Recent years have seen the health and fitness world turning to an old but uncommon mode of exercising for almost every fitness requirement – be it weight loss, muscle gain or fat burn. Free weight training is increasingly becoming the preferred method of exercise and fitness across the globe. Instructors and health care professionals are designing all their weight loss programs and exercise routines which make minimal or no use of machines for exercising the body. Rather, a smooth blend of aerobic exercises and free weight training is implemented. Free weights in this context range from dumbbells, barbells and Swiss balls. The reasons for doing this are many some of which are:

• Weight machines are expensive and require a lot of space to set up. On the contrary, a free weight training gym requires just dumbbells, barbells, a bench and a Swiss ball. Therefore it is easy and convenient to set it up at home also.
• In many cases, it requires an expensive gym membership. Also, sometimes these exercises are ineffective in achieving the desired gains in terms of weight loss and fat burn. Isolation exercises give more muscle gain quickly but are not very effective in other physical gains such as body conditioning and flexibility.
• Free weight training is also called compound fitness sometimes. This means that they make use of multiple muscle and joint movements to exercise them. There fore instead of working one muscle at a time, a group of muscles is targeted.
• This type of training quickens up the weight loss process for people having weight problems because of their multiple actions in lesser time.
• Most of these free weight exercises actually translate to real life activities which is not the same when exercising with machines. For example, when lifting books, groceries and other such daily items are free weights and we cannot rely on guides and rails and levers for lifting them. Another example is specificity in sport training. Using machines will make one good in lifting and pushing them but it will not necessarily mean a better tennis serve.

Apart from these, free weight training has many other advantages over the conventional machines one uses in weight training.