I’m of the opinion that the two main pieces of lifting equipment that have impacted weight rooms significantly in the past decade are the Trapbar & Safety Bar. Low technical overhead, comfort & adaptability, means we can get away from the rigidity of conventional bar sport lifts.

However this does come with a caveat not all bars are created equal. Unlike Olympic bars which are built to an agreed standard with minor differences. Variance in TB & SSB is enormous. For instance I often find tubed or box steel designs to be inferior to solid steel.

Safety bar design varies wildly, tubed steel designs being the most variable. For my purposes low camber safety bars are worse as they effectively become a big pendulum. Unless you are gripping the camber & not the handles, the swing becomes more pronounced the heavier the load.

I prefer a modest cambered solid steel design, fairly rigid padding that should be closer to the neck and not draped over the shoulder. A lot of the OG safety bars where closer to this design. manufacturers get a bit wild with tubed steel as it’s easier to machine I’m guessing.

As it pertains to hand supported squatting. Notice that the OG Hatfield bar (top) has no bloody handles. The low cambered safety bar with hand support often causes this excessive forward trunk lean. The hand support does cancel out some of the sheets stress. Not ideal.

Safety bar design varies less but poor design choices make a ton of diff. Top is solid steel 25kg bar my preferred design standard width grip. Mid, tubed & boxed steel with hilariously high handles, feel free to denigrate anyone pulling 600lbs on handles that start at the knee.

Bottom design commits a few common sins, it’s 35kg so very heavy for storage, high handles only, overly wide with smaller sleeves than top design. Handles are too wide apart every inch the hands get further out from the body the lower start position of pull gets.

OG Trapbar diamond design was pretty damned ergonomic notice how close to the body handles are. The addition of high handles & hex shape fixed most of issues with this design.

Supposedly Al Gerard tried Rectangular, oval designs!

Where is this going? Modular Safety bars like @KabukiStrength has put out will fix issues around camber vs handle position. And half Trapbars are also all the rage. They allow for heavier loading of unilateral work than dumbbells, minus the axial loading of conventional Barbell.