It's a bar at head height that is attached via a cable over a pulley to a weight stack, which you lift by pulling the bar down to your waist. Basic physics dictates that you can't pull down more than your own bodyweight: add even one kilo more than you weigh to the weight stack and it won't budge: you can lift your feet up and swing off the damn thing and nothing will happen. Even without knowing what the machine is you'd have figured that out in a nanosecond when you saw it, but this guy was practically giving himself a brain haemorrhage with the effort, and still the penny hadn't dropped! The sitting pull-down is different, because you can jam your thighs under a roller to pin yourself to the seat and then potentially pull more than your body weight. Ow, I didn't read it properly and thought it was the seated one you meant. I was a little confused as to why you thought it was such a terrible thing