Its all in what you want to do. The barbell prescription book goes into great detail on medical research on the effects on blood chemistry and general health of the ratio of muscle to fat and so on. For that, it doesn't matter if all the muscle in my body is in my left calf or stabilizers or whatever. On the other hand SS and similar IS vital if you're going to work a blue collar job and lift and install plumbing all day long at a construction site. Another topic is the machines make it virtually impossible to hurt yourself no matter how dumb you are WRT liability insurance reasons, so they're quite safe, whereas everyone doing free weights eventually ends up in the ER self inflicted.
Overall the machines are BOTH a good gateway and a good terminal activity. Wanna move up to free weights, can do! Wanna just have better blood sugar and osteoporosis outcomes for the rest of your live and never move up to free weights, can do!
Free weights do nothing for stabilizers anyway. Run the trig and static engineering numbers. Sine of 10 degrees is about 0.2 so for people starting out, benching 50 pounds with ridiculously bad form only loads the stabilizers (triceps, maybe?) with 10 pounds at 10 degrees off ideal, and even noobs start triceps extensions way more than 10 pounds. And "experts" have perfect form so there's "zero" load. Due to trigonometry you can't work your delts merely by using ridiculously poor form when bicep curling. The whole stabilizer issue is a bro-science thing that requires not running the math or engineering statics vector diagrams.
If stabilizers were not important, one would be able to lift exactly the same free weight as you do on a machine (after practicing form with light weight under supervision for a while). Is that true?
Overall the machines are BOTH a good gateway and a good terminal activity. Wanna move up to free weights, can do! Wanna just have better blood sugar and osteoporosis outcomes for the rest of your live and never move up to free weights, can do!
Free weights do nothing for stabilizers anyway. Run the trig and static engineering numbers. Sine of 10 degrees is about 0.2 so for people starting out, benching 50 pounds with ridiculously bad form only loads the stabilizers (triceps, maybe?) with 10 pounds at 10 degrees off ideal, and even noobs start triceps extensions way more than 10 pounds. And "experts" have perfect form so there's "zero" load. Due to trigonometry you can't work your delts merely by using ridiculously poor form when bicep curling. The whole stabilizer issue is a bro-science thing that requires not running the math or engineering statics vector diagrams.