A long time ago, barbells were thought to be dangerous. This was a common belief among doctors, your grandparents, gym teachers, real estate salesmen, guys who maintained swimming pools, the manager at the YMCA, and other people who did not train with barbells. It was apparently based on the fact that barbells can fall on you, a characteristic common to all physical objects if handled improperly. The truth of the matter is that barbell training gyms – when staffed with people who keep their heads out of their asses – are among the safest places on earth. Next to single-floor libraries without stairs to fall down, barbell gyms are awfully damned safe places.

Now, it is not completely impossible to get hurt in a barbell gym, but you have to make serious errors that involve just not paying any attention to what you are doing. If you pull the 45-pound plate off of the bar and there's a 2.5 on the bar outside of it that you don't see, it can fall and hit your foot. If you rerack the bar and miss one of the hooks, the bar will fall on you – if this happens on the bench press, it can kill you. If you take a thumbless grip on the bench press, it can fall on your chest or throat and kill you. If you take a very wide sumo stance on the deadlift and your feet slip out during the pull, the plates can chop off your toes when you set the bar down (this is one very good reason to use a conventional stance). If you leave plates lying on the platform where you are doing your cleans, spectacular accidents can and do occur.

The use of the power rack increases safety in the gym to the point that if you get hurt under the bar, it's your own damn fault. Squats, presses, bench presses, or any lift where you are actually underneath the bar can be performed in the rack while being protected by the safety pins set at the correct height. Snatches, cleans, and jerks are performed with bumper plates, and learning to drop the bar safely is part of learning the lifts.

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There is risk inherent in performing limit attempts, as in a competition. Most lifters who enter meets do not get injured, but some do, and this is the nature of competitive sports – there is risk in testing your limits that does not exist in training to expand those limits. But the bottom line is that the barbell lifts are not dangerous – at all – if performed correctly and consistently with some commonsense preparations.

But knee and elbow tendonitis are common complaints among gym members all over the world, right? This is the fault of two different mechanisms, 1.) poor form on the barbell lifts, and 2.) the use of exercise machines. Poor form under the bar places components of the kinetic chain in positions of loading that are not compatible with their normal anatomical function – knees, elbows, and shoulders do not respond well to loading disproportionate to their position in the kinetic chain, and tendons and ligaments get inflamed. Once inflamed, they can stay that way quite a while, so good form is important. Opinions vary on the definition of “good form,” but I have made all these errors and figured them out, so if I were you I'd trust me when I tell you how to do the basic barbell exercises.

Exercise machines are a different problem, primarily because they isolate a kinetic chain component in order to work a single muscle group separately, an idea peculiar to bodybuilding and foreign to strength training. They do this by making one or more of the joints in the chain stationary to isolate the function of the flexor or extensor at the joint. Leg curls, preacher curls, and the pec deck are examples of machines that isolate muscle groups by fixing the position of a normally mobile joint or joints.

For example, in the press the bar moves into lockout overhead using elbow extension, shoulder flexion, and scapular elevation, supported by all the trunk muscles, the hips, and the legs. This distributes the stress over the entire kinetic chain – from the floor to the hands – and preventing the entrapment of any one of the structures. Some of the muscle mass directly moves the load while the rest of it is locked in isometric contraction to support the loaded body. In contrast, a knee extension machine works the quads by placing all the force on the quadriceps and patellar tendons, with no way to load any of the stress onto the hips, low back, and ankles that would normally share it.

And don't forget the higher reps for these assistance exercises. There are few better ways to inflame a joint than to isolate it from its buddies in the kinetic chain and do 5 sets of 10, the common prescription for isolation machine work. The reason for this is that you are chasing “the pump,” that wonderfully satisfying feeling a blood-engorged muscle belly provides the lifter of light weights and high reps – a feeling that has absolutely nothing to do with an increase in strength.

Normal human movement patterns always involve multiple joints and lots of muscles, allowing heavy loads to be moved without isolating any one joint. Squatting down and standing back up, picking something up from the ground, pushing something overhead, pushing something away from you, and pulling something toward you are normal human movement patterns, none of which isolate anything, none of which produce injuries when trained correctly, and all of which produce a marked increase in strength by adding to the load each time they are trained.

Simply put, the multiple joints in a kinetic chain allow many points of rotation within the movement, which prevents “focal stress” on any one of them. Compound-joint exercises distribute the stress over multiple structures and don't cause connective tissue injuries, while machine isolation-type exercises stress a limited number of joints and produce un-moderated stress focused on single joints. If the movement pattern is the entire loaded system instead of one of its kinetic chain components, the whole movement gets strong and the joints within it are buffered from isolation and focal stress.

Barbell training – properly conducted – produces remarkably few injuries, and almost all of them due to you fucking up. Since we are gradually increasing the loads on normal human movement patterns you are already designed to perform, strength accumulates as the loads increase, making injuries even less likely to occur over time. In contrast, machine-based exercise seems almost designed to irritate joints, tendons, and ligaments if you use enough weight to challenge existing levels of strength. If you have to use machines (and I don't know why you should) keep the weights light, and just enjoy your “pump.”

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