Benefits of the Safety Squat Bar on Leg Day

Safety Squat Bar

I’ve seen you use the safety squat bar in your DVDs, and I asked my gym owner if he would get one for our place. He started giving me excuses about budget and whatever, so I looked online and found one used for under $300. I am sure the shipping won’t be cheap. Obviously I would take this to the gym and leave it there for everybody to use, since I’m not going to bring it with me and take it home every time I train legs. I’m a little bit on the fence about this, so I wanted to ask you what you would say the advantages of this particular bar are.

I love this bar so much that I do almost all my squatting with it. The safety squat bar is a bar with a yoke type of padded harness welded into it that goes over your upper back and chest. That changes the weight distribution so there’s much less pressure bearing down on your lower back, which is perfect for anyone who either has a lower back injury, or who has had one in the past and isn’t interested in re-injuring the area. Another thing that redistribution does is make the quads work much harder by taking the glutes and hams out of the movement to a large extent.

You also have a couple of options with the safety squat bar. Some of them have bars welded into them that come out in front of you as handles you can grip. For anyone with shoulder problems that has a tough time reaching back to hold on to the bar for squats, this is a real relief. Another thing you can do, thanks to the harness, is grip the uprights of the power rack for greater stability, maybe even a forced rep or two. All in all, it’s a great little piece of equipment. It’s definitely worth investing in. And for those of you who have one at your gym but have never tried it, you have no idea what you’re missing.

Time to Shrug Off Shrugs?

In all your DVDs and video clips that I’ve watched, I’ve never once seen you do any shrugs. Obviously, you aren’t lacking in trap development, so I was wondering if you do something else for traps, or if it just comes naturally from all your back and shoulder exercises?

I used to do a lot of heavy shrugs. I don’t do them anymore because I really don’t need my traps to get any bigger. Also, I deadlift every week and work shoulders very hard, so that provides enough stimulation for the traps. A lot of guys don’t realize how much your traps are involved in heavy side raises and overhead presses. If you ever trained traps hard enough to get them really sore the day before shoulders, you might get a better idea.

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