Guide To Buying A Smith Machine

The Smith machine is a piece of highly versatile equipment on which you can do a variety of exercises to target almost every muscle group in your body. You can work on your chest, shoulders, back, biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, and calves. The best part of this machine is that it has weight stabilizers, you can overload your weights and still retain stability while exercising.

The Smith machine has safety catches and weight stabilizers to ensure that the weights don’t come crashing down on you. These safety features make it easy to work out with and instill a lot of confidence. This makes it especially useful to beginners who are wary of stacking up heavy weights while maintaining balance. However, all this doesn’t mean that you should stack up beyond your limit and go crazy on the machine. Like any other gym equipment, you must observe safety precautions with this machine too.

You can work on almost any muscle with this machine. Some of the most popular and beneficial exercises are:
 Legs: The reduced need for balance means that you can stack up accordingly and do leg exercises like squats, Romanian deadlifts, and calf raises comfortably.

Chest: Pull up a bench underneath the bar, and you can do the variation of barbell bench press, whether flat, incline, or decline, on the Smith machine. The mechanical spotter arm ensures that the bar doesn’t go beyond a certain height.

Shoulder: Exercises like overhead press and wide-grip upright rows always require balance. The Smith machine provides a much-needed balance so that you can focus all your energy on your shoulders.

Biceps: Because the bar is locked in place, it eliminates the range of motion that activates your delts and isolates your biceps.

Back: You can perform Smith machine deadlifts and bent-over rows to get a killer back workout.

It varies. But the standard weight of a Smith machine bar is 15 lbs. This is significantly less than the weight of an Olympic barbell, which is about 45 lbs.

Beginners can use the Smith machine to do squats as it provides stability, balance, and safety. Here’s how you can do squats on the machine:

1. With your feet around hip-distance apart and hands shoulder-width apart, rest the bar on your upper traps.
2. Unlock the bar by lifting it up and then forward.
3. Lower your body into a squat until your knees are at a 90-degree angle.
4. Now stand back up and squeeze your glutes as you reach the starting position.

You could, but keep in mind that the bar in a Smith machine is thin and your legs could slip off the bar and cause injury. Also, on a usual leg press machine, you can load up lots of weights. If you plan to do a leg press on the Smith machine, it is vital to ensure that it can withstand the weight.

If you do not plan to overload the Smith machine and if you don’t have a dedicated leg press machine, you can use it for doing leg presses. Just make sure that the machine has the safety mechanisms and spotter arm in place.

You can also use the Smith machine to do other leg exercises, like Front squats.

 Front squats are a great alternative to other risky (leg press, as discussed above) exercises on the Smith machine. Here’s how you do it:

1. Position yourself under the bar so that it rests on your collar bone.
2. Cross your arms and place your hands on top of the bar.
3. Unlock the bar from the rack by pushing your heels up.
4. Lower your body until your thighs are parallel to the floor.
5. Hold the position for a second and then return to the starting position.