The equipment that a gym provides either expands or limits what you as a gymgoer can accomplish there. For a trainer, the equipment in the gym will determine what you train clients with, what you know, and will either expand or limit your knowledge and growth as a trainer. I can’t think of a single piece of equipment that limits and retards both client’s and a trainer’s growth more than the worthless Smith machine.
The Smith machine was invented so that people who had no idea how to really lift weights would feel safe and comfy while doing things their bodies aren’t ready and capable of actually doing with a real barbell. The bar on a Smith machine slides up and down on two rails, stabilizing you in both the side-to-side plane and in the front-to-back planes of motion. While this provides the illusion of safety, there are numerous drawbacks to this.
First of all, this is NOT real weightlifting. Real weightlifting involves having the barbell on your body, not having a machine stabilize the weight for you. Barbell squats as done by real strength athletes like Olympic lifters and powerlifters place the force of the barbell totally on the body — meaning that you have to stabilize the weight 100% with your own body, not the machine. The amount of muscle used in a barbell squat is much greater than that used in the Smith machine, and the more muscles you use, the more calories you burn. Smith machines rob you of the results you’d get by using real barbells — whether you’re looking for fat loss, muscle gain, general fitness, or athletic performance — because the machine is doing a lot of the work for you.
A REAL barbell squat:
Second, Smith machines are dangerous because they allow you to “squat” (if I can call it that) using a form that is totally dictated to you by the machine. People place their feet too far forward, put their backs in the wrong position, use a “tampon pad” because they don’t want the mean old bar to hurt their spines, fail to engage their cores properly and do dangerous amounts of weight — all because the machine allows this. Here’s what can go wrong:
Not as safe as you thought, right?
Third, people make all these mistakes because they were never taught how to lift properly and they weren’t taught because their trainers don’t know how to squat either. What the trainers know and what the gymgoers can do is limited by the equipment in the gym and the equipment found in a typical gym is pathetic. Power racks, which actually allow you to learn how to lift, are few and far between in the typical big box gym. Without a power rack, you’ll NEVER learn how to barbell squat properly. You’ll never learn that you don’t need the tampon pad because if you squeeze your shoulders together and down, you create a shelf of muscle that prevents the bar from sitting directly on your spine. With the pad in place, you won’t tighten the upper back, preventing the squat from being a full-body exercise. Let me guess, you thought squatting was only a leg movement, right? Check out his clip:
That’s a full body movement if there ever was one. He’s using everything he has to lift the bar, something that is impossible on a Smith machine.
Trainers that work in gyms that only have Smith machines are really screwed as far as their knowledge is concerned. Squatting is an art and a science, as are all of the barbel lifts. The placement of the bar, tightening up the back and the core, wearing a belt, foot placement, the angle of the back, squat depth, etc. all are the types of knowledge you can gain from squatting in a power rack. This is the type of knowledge you want people to pay you for, but you won’t have it if the clients use a machine to quarter squat and get about one-quarter of the results they would get from barbell squats.
I actually feel sorry sometimes for such trainers and that’s why I opened Formosa Fitness in the first place — I wanted a place where I could get the equipment that would allow me to be the type of trainer that actually knew something. As far as I’m concerned, if you don’t know how to barbell squat, deadlift, bench press and press a barbell overhead, you have no business calling yourself a personal trainer to begin with. Those of you in big box gyms need to realize that the typical gym environment is designed for skill-less exercise in the first place and will prevent you from developing the very skills you want people to pay you for.
Whether you’re a gymgoer or a trainer, skip the Smith machine and find that lone power rack in the corner that everyone does barbell curls in and use it for what it was designed for. Learn how to squat and do the other barbells lifts correctly and you’ll have a base of knowledge that you can mine for the rest of your life. Don’t have trainers at your gym that know how to lift without a Smith machine or don’t have power racks at your gym? Time to switch gyms!