Which one is best to buy?
My shoulders don’t like pushing a straight bar, so I have decided to go for one of these two.
The Swiss bar has straight handles while the football bar has angled grip handles which are also a lot thicker.
Aren’t they the same thing?
I researched every forum thread I could find on this. Seems there’s loads of people who liked one immensely, but the other not as much. Besides the angles, you also have to figure out what width you’re going to want. Here’s what I did:
-Put two smaller hex dumbbells on the ground to do pushups off of
-Try both angled and parallel configurations at the different grip width options. Black Widow has some wider options, Edge Fitness and Rogue have narrower options, and Elite has a variety, with a really wide option. Most of these have thick or standard grip options, that’s not restricted to football bars. Edge has a combo bar that’s just a football attached to a swiss bar if you really can’t decide (look it up, pretty crazy looking). For me, I’ve narrowed it down to the BW football bar, but that’s not in the cards until Father’s Day.
Some people say to try dumbbell presses at straight and angled positions, but it’s really not possible to get an idea for grip width like this. Good luck, and let us know which one you go with and how it works out to help out the other bum shoulder owners.
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
Aren’t they the same thing? [/quote]
Nope.
a football bar generally has 2 ovals attached with a straight peg like so:
<>-<>
a swiss bar is generally a large rectangle like ===
Arguable that it’s semantics, but ther’s also a log bar which is more like <===> and mimics the log press a lot more than a bench press.
They all have their uses and they all suck! Seriously, I hate them. They work though.
[quote]corstijeir wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
Aren’t they the same thing? [/quote]
Nope.
a football bar generally has 2 ovals attached with a straight peg like so:
<>-<>
a swiss bar is generally a large rectangle like ===
Arguable that it’s semantics, but ther’s also a log bar which is more like <===> and mimics the log press a lot more than a bench press.
They all have their uses and they all suck! Seriously, I hate them. They work though.[/quote]
Gotcha. I have one from rogue like so: ----< I I I I I I >----
It’s okay.
I like the angled swiss bar. I have a prior pec tear and partial bicep tendon tear.
This is the one I bought: ebay angled swiss bar - Google Shopping
Close grip work is great with it. It’s hollow, but I doubt that I will ever have more than 350-400 lbs on it.