Home Gym Review Series: The Safety Squat Bar

Look at this beast. It’s called a safety squat bar, and it’s so goddamned big and heavy it won’t fit into a photograph straight on. So here’s another angle.

Technically this is the EliteFTS SS Yoke bar (on sale now!!!)¹ but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll call it the Safety Squat Bar, or SSB for short.

Sometimes appearances can be deceiving, but in this case the SSB’s appearance is true-to-form: it’s a beast. First of all, it’s heavy–65 pounds, versus a standard 45 pound barbell. It’s also incredibly unwieldy to move from place to place, owing to its cambered form, which makes it difficult to move from a barbell holder into the rack.

The “Safety” in “Safety Squat Bar” derives from the fact that it has two handles that extend out from the main section of the barbell, along with a padding that makes it more comfortably sit high up on the shoulders. The idea is that this makes it easier for meatheads with banged-up shoulders (that is, every meathead above the age of say 35) to do squats with, since it doesn’t require the same shoulder mobility to get onto the shoulders.

But in my opinion the term “Safety” is a misnomer. The camber of the bar–or the unique bend that terminates in the portion where you load the bar–creates unique challenges for almost any lifter. I can’t really describe the physics (I was an English major who graduated undergrad by the skin of my teeth), but the bend in the bar tends to pitch the torso forward, which really throws off the entire biomechanics of a usual squat.

That’s a pretty sterile description, so I’ll give you a more colorful metaphor: the SSB is trying to bend you over and have its way with you. And the force with which it bends you over increases as the weight on the bar increases.

The trick with an SSB is to really brace hard – take a huge belly-breath of air and hold it in while trying to exhale. That will fortify your midsection against the force of the bar trying to bend you over. For that reason, the SSB is a great test of whether you’re spending enough time on ab exercises – if you have a weak core, watch out, because the SSB will absolutely bend you over at the bottom of the lift and put you in a very bad position, biomechanically, to get up again.

I had that happen to me once – it wasn’t necessarily weak abs that put me in a bad position, but rather hubris. I’d finished up a workout at the commercial gym that I’m a member of, and was in a hurry to get home so cut off my workout, skipping the SSB squats I was supposed to do near the end of the workout. I drove home, parked in the garage, and saw that I’d left my SSB ready to lift in the rack. But instead of doing a few light sets to get down the motion of the bar, I loaded it up to my working set–nothing too crazy, maybe 185 or so (I was squatting in the high 400s at that point of my life). I thought the weight was light enough that I didn’t even set the safeties in my rack….

And on my first rep, the SSB pitched me forward and I was stuck in the bottom, completely out of position, unable to stand up and trapped under the SSB. I struggled for a few minutes and realized I was fucked. I thought about yelling for help from the house, but then decided that I’d suffered too much humiliation already and instead rolled the thing over my head, sending it being down to my platform with a thunderous thud….

That was a close call, but it taught me a valuable lesson: always, always, ALWAYS respect the SSB. No matter how “light” I think I’m going to go, I always do a few warmup sets, beginning with the unloaded bar, so I can get used to the unique force that the SSB applies.

There are some other manufacturers of SSBs other than EliteFTS. Rogue manufactures a similar one–the same shape and size–and I’ve used one at my commercial gym. But having tried it, I would recommend the EliteFTS model 100 out of 100 times. The padding on the EliteFTS is great, while the Rogue padding is sort of stiff and the bar sort of digs into the top vertebra, making the higher weights more about how much spinal pain you can withstand versus how much you can fight the force of the SSB bar trying to bend you over. Also, Dave Tate, the owner of EliteFTS, is a real one, having trained at Westside Barbell before starting his own gym, and provides a bevy of outstanding information for free on the EliteFTS website. He’s definitely a guy worth supporting.

As far as utility goes, the SSB will absolutely make you stronger everywhere–legs, obviously from squatting, and abs, as I mentioned before. Also the lower back, which is also put under strain by the unique “movement” of the SSB. Some people say that the SSB is a great way to increase your deadlift. I don’t know if I subscribe to that theory, but like I said, squatting with the SSB will make you far stronger everywhere, and will benefit any lower body lift.

I guess the only drawback to the SSB is that it is huge and not particularly versatile– I’ll also use mine for SSB Good Mornings, and some maniacs like using it for overhead presses (not me). But if you want to increase your lower body and core strength, it’s a great bar to have.

Just make sure you respect it!

1. RayDorl.com is not endorsed by any workout company… but if anyone’s in the market for some publicity, hit me up! ↩︎