im too scared to bench. can smith machine bench be a good enough substitute?
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im too scared to bench. can smith machine bench be a good enough substitute?
You can do weighted dips. You can also do dumbbell press. Or even use machines.
Just look at any oly lifter thats not in the heavyweight category. They all have big chest but none of them do bench, they only do weighted dips if they are going to do any chest work
>You can also do dumbbell press
absolutely this, do dumbbell presses until you get more confident, warm up with cable flys too.
This guy is correct, I would say dumbbell bench, and dips is better than smith bench. Start with dumbbells I would say if youre a beginner, you might not be able to do dips.
>none of them do bench
wrong
Can you show me a video of any oly lifters doing bench? I literally have never seen them do bench ever in my life
oly lifters literally talk about how doing bench hinders their flexibility when it comes to clean and jerk. the anon is right
Why are you scared to bench?
Also, just do push-ups with a weight vest.
Smith is fine
No safeties?
start with just the bar, gain confidence and slowly increase the weight, there's nothing to be afraid of
A dedicated chest press machine will be better than smith machine if you have one available.
In terms of muscles being training yes. In terms of being safer no. You need to rotate your wrists to unhook the bar in a smith machine which I don't see how it could be done safely with significant weight.
>significant weight
Anyone still lifting in a smith machine after a few years isn't likely to push into advanced territory anyway. It's difficult enough to become advanced the "right" way let alone a suboptimal way. But that's beside the point. There is a technique to unracking the bar in a smith machine which feels awkward to setup but always sets your wrists in a neutral position. You have to actually reach over the bar a bit and have your wrists tilted forward slightly while maintaining full contact with the palms, then when you unrack the bar rolls back along with your wrists while all the weight stays grounded in your palm. Even describing it it sounds kind of fricky but it works, definitely saved my wrists once I approached lmao2pl8.
Also, doing bench up until you start hitting two plate isn't very dangerous.
I'm probably(most likely) a weak c**t, but I felt quite a bit of pressure on my wrists, hands and torso at 1pl8 already.
>not OP
fill up one of these with rice and start doing forearm training with it.
That's natural, bench is actually a fairly technical lift. It gets a lack of respect from the "how much do you bench bro" meme but its incredibly easy to frick your shit up if you do it wrong. And doing it wrong in some way is going to be the default when starting out. You have like 4-5 joints on each side to line up properly to achieve the correct biomechanical position which prevents overloading any one joint with a bunch of leverage. Always do low weight warmup sets and focus intently on your form. When starting out you will go and focus on one aspect at a time to dial it in. Then the next. Then the next. Once you have all the pieces put together you'll be able to feel it all come together naturally without having to think about it. Just takes practice.
Smith bench prob the best smith exercise analog out of the core compound lifts