heavy loads and less-than-perfect form, can cause problems—especially in men over 40 whose joints are getting creaky—and are not especially meaningful.
Researchers, for instance, have known that the leg-extension machine (the unit in which you sit with your shin behind a padded bar attached to a weight stack and then straighten your leg in front of you) trains you to do just one thing: become very strong at the leg-extension machine. In one of the few studies on this subject, researchers from the University of Kentucky studied 23 patients with knee pain to see what made them stronger: a step-up test or doing leg extensions. While they found that both groups eventually became stronger at doing leg extensions, only the group doing the step-up test actually became stronger at stepping up and doing functional activities. The reason: The seated leg-extension machine has nothing to do with how we use our legs, which are meant to hold us upright against gravity while we walk, climb, or descend.
A state-of-the-art health club recently opened in Rochester, Minnesota, where I live. A gleaming cathedral of exercise, it cost $22 million to build and features an expansive climate-controlled fitness floor beneath three-story ceilings and a soaring wall of windows. Like most American health clubs—a $17.6 billion industry made up of more than 29,000 clubs and 42.7 million members—the facility reserved its nerve center to house its greatest treasure: hundreds of futuristic and impossibly sleek cardio- and strength-training machines. Walking these aisles is like entering the showroom of a Mercedes-Benz dealership. 
