[quote]LiquidMercury wrote:
Glad to get a review on this. If you get a chance to try out a cambered bar I’d be interested to see how you feel it differs from the spider bar because how you described the spider bar working is pretty much how cambered bars feel so that’s really the big thing I want to know. Interesting to hear that it doesn’t pitch you forward like the yoke even though I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised since it doesn’t seem as though there is a camber down low on the actual bar like there is on the yoke (2" camber forward on yoke).[/quote]
I have used a cambered squat bar before. It wasn’t the efs version but it did have at least a 14 inch camber. Granted it was several years ago. The biggest difference that I can tell you about is that a regular cambered bar would have more placement options in terms of where the bar could be placed on the back. I remember doing sets with the bar on both high and low back positions. I remember when the bar was held lower I could get away with shittier form, meaning more of a Good morning in the low bar position vs the higher bar position. The high bar would fold me up and that is exactly what I experienced with the Spider bar. It’s not a “chop your head off” feeling like the Yoke bar but it will take you down if you get too much into a GM position.
The Spider bar sits just slightly higher than I would have it if it didn’t have the handles or so I originally thought as I had grown accustomed to a straight bar in a low back position but honestly it prolly sits in the correct position as is or those guys would have made it sit lower on the back. IDK… I can tell you that the bar sits lower than the Yoke bar does or at least it feels like it does. Maybe the cambers of the bars are Jedi mind tricking me and are making it feel totally different.
I used the bar again today, this time wearing a set of single ply Titan briefs cause I was still sore from Friday. I was able to work up to 425… still far from what I can do with a straight bar but without the killing of the shoulders and with more hip / quad engagement.
** oh, and another observation. If I hold the handles I get more swaying of the weights because my back is looser due to the hand position. If I hold the bar down on the cambers, I can get my back tighter and there is less swaying. Either hand position is very comfortable ad the handles make it so I don’t even have to hold the bar at all. Which would be nice if I fail at a weight, I can just help myself up by grabbing the power rack. I suppose that I could do very heavy reps and cheat by pulling myself up to but that might be dumb… idk. Thought I’d throw that out there too.
I did notice that as the bar got heavier my legs would give out on me and I would end up muscling it up in a GM. If I started to GM the weight up, the weight would begin to swing out in front of me due to the camber and I’d get a tremendous stressing of the middle back. If I stayed upright, there would be very little back stress. My obvious limiting factor is the quad strength with this bar. The best way I could describe the way this bar feels is to compare it to doing heavy ass leg presses but with a bar on your back.
I ended up just accepting the fact that I was going to have to use less weight than I had hoped for lol. I ended up dropping back down to 335 ( 3 plates) and repping that. By the end of the session my legs were totally fried.
Think I’m gonna run the Spider bar on ME days and the Yoke bar on DE days for 3 more weeks then try a straight bar and see how I do. I am expecting that when I go back to a straight bar it will feel very easy compared to the two special bars.