Like you Ive always preferred free weight. The hammer row is something special though.
Do you have a link anyway to that article by Wood and Brown? Would love to read it
It wasnāt a single article. It was a newsletter that Hammer Strength put out when Wood and Brown owned it. It started out as The H.I.T. Newsletter, then they changed the name to try to appeal to more than just the HIT crowd. Life Fitness bought them out around 1997. Did a google search, I donāt think they are available on the net. I have them all. They are outstanding. That quote was at the top of the cover page.
Yeah, i looked for them, couldnāt find them anywhere either. Thx!
Strengthmaster I think itās pretty obvious youāve been around this stuff for quite a long time especially seeing youāve got all those newsletters. You may or may not be from the old Nautilus guard but itās good to hear from you!
Scott
Scott, check your msngr
I have to tell you Strengthmaster that I keep rereading some of you posts theyāre so good ! Have you got or read Hutchins book on cams yet? Thatās next on my list!
Scott
Thanks Scott, I appreciate it. No, I havenāt got or read the CAM book yet. I know that I read in one of his articles that he said āAt faster rep speeds, the cam effect is negated, or minimizedā or something to that effect. What speed that is, I donāt know, or donāt recall if he in fact stated the rep speed. What I DO KNOW is: while Arthurās cams may have not all been correct (Too aggressive) , they were 100% better than other manufacturers that tried to copy him. The Icarian line comes to mind. Back then, every single machine they put a cam on was the same size and same shape. The strength curves were terrible!
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Was it ā With respect to the speed of movement exhibited by most subjects using exercise equipment, the Cam or virtual cam effect is useless. There might as well be no Cam.ā Ken Hutchins
Even the machines that supposedly had too aggressive a cam were still 100 percent better in every way that what was already out there. In the early 70s after reading about Nautilus and how much they cost I tried to build a pullover by welding a monkey bar play set together. It never came close to working soI traveled from Va to Deland to see if I could get a plan to build one. Iām sure they had a good laugh at this teenage kid wanting to build a pullover. I went home discouraged but kept trying to build one from Wood etc . All were failures. It wasnāt until many years later I saw a gym had closed and their plate loading pullover was for sale for $350 . I rushed over and got it and that and a Weider bench is all I had until many years later when I found a Nautilus lateral machine at a school in the trash . I rushed it home and thatās when I became aware that Nautilus were out of favor at gyms and schools so I started picking them up right and left! I was in heaven!! They replaced them with power stands and junk machines. I work for the schools and I remember standing in a fully outfitted Nautilus weight room and they were going to scrap at least 15 of them and I had no where to put them or I would have got them all. These were perfectly good machines but they just wanted something new. I thought of as it insanity.
Scott
One thing I find interesting about many cammed machines is many if not all still have several big counter weights attached that smooth out or even the movement. Iāve often wondered if in the process of designing the movement arms with cams they found the cam shape just wasnāt enough to even out the movement so they added on big counter weights to do the job? In an attempt to even out an overly aggressive cam I attached my own counter weights and it sort of works.
Scott
Which machine?
melisnmatt, I believe you could be correct. That may well be what I remember reading about cam effect and rep speed.
Plate loading pullover, compound bi-tri , multi bicep etc etc
Scott
Plate loading pullover , plate loading bi-tri, multi bicep etc etc almost every machine Iāve got have counterweights .
Scott
Where would you guys have improved these cams with regard to the ranges of where they gave more or less advantage?
Iād think that counterbalance weights would be there to offset the weight of the movement arms, and perhaps body parts.
For example, in a pullover, the arm which holds the pads weighs something, and exerts a torque around the axis of the movement. As the orientation of the arm varies relative to gravity (vertical downward force), the amount of torque varies. You could try to design a cam that adjusts for both the force capabilities of the muscle and the variable force exerted by the movement arm as it changes angles. But it is probably easier to counter balance the movement arm with weight, so that the cam only needs to mimic the variation in the strength of the muscle.
If you look at the literature on the MedX back and neck machines, they describe the purpose of the counter weights as being to offset the weight of the users torso and head as the torso angle changes relative to the direction of gravity:
To compensate for torque produced by gravity acting upon the mass of the head, arms, and torso, a counterweight must be positioned accurately to offset this force. Both the Lumbar and Cervical machines provide such a counterweight and it must be set appropriately for each testing or exercise session. On the Cervical Extension, every part of the machine that moves, apart from the weight stack, is also counter weighted.
Most of the original machines had cams that were aggressive (increasing resistance) approaching the contracted position of the movement. Looking at them a little later, it was clear that some movements needed the cam to fall off some to decrease the resistance in the contracted position. Some examples: Leg ext., leg curl, rowing torso (rear delt), some bicep movements. But, there are some guys who train on the older machines that like that aggressive cam. But, biomechanically, it was not correct.
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Good, laymenās explanation of movement arm counterweighting. I donāt think most guys appreciate the sophistication of proper exercise machine design. In that regard, Nautilus machines were truly a marvel
Yeah. This is the thing that always puzzled me.