Oh really?

I have been saying for years that the single most dangerous piece of equipment in any given gym is, and will always be, that spine-mangling, knee-destroying, tendon-shredding monstrosity that all real lifters know and loathe as the Smith Machine.

Well, you know what? As Mal Reynolds would say, it’s a real burden being right so often:

A gym addict was left paralysed when a 150lb weight fell on her after she slipped while using a squat machine.

Student, Sophie Butler, 21, from Essex, was using the same squatting machine she had used nearly everyday for two years when she lost her footing causing the weight to fall on her, fracturing her spine.

Ms Butler was left paralysed and in need of an urgent operation to save any chance she had of being able to walk again, after the accident on July 5.

She said: ‘It was the same day as I had received my my final university results.

‘Me and my dad were planning on going out to celebrate but both wanted to go to our separate gyms first.

‘I was doing my last set on the machine when I lost my footing and fell to the floor with weight in top of me.

‘The staff came running over but it wasn’t till about 20 minutes later that I started to feel the pain, it was excruciating.

‘Someone asked me if I could wiggle my toes and when I couldn’t I knew it was serious.’

Ms Butler was rushed in an ambulance to Basildon hospital, where she was joined by her father, Dave, 48, and give the news that she had broken her back and that fracture was now pressing on her spinal cord.

Doctors said that Ms Butler would need emergency surgery within the next 12 hours or she may never be able to walk again.

She said: ‘By the time I had been taken into hospital I couldn’t take the pain, I felt like I wanted to die, just so it would stop.

‘It’s awful to think but that was how bad the pain was.

‘Doctors told my dad that I would need to go for surgery straight away because I wasn’t taking anything in due to the pain. It felt like I was being stabbed.’

The dreaded Smith Machine claims yet another victim…

First things first- good wishes and a speedy recovery to Ms. Butler. She really should have known better than to do squats in a Smith Machine, but that is a discussion for another time. After all, she went from looking like this:

… to this:

And all because of a contraption that looks like this:

I’ve picked up several injuries over the last few years, mostly from martial arts and not lifting. But the worst injury that I’ve ever had, by far, and the one that still plagues me to this day, happened nearly 8 years ago and was the direct result of using a Smith Machine.

It was a cold and frosty February morning in 2008 when I went into the gym in the morning, walked over to the Smith Machine in my gym at the time, and on each side of the bar put two 45lb plates and starting doing “bench presses”. (I use quotation marks because no real lifter with any self-respect calls a machine-assisted press like that, without even full range of motion- I didn’t touch the bar to my chest back then- an actual bench press.)

I did some reps at that weight, and then eventually got around to adding a 25lb plate to each side of the bar. I thought I was strong enough to handle that much weight.

Within a few minutes, I discovered very quickly and very painfully that I was not.

After, I think, 3 (half-)reps, I tried for one more and found that I couldn’t lift the bar. The whole contraption came down and hit me in the chest, pushing my left shoulder back with an audible popping sound and pinning me down under it. A couple of gym bros came over and did the decent thing to lift the bar back up off me and onto the safeties, but by then the damage was done.

To this day, my left shoulder has never fully healed and continues to cause discomfort and tightness. It was years before I could bring myself to bench press properly with full range of motion, such was the damage done to both my shoulder (which actually isn’t much of an impediment, these days) and my psyche.

Even today, when boxing and sparring, my left shoulder starts to ache and burn very quickly from holding up gloves, because the tendons and ligaments within it have never fully recovered.

I’m not alone in injuring myself in a Smith Machine. A guy that I worked with about ten years ago told me after I injured myself about how he blew out his knee while “squatting” about 600lbs in a Smith Machine in his gym. He had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance and had to undergo surgery and extensive rehabilitation- and all because of that one damned machine.

Moving past the fact that the Smith Machine is so bloody stupid and dangerous, let us be very clear about one thing: there is no such thing as a “squatting machine”, a mistake that the article makes several times.

A Smith Machine is not a “squatting machine”, it’s a death trap. Don’t use it. Do squats where they are supposed to be done.

And that is in precisely one place.

It is the holiest of holies, the crucible of pain, the forge of body and will. It is the squat rack.

This is the altar of the Iron God. And as it is written in the Swoly Bible, the SQUAT RACK is indeed the temple of the true lifter:

The squat rack makes lifting as real and as personal as a punch to the nose. There are no pulleys or slides or safety hooks. There is only the bar, a lot of weights, and a couple of (optional) safeties designed to catch the bar and stop you from getting crushed by the weights if you do something silly. And that’s it.

As our friends the Gentleman Adventurer and the writers over at Men of the West like to point out, squats are the foundation of any masculine man’s beast-life regimen.

Yeah, they suck. Yeah, they can leave you sore for days afterwards. And yeah, if you do them wrong, they can cripple you when you’re lifting daddy-weight.

But they are still the mainstay for every real gym session.

Whenever I do squats, I always follow them up with deadlifts. I tell you now, brothers, that there is no feeling more powerful than that which follows you out of a truly hard and brutal gym workout.

Your muscles ache. Your bones are sore. Your nerves are on fire, your blood thunders in your ears. Every breath is a struggle as your lungs suck air in like old-fashioned bellows into a chest cavity that feels like an oven.

You feel the raging, righteous strength and power of a god coursing through your veins. You simply want to throw your head back and ROAR into the heavens with delight, for your whole body feels alive.

The joy of life is in you, the spirit of the Iron God is with you, and it feels as though nothing and no one can stand before you.

All that is weak and indecisive within you is burned away, and is replaced by purpose, awesome and terrible, relentless yet inspiring, every bit as unbending and remorseless as the very steel that you worked against.

That is what the squat rack will do for a man. That is why we real lifters regard it with such reverence and respect.

Don’t be a pussy and lift in a Smith Machine. You’ll hurt yourself and look like a complete tool in the process. Lift where real men are meant to lift, and do it with the masculine pride and joy that was yours from the very day you first took breath on this Earth.