Well you better believe it makes such a dramatic difference...
If you think about it, this takes away so much from your leg strength potential because you can't use a weight that's actually challenging for your leg strength. You use a weight that's challenging for your form, while the legs can cope with that weight with no problems whatsoever.
That's a lot of lost training stimulus.
That's a very interesting part , im not sure how exactly it goes.
So there's a huge deficit betwen smith and free squats , like 50lbs in the 6-rep range.
But how much of it is it because of the thin-olympic bar and how much because of the balance/help the smith machine gives?
Id like to hear what Andrew has to say about that...
Well, in most smith machines, the bar alone does not weigh 45lbs, I think it is usually closer to about 25lbs, so that accounts for a portion of the discrepancy.