Selectorized and plate-loaded cable pulley machines typically do a pretty good job of replicating natural movement without restricting range of motion like some isolation machines do. The seated cable row machine is one of the few machines that I like and miss. Seated Cable Row Alternative Exercises (Back) I tried to avoid anything with a required 15-30 second ad. The few remaining videos all link to YouTube, so they may have the short ads you can stop after 5 seconds. I reference a lot, as they have the most massive exercise database that I know of and they don’t run ads before each video demonstration, which I figured you all would appreciate. If you don’t know what a particular exercise is, click on the name of the movement to see a video demonstration.
#Band in a box free alternative iso#
For instance, I don’t think that I need to tell you that the barbell bench press is the alternative to cable loaded bench press machines or the Hammer Strength ISO Bench Press. That said, I will mostly avoid listing machine exercises that have very obvious free-weight alternatives. I merely intend to show alternative exercises to commonly used machines that have less-than-obvious alternatives for those lifters who may be new or just not be as experienced as others. My goal with this article is not to be a giant database of exercises. For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to refer to these exercises as alternatives.
If I may rant for a second, I do hate having to refer to these exercises as alternatives. It’s really the machine exercises that are the alternative exercises, but whatever. The best part is that the free-weight alternative is going to almost always be far superior than the machine movement. It may not be the exact same movement, but I guarantee you that you can work every single muscle in your body with a barbell, dumbbells, or even just your own body weight. Well don’t worry, as there are free-weight alternatives to every single exercise you can do on a machine. Oh and yes, I did in fact just make that term up. You may even be at a loss as to what exercise you should be doing as a free weight alternative. Machine withdrawal is when you are accustomed to utilizing a machine for any given exercise rather than using free-weights, and now you find yourself missing that machine. When you first make the transition from training at a commercial gym to working out in your own home/garage gym you may experience what I like to call machine withdrawal. Exercise Equipment Reviews and Weightlifting Articles ≡ Menu