I was all ready to come on here and trash this article. The headline and the first few paragraphs had me rolling my eyes. But I kept reading and changed my mi

I was all ready to come on here and trash this article. The headline and the first few paragraphs had me rolling my eyes. But I kept reading and changed my mind. I've now bookmarked this article. People seem eager to find some magic, half-hearted shortcut to reaching certain goals. There really aren't any. The best advice is often the kind you don't want to hear. To really improve, look at the people who are the best in their field and mimic them. Why would you blindly trust a magazine written by someone trying to sell you a product? Look at any college gym to see how well the article's conclusion is supported. Women generally stick to cardio machines. The skinny guys trying to get strong are all on the weight machines, and the big guys are all using free weights. Having recently switched from distance running to weight-lifting because of an injury, I've had a rapid improvement in a few months. The exercises recommended to me from a guy that benches 400 lbs (180 kg) include: squats, deadlifts, bench press, dips, chin-ups, flys, and ab-crunch machine (only machine he mentioned). Dips and chin-ups should have weight added when body-weight becomes too easy. Also, since I've very paranoid about injuries now, I've been watching and reading as much as I can on proper lifting form. In this case, I would recommend against copying the strongest guys. I see some very strong people with bad form. All that means is that they've been lucky so far.