MetalBoar
Black Belt
Grip strength is easy. Of the exercises I do with regularity, both pull down and seated row directly inroad the hands and forearms. A number of other machine exercises do so less directly, but meaningfully, when you work with heavy loads to full, momentary muscular failure. I did pull down just last night and my forearms, hands and fingers are all still feeling it today.
As far as arm rotation strength, as presented in the first video, that takes several machines because there's a lot more going on than just arm rotation. With a quality pull down machine you can engage pretty much every upper body muscle involved in that movement. If you include a quality declined chest press and a shoulder press you definitely have them all. If you really want to hit the obliques more, there are dedicated machines for that, but I've never found it necessary, as long as the pull down and declined chest press machine are good, and assuming you're training with heavy weight to failure.
For the lower body muscles utilized for that movement, between hip extension and leg press (again, assuming quality machines) you've got everything in the lower body covered as well as the pelvic muscles and the muscles of the lower back. If you really feel like you need to have an exercise focusing directly on everything you could add in an ab/ad machine, leg curl, or calf raise, but again, I think that's generally unnecessary for most people.
Head lock squeeze? Again, pull down and chest press should target all of the associated muscles used for that.
So, to sum up, with a quality pull down, declined chest press, hip extension and leg press machine you should be able to effectively train all the muscles used in the videos you posted. So, 4 machines to do the job. If you wanted to add in shoulder press, that would be worth while. You could add in a few more machines if you really, truly, felt like you needed more focused work on a few, smaller, muscle groups, but it's going to be unnecessary for most people.
Now, that's not a complete picture if you want to apply those muscles to martial arts, or any other specific activity. You need to develop the skills and perhaps in some cases the neurological brain/body connection to most effectively apply those muscles to a specific task. I think this is what you find lacking from machine weight training.
I completely agree that machine weights don't provide much, if any, useful skill transfer. That's not the point. They are just really efficient for strengthening all the muscles in the body. If you want to be able to most effectively apply that strength you need to practice the things you want to do with your muscles. Your barrel twisting video or the melon squeeze are good examples of how you might do that, some calisthenics are good for this purpose, doing martial arts drills and/or actually sparring are too. I just think they are a supplement, for the purpose of specializing, the solid, general, strength improvements that are developed by doing high intensity, machine based, strength training.
