Thank god for safety's on benches...

[Alextown]

I actually laughed for a second, then I realized how flat my neck would have been without them. Yikes!

[Mahler]

Amazing how often you see people not using them or setting them properly. Same with collars on the bar for heavy lifts.

Glad to hear you are okay, due to your foresight.

Mahler

[Dr. Casey]

Uh, what's a safety?

I do my working out at home. I was doing 122 a couple of weeks ago, missed when I tried to put it back on the rack, it fell down, I had to hold it up with one hand, keep it there while turning back around, and put it back up on the rack so that it didn't make a loud crash. XD It was a bit of a fiasco, yeah.

[Mahler]

Originally posted by Dr. Casey:
Uh, what's a safety?

Look at the Power Cage in the back. The black bars are the safety bars that can be set to any height to keep the barbell from crushing you.

Mahler

[Alextown]

Exactly Mahler. Mine cage is simliar to that, and thankfully effective.

Got to be careful by yourself Dr. Casey. I had a hard day, and went to the bench press well one too many times. No way my wife or 8 year old could have pulled that off me.

[kaply]

Yeah, maybe next time I won't be so shy about moving stuff around in a comercial gym and drag a flat bench over to the power cage. I swear bench pressing scares me. I stuck with DBs forever which is really limiting.

[Ogedei]

How exactly is bench pressing with dumbbells limiting?

Does your gym not have a good range of them or something?

Og.

[Newlife]

The only thing limiting is you have to move less weight, but it requires more work to move them.

And it limits the amount of money in your pocket!

Fuck'n 95's cost me $100 a pair, but long term they are worth every penny.


Glad to hear you are okay. Lesson learned I am sure...

Below is a picture of my cage and it really shows the supports well. They have saved my life on a few heavy days. Plus you can use them for rack pulls and lock out points.

[kaply]

Bench pressing with ONLY DBs is limiting. After 4 months or so I switched to barbells but at a lighter weight that I was sure I could handle w/o struggling and I was sore. So that tells me that it uses different muscles than what I was previously doing. Additionally I've also found that increasing weight on a barbell is easier for me. In the one month that I switched I've found myself being able to go from 45/50 lb DBs -> 75 lb DBs. Of course I also started doing a lot of other stuff so it might not be a direct cause/effect. I was stuck for about one month at 45/50 lb DBs.

[Newlife]

I agree the best thing is to do a mix, but you can do more than one bench movement with DB's Have you tried incline and decline movements? What about hand position?

Also, soreness doesn't really mean much.

Think of all the stabilizer muscles being used with DB's vs. a barbell. Most of my pressing gains come from DB's and when I return to barbells, I feel much stronger and have more explosive power.

I think what happened when you swithed and saw the jump from 50's to 75's was your body adjusted to a heavier load (barbell load) and got used to it so when you returned to DB's, it was less of a shock on your body. You didn't gain enough mass in 1 month to make your DB press go up by 50lbs. If you did, can you send me some of the "stuff" you took.

[kaply]

Yeah, during that time I started taking some chinese herbal stuff. Supposed to make you strong as an ox (think it was made from an ox).

.
.

I did do flat, incline and decline DB presses. One of limiting factors for me was that one of my hands couldn't quite hold the DBs correctly. The heavier the weight got the more it bit into my hand and that's what really would hurt me to the point where I had to stop. I think it was my right hand, basically the weight would sag down towards my face and the webbing(?) would hurt. I haven't had this problem recently though, but even then I recall I was still struggling with the weights.

Other things also affected it like being able to use a wider grip to push up the weight, etc.

( no to the herbal stuff [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

[Newlife]

LOL!!