reckonerSmith machine bench press
The bench press with the bar on rails. The machine fixes the bar path and gives you hooks and stops to rack on, so you can press hard without a spotter. The weight you can move was close to a free bar's in trained lifters1.
Bar over the lower chest, elbows tucked.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, triceps, front delts
- Kit
- Smith machine, bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, wrist, elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Place the bench so the bar lands low
Lie down and slide the bench until the bar comes down to the bottom of your breastbone. The rails decide the bar path, so the bench position decides where it touches, and a bench a few inches off stays wrong for the whole set.
Set the stops
Set the safety stops a little below where your chest sits, so a missed rep lands on them and not on you.
Unhook and lower with elbows tucked
Rotate the bar off the hooks, then lower it to your lower chest with your elbows tucked a little toward your sides. Tucked elbows keep the press in the same groove you would use on a free bar.
Press and rehook
Press up until your arms are straight. After the last rep, rotate the bar back onto the hooks before you let go, because the hooks only hold a bar that is turned onto them.
What goes wrong
Setting the bench by eye
It looks lined up from standing, so it feels set. A bench a few inches off puts the bar on your neck or your stomach for the whole set. Lie down and check where it touches before you add weight.
Skipping the stops
The hooks feel like enough of a safety net. They only help if you can rotate the bar onto them. When a rep fails low, the stops are what catches it.
Flaring the elbows
The fixed path lets you press with elbows out wide without the bar wandering, so it feels fine. Keep them tucked a little, as you would on a free bar.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 50 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 8 at 50 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 50 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 50 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 50 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 50 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 12 at 50 kg | Load up 50 kg → 52.5 kgYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7), so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 52.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 8 to 12. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Is the Smith machine bench as good as a barbell bench?
For building muscle and strength, machines and free weights came out alike across the trials, and each tends to build strength in its own version best2. If you want a bigger barbell bench, press the barbell.
Why is my Smith machine number different from my bench?
The machine is a different lift. In trained lifters the one rep max was a little lower on the Smith machine than with a free bar1, and many Smith bars are counterbalanced. Compare your Smith machine number with itself, not with your bench.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Not by itself. A lifter training alone already has the bench with safeties, dumbbells and the machine press, so the engine never chooses it for you. Choose it in the lift picker or as a swap for your bench press. Shoulder, wrist and elbow are recorded against it.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- van den Tillaar and Saeterbakken, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2012. The sticking region in three chest-press exercises with increasing degrees of freedom eleven bench trained men with a one rep max of 106.4 kg on a free barbell, 103.6 kg on the Smith machine and 89.5 kg with dumbbells. Over five years old, and still the study that measured it
- Haugen and colleagues, BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2023. Effect of free-weight vs. machine-based strength training on maximal strength, hypertrophy and jump performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis thirteen studies and 1016 participants, with no difference between free weight and machine training in direct comparisons of strength or hypertrophy, and strength gains specific to the trained modality