Smith Machines recently have been a popular topic in the strength and conditioning industry. In specific applications it makes a lot of sense to have a fixed bar path. It is one of those things that not every athlete needs to use nor should they replace a barbell, but it is another tool to add to the tool bag to help your athletes reach their athletic potential. As they are often large footprint units, we decided to make it a rack attachment version to save as much space as possible.
While designing the system, we also decided to make it function as an overcoming isometric tool by allowing the Smith Machine bar to pin into more than 40 positions up and down the upright. This allows athletes to perform overcoming isometrics from shin level all the way to overhead positions, giving coaches a wide range of training and testing applications within the same unit.
Our ISO Cups are commonly used for force plate testing, but because a traditional barbell moves about 2" with that setup this creates an additional variable coaches must either account for or filter out in the data. With the Smith Machine ISO system, the bar does not move at all once pinned into position, helping create a more stable and repeatable testing environment while also simplifying data collection.
3 Position isometrics are a commonly performed isometric concept, where you perform an isometric at 3 points of the range of a specific lift. For example on a squat, 10 seconds each at the following 3 positions, in the hole, half way up, 3/4 of the way up. This is traditionally very annoying to do with spotter arms, as most people perform overcmoing isomterics on the bottom of spotter arms. But with the ISO Cups or Smith Machine Overcoming Isometric tool, it takes 10 seconds or less to adjust the bar which is usually the amount of rest you want to give yourself anyways.
Shown below, Anthony Cockrill is administering 3 position back squat overcoming isometrics with one of his volleyball athletes at Southern Methodist University. Click here to watch the Instagram Reel.
