What is Constant Force?

Everyone is familiar with weight training in the gym, right? When you lift weights in the gym, you want to have your muscles under constant load so as to stimulate growth in your muscles. What actually happens in most exercises is, it's easy in the beginning, hard in the middle and easy again at the end because the angles at which you push against gravity are always changing.

Let's take lifting a dumbbell with your arm as an example. The dumbbell is lifted from the upper thighs in a circular path towards the chin, at the beginning of the movement the dumbbell is traveling more horizontally then vertically, it is only when the dumbbell is in the middle position that you are pulling it upwards against gravity. This leads to cheating or bad posture as the user adjusts their body position to lift the weight.  

Not with Constant Force. This is a new way of working your muscles which requires lower weights as it will tire you faster!

Why have we selected the resistance we did?

Lifting relatively light weights (about 50% of your one-rep max) for about 20–25 reps is just as efficient at building both strength and muscle size as lifting heavier weights (up to 90% of one-rep max) for eight to 12 reps, according to the study, the latest in a series done at McMaster University in Ontario.

“Fatigue is the great equalizer here,” Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a kinesiology professor at McMaster and the senior author of the study, wrote about the research. “Lift to the point of exhaustion and it doesn’t matter whether the weights are heavy or light.”

“As long as you’re doing enough volume, you’ll positively adapt to the training,” says Sean Collins, C.S.C.S., a USA Powerlifting-certified trainer and powerlifting coach at Murder of Crows Barbell Club in Brooklyn. “Volume acts as a driver that overloads the body to make an adaptation, also known as supercompensation.”

Regular weight machines may not be telling the truth!

Whether we are novices or professional athletes, we all like to lift more weight. It satisfies the ego and is an innate part of the human condition. Strength athletes need something to measure their progress with and the amount of weight on the barbell or machine seems to be an objective way of doing this.

Where the real problems occur is in the mechanical components of the various machines. It is a fact that the manufacturers build in a certain amount of mechanical advantage to their machines. The whole idea is that a machine can move more resistance than the effort put into it.

We would expect our effort should equal the machine’s resistance, not that resistance be far greater than effort. We want a 1:1 ratio. What goes in must equal what comes out. But that is not what happens with many of these machines in gyms today.

Gym machines can be divided into levers, pulleys, and inclines. Gym members will may notice that seldom do they experience a 1:1 ratio of resistance to effort with these machines.

Almost all of the machines give the user a little bit of help, making the ratio anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1. Many machines utilise not just one such assistance device, but often two or even more, each with its own mechanical advantage. You must then multiply them all to get the total mechanical advantage.

More than one cable means you do have a mechanical advantage. Many machines have two supporting cables and some even have three, often hidden so that counting them is difficult. Not with the X1.

The X1 advantage