You'll get a big disagreement from me. It's one thing to use a machine as an adjunct to something else and quite another to use it as a primary modality. Sports + machines isn't as good as sports + free weights but they're both sports +.Personally I can see the benefit of machine training for a lot of individuals - compliance rates and individual effort will plummet as the technique becomes more involved, on the machine it takes far less time to get up to speed (sit/stand here, grab handles, do this). Muscle responds to resistance, it doesn't care how its applied in a general sense.
Exactly, and this contradicts, IMHO, what you've said above.IIRC the 72 Dolphins trained on Nautilus, but strength training was not the totality of their program...
JMO, YMMV.
-S-