I’d like to share today’s experience with my fellow T-Nation forumers regarding a little incident. This amount may not seem like a lot to a ton of you guys, but I was attempting my first 495lb squat, and I failed. My spot couldn’t hold me back, and I was unsuccessful at tossing the bar behind me.
Stupid as I am, I had forgot to set the safety bars in the squat rack I was using. The bar dragged my neck down and smashed me face first into the the ground. I’m lucky I have a small neck, the weight held the bar higher than my neck so it didn’t crush me. I escaped with a bruised up face and that’s about it. I consider myself very lucky. It could have been much worse.
Anyways, that’s about it. I wanted to share my experience. I’m sure others have had similar experiences with the bench, snatch, jerk, squat, etc… If you feel like posting yours, feel free to. If not, that’s cool.
I’m off camping for the long weekend right away so I look forward to reading em when I get back.
Glad you are ok…I bet you remember them safety racks from now on tho. It is really hard to spot that kind of weight if the lifter misses completely and it starts to roll over his head. It could have been much worse, at least you were able to come back and type a message about it.
I have failed on every lift I can think of. From the bench falling on my chest and fellow gym mates having to pick it off me to clean and jerk almost falling on my face. The squat is the one I always remember to have safety bar, I’m scared to shit of it since your moving probably the most amount of weight you can.
Remember to always keep your head when your lifting its a serious activity. -pun intended-
When I tried hang cleaning a new 1RM I pulled far too hard and ended up falling backwards. Thankfully I was able to throw the bar away, but I still ended up flat on my ass.
It happens to the best (and in my case the mediocre) of us.
I was squatting once and let out a little puff of air at the bottom, started accelerating upward, and dislocated my spine. That hurt like a motherf&cker!
I was able to re-rack it, then hit the floor in agony.
Yup- that’ll take the mojo out of your training session. Even with safety measures like spotter bars or loop of chain to catch a falling bar, there is really no substitute for a two or three decent spotters that you can trust.
Unfortunately, you are pretty hard pressed to find one (much less two or three) folks standing around most commercial gyms or college rec centers that are worth a damn in the spotting department.
we’ve all been there before. move on and don’t even think about ever again. just use the safety bars next time and learn how to dump the barbell quickly.
I once tried to squat 620, wasn’t really ready but I was kidding myself. Got stuck then started coming forward. A buddy on 1 side grabbed the weight, the guy on the other side stood there dumbfounded, while the back spotter had the presence of mind to pull me under the weight as it was rolling over my head. Scared me to death. Glad you are ok.
Went to push press 265 lbs after cleaning it. Reached a little too far back, ended up tripping over the leg press machine behind me. The bar somehow didn’t land on me or anything. Just had a tweaked back for awhile