Mixing bumper and iron plates

elmaestrokgb
elmaestrokgb Posts: 1 Member
edited February 18 in Fitness and Exercise
I'm planning to do starting strength soon, and I have a question about equipment. It seems like you'd want bumper plates to do power cleans (at least once the weights get heavy enough that you don't want to try to catch it on the way down every time). But bumper plates seem to be more expensive and harder to come by. Is there any reason you couldn't use regular iron plates for the smaller plates as long as you have bumper plates for the 45s? I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has actually tried this.

Replies

  • Leadfoot_Lewis
    Leadfoot_Lewis Posts: 1,623 Member
    If the iron plates are smaller than the bumpers you should be fine. You can also buy rubber non-bumper plates. I bought a set of 5s & 2.5s of these and they work great.

    Also - where do you live? Bummer plates are very easy to come by.
  • HelloDan
    HelloDan Posts: 712 Member
    Bummer plates :-\ (I know it's a typo, but it amused me!)

    No problem mixing bumpers and irons, as long as you use bigger bumper plates. Having a 100kg bar and just 2 x 10kg bumpers for example is a bad idea, but as long as your sensible, it's fine.

    If you're doing power cleans though, you can probably get away without bumpers anyway. When the weight goes up, you should just start catching it lower than power (the sign to not up the weight, until you can do it power), so you should have plenty of margin before you fail and need to dump the bar.
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