Why Hex Plates Deadlift Sounds Like Hell on Earth
If you’ve come home on vacation and visited your local gym to sweat, you probably already know that not all gyms are created equal. Some are naturally crappy, filled with old rusty weights and uneven floors. But even in a brand new and well-equipped gym, sometimes things feel different and therefore much more complicated. The barbell might not feel right. The benches don’t feel right. Hell, even the treadmill model might not be what you’re used to, and running will feel a little odd.
Worse, this gym has hex plates – the easiest way to ruin your deadlift. This is why hex plates instead of rounded ones usually suck. If you’ve never seen a hex plate, it has flat sides; round plates, as the name suggests, do not have flat sides. When you do deadlifts with round beads, they hit the ground and remain stationary as they should. When you do hex plate deadlifts, it’s chaotic.
You see, the hex plates tend to roll when you lower the bar. “Basically, they will still move, and when you put it on, it will either come up to you and scratch you or roll back, causing someone to trip over it,” Louis Cormier, personal trainer and Precor Head Coach; here is avideo demonstrating this problem. The problem then is that you constantly need to make sure that the bar is properly aligned with your body, otherwise you risk injury to yourself or others while lifting. (Here’s anothervideo that shows the difference between lifting hex and round plates.)
Last week I was in the gym where there were only hex plates, and the deadlift, my favorite lift, was a real headache. Fully reconfiguring between reps didn’t help much; sometimes the bar would roll back and forth when I held it on the ground, no matter how much I concentrated on keeping one side of the bar not closer or farther away than the other.
Why, then, do gyms choose the dreadful hex plate? Well, you can read online that some commercial gyms may use them specifically to prevent serious deadlifts (less noise, fewer people use barbells, etc.). Whatever the reason, if you find yourself in this situation, first of all, I am sorry that this is happening to you. Second, there is little that can be done to change this. You can place a small weight on either side of the plates to minimize rolling, but this will only help. In any case, he can bounce back or roll over over the weight.
If you’re willing tosplurge a bit, there’s even a product that turns hex plates into round ones – the “HexBumper ” – but it might be worth finding a new gym, period. Here’s how to start this process .