Barbells Aren't Magical

It is 2025 and people still believe there is something magical about barbells.

Not only are barbells magical, but machines are the opposite - apparently, machines make you “dysfunctional”.

On one hand, no one should take this seriously.

These claims are so obviously rooted in ignorance and dogmatism that they shouldn’t be worth anyone’s time to debunk.

But, on the other hand (like many other claims in the fitness industry), this doesn’t seem to stop people from blindly accepting such claims as irrefutable truths.

To some degree, I don’t blame non-fitness-professionals - I blindly accept many things that I don’t understand simply because it’s not my job to understand them.

So…this’ll be my best attempt at debunking such claims, now and forever, so that you can see clearly through them (as any reasonable person should).

Before I do this, I want to make one thing clear: I understand the barbell obsession.

I believed that barbells were magical.

And I first want to “steel-man” the case FOR the use of barbells before I do any debunking...

It’s Not All Bad

For the first 3 (or so) years of my lifting career, I spent ~80% of my gym-time with a barbell in my hands or on my back.

I eventually grew strong enough to bench 375 pounds, squat 550 pounds, and deadlift 605 pounds.

So although I’m no world-record holder, I think these numbers are, at minimum, proof of my investment in barbell movements.

The barbell does three things really well:

1. The barbell is easy to figure out how to use, unlike many machines. Although individualizing and improving technique may be difficult, the barbell is more accessible to the average person than just about anything: grab the bar or place it on your back, then just mimic what other people are doing.

2. The barbell is a near-universal piece of equipment - regardless of where you are in the world or what gym you’re training at, the barbell is one of the only pieces of equipment you’re bound to both see and recognize (again, unlike many machines). Because of its universality, people understand the experience of the barbell, which propagates discussion about it. For example, most guys know what 135 pounds feels like in their hands - and therefore it’s easy to understand how impressive it is to bench press 225, 315, 405 and beyond. Machines don’t work this way - people don’t generally take note of how much weight is even on the stack to begin with, and machines from gym to gym are often completely different. There’s no universal understanding of what 135 pounds feels like coming from a cable, either, or what a 10-plate leg-press feels like. This is - in part - because few people actually care about the weight they’re lifting when it’s not on a barbell, but also because there are a multitude of different machines in every machine category.

3. Barbell motions allow the user to add relatively small increments of load easily, so progression is quite mindless. Progressing on machines isn’t difficult either, but we’ll talk more about that later and why people tend to think otherwise.

So, in short, barbells are easy to understand, easy to talk about, and easy to load and progress. But most importantly, however, they’re familiar.

But familiarity is not magic.

Barbell Dogmatism

I have never once received a detailed defense of the barbell as I’ve just given whenever I ask barbell dogmatists what their beliefs are based on, however.

Overwhelmingly, I hear the following kinds of statements:

• “Barbells and dumbbells help strengthen the stabilizer muscles. Barbells and dumbbells are more functional than machines”

• “Barbells are more functional than machines because you learn to stabilize. This is why machines will always be less impressive”

• “Barbells and dumbbells train your body in the proper range of motion for the specific individual and also target a lot of stabilizer muscles”

• “The barbell requires that you move the weight according to your balance and anthropometry. Machines do not provide an equal level of central nervous system activity, balance and coordination stimulus, connective tissue stress, physiological demand and toughness, and overall conditioning”

In case you were curious, yes: these are all direct quotations from real people who have commented on my posts.

And aside from that last one, which really went off the obfuscation-rails, these comments have a clear thread between them: it seems that the idea of the magical barbell originates from the notion that touching objects outside the body during exercise is inferior to not touching outside objects.

In other words, the concept of “stabilizer muscles” reign supreme.

Free weights appear to challenge “stability” - whatever that means - while machines don’t.

Of course, we need to touch something to exercise at all, but the alleged logic appears straightforward: the more difficult an exercise is to coordinate, the better…right?

Stabilizer Muscles

Let’s first address the concept of the “stabilizer muscle”.

Here’s a pop quiz: which muscles in the body function as stabilizers?

If you name any specific muscle in the body, you’ve already got it wrong.

Regardless of the specific muscle in question, muscles do one thing: they contract.

In other words, muscles pull two or more bones closer to one another. Whether a muscle’s contraction is resisting motion or creating it - at bottom - all muscles have the capacity to stabilize.

Of course, there are muscles capable of creating much larger degrees of motion than others, but when we look at the role of any muscle across more than one scenario, it becomes easy to see how every muscle (at one point or another) can play a “moving” role versus a “stabilizing” role.

Let’s look at the lats, for example…

If you’re performing a pull-down motion, one could consider the lats a “prime mover”.

But if you’re performing a triceps push-down, one could consider the lats a “stabilizer”.

All muscles function this way, even the ones we’re programmed to recognize as “stability muscles”.

The quintessential example is the rotator cuff group.

Collectively, the rotator cuff holds the head of the upper arm in the socket of the shoulder blade - and so the cuff often plays a “stability” role in this sense.

But the minute one performs a shoulder external or internal rotation activity, now the rotator cuff is a “prime mover”, while other, larger muscle groups, like the deltoids, take on a “stability” role.

So ultimately, to say that barbells are universally better than machines because barbells “train the stabilizers” is to say nothing at all.

At bottom, there is only contraction.

And in any exercise scenario, there are both stabilizers and prime movers which may not play the same role in the next exercise one does.

The Stability Trap

To zoom back out, I understand why people fall for the “stabilizer” trap.

They grab a barbell for the first time and it wobbles - perhaps side-to-side, perhaps a twisting fashion.

But people are deeply confused about what stability actually is.

For reference, I have a monster-article on the different types of stability, so I’ll keep this explanation relatively brief.

Internal stability occurs at the level of the muscle - internal stability is contraction to control the body.

Whether it's your pecs, your rotator cuff, or your quads, all muscles fundamentally do the same thing: contract.

External stability occurs at the level of the implement - it describes how free (or not) an implement is to move in space.

For example: barbells are inherently more stable than dumbbells, while machines are inherently more stable than barbells.

An implement is more stable if its potential to deviate from a single path is low or non-existent.

Exercise stability refers to how easy or difficult it is for someone to balance themselves during an exercise.

Exercise stability is the net result of the conversation between internal and external stability.

People conflate the different forms of stability to various degrees.

Most commonly - as in the case of most barbell motions - people conflate exercise stability with internal stability.

In other words, people think that because the barbell is harder to balance than the chest press machine, it therefore “trains the stabilizers” more significantly.

But this misses the mark, again, on what “stabilizers” actually are - they’re muscles that deal with the demands of external force.

If one is performing a machine chest press and has no trouble balancing the external load, the internal stabilizers (an example might be the posterior rotator cuff) are working just as hard, if not harder, compared to a barbell bench, wherein the individual has to coordinate balancing the bar over their hands as they press.

The necessity to coordinate one’s balance - whether through the hands or the feet - will only decrease the ability to generate force directly into any implement.

Now, this doesn’t mean that barbell movements don’t produce results - of course they do - but if we’re going to talk about the merits of how “stability” is trained in either case, we’d better be precise about what we mean by stability and how it actually differs between scenarios.

While it might be more difficult to balance a barbell over your hands than to press into the handles of a chest press machine, the posterior rotator cuff needs to “stabilize” the shoulder just as much (again, if not more, given the potential higher force demands).

Might the wobbliness of the barbell increase the amount of micro-adjustment necessary to perform the motion (i.e., increase the demands on exercise stability)?

Yes.

But does that make the demand on the rotator cuff higher?

Likely not.

If anything, performing exercises where balance is the primary challenge provides LESS of a stimulus to “stabilizer” muscles compared to exercises where balance isn’t an issue.

What do you think asks more of our “stabilizer” muscles?

1. A machine chest press performed with the entire weight stack, done for 8 reps to non-volitional muscular failure.

2. A single-arm kettlebell bottoms-up press done with a 25-pound kettlebell, done 15 reps shy of muscular failure.

Although extreme, these are often the tradeoffs people choose to make when under the spell of the stability myth.

Force Is Force

At bottom, we can define exercise as a specific kind of interaction between our bodies (our anatomy) and the external forces we impose on ourselves.

When we place a barbell on our back, the barbell imposes a force on our bodies (from where it is placed) toward the center of the earth (what we call “downward”).

This is fundamentally no different than when we insert ourselves onto, say, a hack squat machine, wherein the pads of the machine apply a force on our shoulders (via the shoulder pads) and our backs (via the back pads).

Regardless of the scenario - whether inside or even outside the gym - we’re dealing with the same building block of exercise: force.

Forces do not have emotions.

Forces do not have personal preferences for what exercises we choose.

Force is simply force, regardless of how emotionally attached you are to certain exercises.

It is only through the lens of force that we can truly understand what an exercise does and does not ask of the human body.

And it is only through the lens of force analysis that we can form objective claims about the differences in quality between exercises.

For whatever reason, a focus and understanding of force has been largely ignored in the fitness industry.

We tend to imagine that each exercise possess some kind of mystical, magical quality that other exercises do not.

In the lifting world, few beliefs are held with more religious fervor than the dogma surrounding the "Big Three" barbell lifts: the squat, bench press, and conventional deadlift.

These exercises have been exalted to near-mythical status, treated as sacred rites rather than normal exercises bound by the laws of physics. It’s time to break the spell.

The Cult of the Barbell

Like any dogma, the belief in the mystical superiority of the Big Three persists not because of evidence, but because of tradition and social reinforcement. Fitness culture still elevates these lifts as indispensable and untouchable.

But this reverence is based on unquestioned assumptions. Ask why these lifts are "the best," and the answers often sound like faith-based proclamations: "They build the most muscle!" "They’re the ultimate test of strength!" These statements are rarely supported by reasoning or research and rely instead on emotional conviction.

Physics, Not Faith

Strip away the mysticism and the Big Three are merely movements that follow the same principles as every other exercise.

The barbell squat isn’t magical—it’s a task involving the hips, knees, and spine moving through defined ranges of motion under load - just like a leg press.

The barbell deadlift is often portrayed as the ultimate test of full-body strength, but mechanically, it’s just a hip hinge, like the 45-degree hip extension machine.

The bench press is revered as the gold standard for upper-body pressing, yet a converging chest press machine can often offer a more specific to chest-training solution.

This isn’t to say that a leg press is the same as a back squat, that a deadlift is the same as a 45 degree extension, or that a bench press is the same as a machine chest press. Each exercise possesses unique qualities - and that goes for every motion one can perform.

The barbell lifts produce results because they work the same way that every other exercise does.

To progress as lifters—and thinkers—we must be willing to question our assumptions. The spell of barbell mysticism can only be broken when the lens through which your looking is removed.

The path forward is clear: abandon the mystical thinking and embrace a rational approach.

Every movement can be understood through principles of force, without resorting to exercise dogma.

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