Old School Training – Smith Machine

Cassidy-style 1^st generation Smith Machine: straight up and down, unadorned, not overbuilt. This guy couldn’t deep squat the 300 loaded on the bar if he had two friends helping.

If I arrive at my local YMCA, a lovely facility, at 6:30 am, when they open, the place is empty. I have it all to myself: the room housing the resistance training machines, the cardio device room, the free-weight room, the steam room, the sauna, the shower, the pristine 50-meter indoor pool, totally deserted. Recently, I made a new acquaintance of an old friend: the ancient and venerable Smith Machine.

I recently began squatting on the YMCAs underused/misused Smith Machine. I now had access to a modern version of this mechanical marvel I first saw and used in 1968. Owned by world powerlifting champion Hugh Cassidy, the Smith Machine’s lure was its built-in spotter. i.e., miss a rep? Simply rotate the handle and “rack” the weight. Genius cubed. Train heavy when alone safely. I first saw Cassidy’s gleaming monstrosity in an era when a lat pulldown/tricep pushdown double-pulley device was rare and considered hi-tech and exotic.

The Smith Machine was eons ahead of its time. I was 17 years old and bedazzled as I gazed in wide wonder when Cassidy flipped on the lights in his garage to reveal this magnificently engineered device, all that was missing the title soundtrack music from the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Glenn Middleton was a Bechtel engineer. He had trained with Olympic gold medal winner Norbert “Ski” Schemansky, in Detroit. Glenn drove Artishan Bagapour, an Iranian Olympic weightlifting champion, and me to Hugh Cassidy’s home in Prince Georges County. It was a pilgrimage to view the newly purchased chromoly behemoth. It was a gleaming, shinning jewel. To our 1967 eyes, this device was science fiction come to life.

Artishan went crazy. He lost his cool trying to impress the taciturn Cassidy, the reigning national powerlifting champion in the 242 pound class. Hugh yawned as Artishan repeatedly failed with his top sets in his benches and squats, all using the Smith machine. He was sloppy and past his limit and just shy of manic. Cassidy never said a word. Hugh munched on an apple. He nonchalantly sat the apple down and proceeded to bench pressed 405 for 6 without a warm-up. That calmed Artishan down. Glenn indiscreetly asked Hugh what he paid for it. I was shocked when Hugh said $450, which would be $4,500 in 2022.

Hugh added matter-of-factly, “In my mind I justify the cost; over the course of a year, normal people (this is 1967) spend $400 bucks annually on booze and cigarettes. You know, if you woke up your dog and forced it to drink coffee, smoke a cigarette, and then eat glazed doughnuts, they’d have you arrested for animal cruelty.” Hugh was one of my earliest mentors in the fine art of twisted rationalizations, which I attempt to use on Stacy to this very day.

It was old home week when I ran across this modern version of the ancient device at the Y. The theme of my winter campaign was bringing up my newly discovered subpar leg strength. A loss in bodyweight bought about an unbeknownst leg strength nosedive. The Smith Machine would allow me to push my guts out squatting, and do so safely, if I miss a rep, I rotate the handles and rack the weight.

If you are a “bend-forward” squatter (90% of the squatting universe) the Smith Machine is not for you. I am an upright squatter, my squat bar path is straight up and down, ergo, the Smith Machine bar pathway suits my technique.

Heading into my 5^th week of Smith Machine squatting, I am on a roll, so far, improvements in every session. I made three major adjustments to my Smith Machine technique: first, I now pause all reps for a single second before arising. This makes squatting way harder. I also lowered my squat depth. I now dip a few critical inches deeper. This knocked my poundage back a good bit.

Deeper depth obtains superior results using a lesser poundage. I don’t want to squat borderline, or an inch above parallel. I dropped the stop pins on the Smith a full three inches. This depth change stretched me downward, a great thing, Iron Yoga. All in keeping with our philosophy of making light weights heavy.

Another change: I no longer work up to a top set of 5 reps. I now work up to one all out set of three reps, a triple. Each week for the past five weeks I have moved up my weekly top set, my triple, upward be a mere 10 pounds. The miracle of compound interest will net me a 100 pound increase in 10 weeks time – and I am already halfway there.

I train with Kirk Karwoski, and he rarely does more than a triple in the squat or deadlift. Occasionally Kirk will do a 5 rep set, but 85% of his top set squat and deadlifts are explosive triples and singles. I now digress to relate a small bit of strength training history…

The 5 rep set has a long history of being the chosen rep, the ideal, the optimal, for creating muscle and power: the “5” has been universally hailed as the rep to master for building muscle and “absolute strength” (as opposed to explosive or sustained strength.) The famed muscle scribe John McCallum continually praised the 5 rep set as the “ideal rep number.” 5s perfectly split the difference between the pure torque and power of super low reps, and the hypertrophic attributes of the higher, 8-12 rep sets.

In 1966 Mac was telling us to master the 5 rep set, make it the mainstay, the backbone rep pick for all the major resistance training exercises. Do so consistently and repeatedly and become manically strong and massive. Our empirical experience long ago proved this supposition to be true. The 5 was King.

I took the 5 rep message to heart, as did all the early power pioneers: my mentor “Huge” Cassidy. Hugh grew gargantuan on 5s. As did midwestern powerlifting gods Ernie Frantz and Larry Pacifico. In the southwest, Doug Young, Dennis Wright, and Walter Thomas thrived on 5s. As did Dave Shaw and Larry Kidney in California. I preached the five-rep set to my boy Karwoski and he shocked the world: his 800 pounds for 5 reps, raw, below parallel, weighing 269 might be the greatest squat set of all time. The 5 rep set was Ed Coan’s backbone rep number. 5s are burned into my DNA.

Kirk recently bitch-slapped me to a new reality when he paradoxically quipped, “3 is the new 5.” His meaning had Zen clarity: at ages 56 (for him) and 72 (for me) all-out 5 rep sets knock us too deeply down the black hole of recovery. All out 5s, for oldsters, digs too deep an inroad, one we are unable to get out of before the next workout.

What old pros like he and I know is that a limit triple is less taxing, from a recovery standpoint, than a limit set of 5s. Higher reps impact the body differently (from a hypertrophic and recovery standpoint) than low rep sets. There is a different “quality” of fatigue associated with low-reps (“I feel like I am walking through water!”) versus hi-rep fatigue (“My muscles are sore to the touch!”)

Kirk’s triples are coiled on the descent and exploded on the ascent. he never, ever “grinds” a poundage, i.e., pushes slow or goes so heavy it breaks down technique. Snappy, explosive singles and triples dig a far shallower recovery hole to dig out of – especially if the explosive reps are deep and paused – making them lighter.

My Smith Machine approach to paused triples mirrors Kirk the Squat God: coil and control the negative, follow with an explosive concentric. My goal is to improve my technique and increase poundage each successive week for five more weeks. So far, the paused triple rep strategy has worked exactly as hoped. Despite going all out, the recovery hit is far less impactful than 5s. It would appear that 3 is indeed the new 5.

For training inspiration check out these posts on programming and changing your rep ranges.

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