Pressing in Power Rack/Smith Machine

Training Bodybuilding
1

My gym sucks. We only have 2 hammer strength machines. The rest of the machines are the garbage pulley system kind.
I use a lot of rest pause sets and due to a lack of equipment i rely mainly on the smith machine for my pressing movements (incline & shoulder press). I was thinking of switching to the power rack for these instead.

I’ve always heard that the smith is evil and should be avoided like the plague. Obviously I don’t fully agree with that statement but do feel that it is not ideal. For example if my bench isn’t perfectly perpendicular with the bar it tweaks my shoulder at the bottom portion of the lift.

Anyways, so my question concerning doing pressing movements (in my case incline bench and seated military presses) in the cage is, is it better to set the safety bars at the lowest portion of the lift and start from there -or- use the hooks and set the bars as a safety measure?

2

Get a spot.

3

i train alone and i usually train late at night, so there aren’t too many people there. 3/4 of the times i’ve had someone spot me, they really had no clue how to do it properly.

4

I use the hooks and lower the weight from there, using the safety stops just in case I reach failure. A spotter is better, but without one, the saftey stops are great.

5

You could always do dead stop benching when using the safety stops in the power rack.

6

[quote]Bingbeast wrote:

Anyways, so my question concerning doing pressing movements (in my case incline bench and seated military presses) in the cage is, is it better to set the safety bars at the lowest portion of the lift and start from there -or- use the hooks and set the bars as a safety measure?[/quote]

It depends on your goals.