When equipping a home gym, purchasing fitness racks is only the first step. You also need lifting accessories, particularly plates for weight training. You have a choice between traditional iron plates and bumper plates. While the latter is not required for the bench press, they can offer some significant advantages.
What Are Bumper Plates?
At first glance, bumper plates look very similar to their traditional iron counterparts. The most noticeable difference upon visual inspection is that bumper plates tend to come in different colors.
Bumpers are indistinguishable from iron plates in size, shape, and weight. They are purposely sized to Olympic proportions so that they can be used in place of iron plates. The primary difference is in the material that each is made out of.
Rather than metal, bumpers are made from a rubber that is dense and thick.
What Purpose Do Bumpers Serve?
Certain types of lifts require the lifter to raise a loaded bar up to an overhead position and then release it. If the weight plates were made of metal, they could scratch or crack as they hit the floor.
The impact could also damage the rack or the floor itself. Though bumpers are just as heavy as their metal counterparts, the rubber they are made from absorbs the impact. Bumpers are designed to simply bounce off the floor without causing serious damage.
Examples of lifts for which bumpers are specially designed include the clean-and-jerk, the snatch, and the overhead squat.
What Advantages Do Bumpers Offer for Bench Press?
Obviously, the bench press doesn’t involve purposely dropping the weights. If it did, you could sustain serious injury. Therefore, bumpers are certainly optional for bench press, not a necessity as they are for certain types of lifts.
Nevertheless, some people who perform the bench press prefer bumpers to traditional metal plates, finding that they offer some significant advantages.
While you do not intentionally drop weights used for bench press to the floor, you may do so unintentionally, whether while lifting or while reloading the bar. If you were to drop a metal weight, it would probably cause damage to the floor.
A rubber bumper plate does not completely eliminate the risk of damage to the floor, which may depend partly on the flooring material used, but it may reduce the risk.
If you were to accidentally drop a metal plate, it would probably crack or at least get scratched. There is no danger of this kind of damage with a rubber bumper plate. It is much more durable than its metal counterpart, which means it can last a long time.
Lifting metal plates can cause quite a racket as you go through your sets and reps. They make clanging noises as they jostle against one another due to the motion of the loaded bar. Some people find this distracting.
Not only can this noise be annoying, but it can also be detrimental to your hearing health. Loud bursts of noises can cause damage to the inner ear that can lead to hearing loss.
Though not required, bumper plates for bench presses make a lot of sense. Find weight plates and other lifting equipment from online retailers.
