Yeah I can safely say this is just an opinion. I don't think you'll find to many serious lifters who will say the 'negative' of say a deadlift, clean, snatch, pullup etc.. is more important than the actual lift. Negatives deal primarily with machines that can isolate such processes and may provide some other type of muscular engagement. with a rope the decent is fairly unimportant and the lack of such in the machine does not seem to be a detriment to improving the climbing part. you can slide down or jump like a ninja and still get way more effect out of the exercise. odds are if a rope is used in some way in the world its all about the climb.
as for dips. the machine is obviously less natural than the rope machine even if the rope machine was 'half' an exercise. you are sitting down and pushing weight downward, not exactly engaging with the natural world. any extra resistance is easily accomplished wth added weights to dips, pullups etc..and there are really very few people that would say that those particular machines supply any advantage to those exercises.
to me machines are really only worth using if one wants to isolate certain muscles or if the machine can literally accomplish something you cannot replicate with body-weight or dumbells/barbells like things accomplished through bands and pulleys
Negatives is certainly not limited to machines as all barbell exercises have a negative part. Serious lifters need to do those lifts because they need to learn the skill involved. If one is just trying to gain strength and not it doesn’t matter if the resistance is provided by a barbell, rope, log, machine etc. The results produced by strength training depend on the percentage of muscle mass that is involved in the exercise and the level of intensity that is reached. That is the percentage of maximum possible effort. To use as large a percentage of a muscle the exercise should be
1 full range
2 provide resistance in the position of maximum contraction (that is the only position the entire muscle can be trained.)
And a few other requirement but this will suffice for now.
All barbell exercises are limited range and do not provide resistance in the position of maximum contraction. A properly designed machine (those are rare) can provide both those requirements.
Sure you could add weight to your waist and do dips. But the resistance is the same throughout the entire range of motion. However your strength is not the same in fact you’re ~80% stronger near the top than near the bottom. With regular dips you fail near the bottom and therefore have not stressed your muscle as hard as you would have if you would have failed at the top where you are stronger because you involve a larger % of the muscle. With a properly (again rare) designed dip machine you can fail at the top therefore reach a higher intensity. Higher intensity means greater growth stimulus means better progress. A correct designed machine will vary the resistance as your strength varies. I don’t care what’s natural just what works best!
Tell me what direct exercise would you use to train the largest mass in the upper body the latimuss dorsi?
