I have my girlfriend spot me in a commercial gym. She can deadlift 225lbs, and I've benched up to 305lbs with her spotting me. I also don't use clamps, and the benches there have safety hooks, though I've never used them.
I have my girlfriend spot me in a commercial gym. She can deadlift 225lbs, and I've benched up to 305lbs with her spotting me. I also don't use clamps, and the benches there have safety hooks, though I've never used them.
I built these boxes for benching by myself. They're low enough that the bar can touch my chest without the plates touching the box. If I get stuck, I lower the bar to my chest and roll it towards my face. The plates contact the box when my chest slopes away to my neck. I can turn my head sideways, slide out from under it, strip off weight, press it back up into the supports, and continue on with my lifting.
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They're sturdy - 2x10 sides, 3/4" plywood top, and some 2x4 braces under the plywood. I doubt there is a man alive who can bench enough to need anything stronger. The key is getting them high enough to be safe and low enough to not interfere.
When I was lifting alone, I made some safety rails out of ordinary framing lumber. 2 x 6 for the rails and feet, and doubled 2x4 for the uprights. All you need is a handsaw and a drill and some screws. Just make sure you have good post and lintel construction, and don't just rely on the shear strength of the screws. I tied my two rails together underneath the bench so that they couldn't fall over or move at the least opportune time. Also made a squat stand the same way. Didn't have to worry about adjustability, because it was just for me. If you don't have tools, those cheap Japanese style pull saws from Irwin cut insanely fast, and you can buy an adequate drill / driver for $30 to $40. The ones I made could stand having anything I could lift dropped on them.
Honestly, this is making too much fuss of what is almost a non-issue. Just do what others have said, don't collar the bar. If you fail a lift, the bar will tilt to one side and dump the weight off (unless you happen to crash the lift in perfect equilibrium on your chest, which is about as likely as winning the lottery), and you'll be able to walk away with a bruised chest and/or ego. Happened to me plenty of times back in the day, before I got to know my own body well enough to know how much I can and can not lift on any given day. If you are seriously scared that you will fail the last set miserably, I'd just do an itty bitty deload (like 10 pounds), and work my way back up over a couple of sessions. Better slow than sorry.
Also, the others are correct about your wife - she will not be able to help you in any way, and might even make things worse. Don't put the stress on her if she's scared for your safety.
Dumping the bar on the ground is a last resort. You can damage the plates, the bar, the floor, and maybe yourself. Yes, it can be done with no ill effects, but it is not a great idea for obvious reasons. Buy a rack. One made of steel. Not wood. Something designed for lifting weights.
Just wanted to chime in. I have the Rogue Fitness Westside Bench. It is an extremely awesome and high quality bench, including very short intervals for the spotters. This means that you can set it at that perfect height to where it doesn't affect your bench (i.e. hitting the bar on the spotter arms), but also to where you can get out from under it. I'd like to note that at the height we have it set up right now, it is literally impossible for the bar to reach our throats and kill us. It doesn't take much space up, and is the perfect bench, in my mind.
Side note: when I order from Rogue, I always call first and ask if they can cut me a little discount. I almost always get a few dollars taken off.
I would think that better instructions would be for her to step back away from the bar and have him do the tipping, torn pec or no. She's probably more likely to get injured at this point than he is.
Yes, of course a rack is better, but he's being told by a friend that the risk of benching 190 pounds is greater than the reward of getting stronger while his wife spots him without pins or safeties, and that's just absurd. If his friend was right, we'd be pulling corpses out of commercial gyms all the time, since most bench set ups there don't have pins or safeties either. Until such a time that he can or chooses to afford a rack, the last resort option of not collaring and dumping will work just fine. Plus, he's using Hi-Temp bumpers, which are more likely to bounce into a nearby wall than they are to damage anything else.