You know the saying goes something like “some exercise is better than doing nothing.” That might be true, but just barely true. Many of the exercises that I will discuss are useful for the purposes of rehab or bodybuilding. However, as part of an everyday regimen that is focused on functional strength or sports performance, the exercises I am about to single out fall short.

• Machine leg press: This exercise stands out as the most useless exercise ever invented. It only serves a purpose if you are a bodybuilder looking to add volume to your leg routine. However, if you are an athlete or a person that just wants to get into shape then this exercise is a waste of your time. The main reason why it is useless is because it exercises the legs without use of the posterior chain which makes this exercise the antithesis of functional exercise. Never in life will you find an athletic endeavor where the legs are used but the posterior chain isn’t used. Moreover, this exercise fools people into believing that they are stronger than they really are by allowing them to throw 400 lbs or 500 lbs on a machine that sits the weight on a 45 degree angle. If there was ever an exercise that made people delusional about their leg strength, this is it.

  

• Leg extension: The leg extension is an isolation movement that works the quadriceps. I will admit that this exercise may be useful in the context of injury rehab and bodybuilding. However, when it comes to lower body sports performance, I am a huge advocate of compound movements. The leg extension is almost useless for anything performance related.
• Smith Machine Squats: In real world sports, we must not only condition our bodies to be able to exert a certain amount of force, but our bodies must be able to stabilize or preserve balance. It’s not functional if you don’t have balance. The smith machine keeps you on a specific bar path and doesn’t allow an opportunity to develop stabilizing capacity. Useless …
• Smith Machine Bench Press: It suffers from the same problem that the Smith Machine Squat does. Your aren’t training your body’s stabilizing capacity. If you really want to exercise your chest triceps and shoulder using the bench press range of motion, but are worried about safety then put less weight on the bar. Its that simple.

Even though there are other questionable exercises out there, these are the ones that are the worst offenders that I cited as being absolutely useless (unless you are using them for rehab purposes).

Until next time …

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