For anyone who weight trains: free weights or the machines?

There are Pros and Cons to both of them really, depending on what you want to achieve. Free weights will exercise your stabilizing muscles and your core area as well as training the main muscle for the given exercise. So for practicality in real life you will need to get these stabilizing and core muscles as strong as possible for maximum strength gains. Where as fixed machines won't do this, but they do isolate the main muscles. So if you are using a fixed chest press machine then it will really isolate the chest and triceps and work them to the maximum. Where doing the same exercise on free weights may tire out your stabilizing muscles before the main chest muscle, meaning your not working it to its maximum capacity. So really in summary i would suggest to use a bit of both, neither really are better than the other. Hope this helps

I use both free wts and a machine BUT I'm more inclined to use the machine due to some body issues....Using free wts is a bit difficult for me these days thanks to yrs of seriously abusing my body back in the day and the damage it caused ya know.. As far as whether or not one is actually better than the other..well IMO the one thats really better is the one you'll actually use ya know..