Switching from a smith machine to a real rack.

Hey guys, I'm the idiot who posted this the other day. TLDR, I was doing SL for months, had some nice success with it, then realized I was doing everything on a smith machine and that's bad. Oops. Basically, I was a huge noob and I didn't know what the difference was between the racks...

Well, I'm accepting my mistake and fixing it, even if it's a big one, because fuck giving up. I just have a few questions about getting my workout routine straight.

1) I just switched to a new gym, that's the same price, and has a ton more equipment/is better in general. So hooray for that. They have a weight rack that I'm pretty sure is not a smith, but I want to make sure it's still OK for SL. It looks like this. As you can see it has a bar that slides up and down like a Smith, but you can also move it horizontally all around the cage. Is this sufficient for squats, etc.? Or should I avoid this too? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I've just never seen a rack like this before.

2) They've got a bunch of other racks that are specifically for OHP, bench, etc. which are true free weights, so that's nice and gives me options when it's busy. But what the fuck is this for? Barbell row maybe?

3) About stabilizer muscles...On the Smith I was squatting at 145 lbs. I was told to reduce all my weights when I start using non-Smith because my stabilizer muscles are not strong enough to handle the weight. Well, I tried squatting 90 lbs on the machine in #1 today. It wasn't hard exactly but I kept losing my balance like crazy. I guess this is what you guys mean by stabilizer muscles being weak? So this will go away as I train, right? I'm not just a klutz?

4) I'm not really sure where to restart my weights...Some people told me to go all the way down to 45 lbs for all exercises, but I think that's unnecessary. I was thinking I could cut the weight in half-ish and then add ten lbs instead of five each exercise until I'm back where I was, and then add five like normal after that. So for example my OHP was at 80 on the smith; I was able to do like 50 without much difficulty off the Smith. So next exercise I would do 60, 70, 80 and then 85.

Thanks for the help...Sorry if some of this is super ignorant, I just really want to make sure I do this right going forward. I don't want another mistake like the one I just made six months from now.

submitted by melatoninn
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