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Buying A Bar
If you are looking for a new Olympic bar then you will no doubt be asking yourself and possibly people in the know which one to buy and why. Not least of your questions is why are there bars at around £100 and others at £500 or more and what do you get for your money. Here we try to pull together a few facts to explain the differences and guide you to the best product for you. Let’s start at the diameter of the bar, for weightlifting all bars which meet the standards for men are 28mm and women are 25mm. For Powerlifting the standard is 29mm. Training with the right diameter bar is essential if you intend to compete as all competitions or events will use this approved standard.
Cheaper bars tend to have a grip around 30mm, it takes a better grade of steel and engineering to have thinner steel and yet have the same strength!
The standard bar length for men is 2200mm and a weight of 20kg, for women weightlifters the length is reduced to 2010mm and a weight of 15kg. The next thing you can see or probably feel is the knurling, cheaper bars have rough or sometimes sharp knurling that can cause pain during a lift. Manufacturers of quality bars will have spent time to get it right so the lifter gets a great grip without feeling uncomfortable.
The sleeves on a bar are meant to rotate so that as your hand or arm position shifts during a lift the body doesn’t take any additional strain from the weights but turn smoothly. This doesn’t just need to happen when you first buy the bar but through the life of the bar. Hence a lot depends on the quality of bearing used.
In the case of a weight lifting bar and to some extent a powerlifting bar the bearings also need to be able to stand dropping on to the floor which is putting significant pressure on these carefully machined parts. You will know you have a cheap bar when the bearings start to break and make the rotation of the sleeve uneven.
You may not notice it at first but your wrists or arms will as they pick up small injuries. If a ball bearing drops out of your bar then you will need to take it in for repair or buy a new bar.
The next thing to look for is how the sleeve is connected to the bar, cheaper bars tend to have a bolt in the end which can work loose and come off when you least expect it. Whereas a quality bar will be made to very tight tolerances which allow for an engineered fit.
These are all things you can see but what you can’t see is perhaps the most important of all and that is the tensile strength of the steel used. You will often see a pound strength cited by bar manufacturers as an indicator of how good the bar is. This is really only a gimmick as it does not tell you how strong the steel is. The real strength rating is PSI or pounds per square inch required to pull the bar apart. A commercial grade Olympic bar requires a minimum of 150,000 PSI rating and research has shown that anything under 190,000 PSI develops permanent bends over time.
Bars such as those made by Eleiko or Ivanko use steel rated at over 200,000 PSI. Eleiko, which is arguably the finest bar in the world, has a tensile strength of 215,000 PSI. The average Olympic bar is made and sold as "1,000 pound test" and usually runs about 130,000 to 150,000 PSI. Almost all of them are 130,000 PSI. Of course a bar must be straight to begin with, but will it stay that way? Eleiko test every bar with a load of 1.5 tonnes. It must spring back to within 0.5mm before it can be passed.
The final things which distinguish quality bars is that they will never have any grooves in the bar, these only weaken the structure and provide a natural breaking or bending point. Also chrome plating used by some manufacturers to make their bars look better because of the poorer quality steel used can actually weaken the steel and again create a breaking point.
Ivanko for example only offer a black oxide coating or use more expensive stainless steel which requires no coating.
A cheap bar is fine if you are going to do light training and don’t expect to be dropping the bar loaded. You can even use some of these quite heavily loaded but don’t leave the weights on when you have finished training as the steel will gradually bend.
If you are a commercial gym then buying cheap is not really an option, it will only take 1 accident to make any short term saving pointless. Serious or competition lifters will probably already know that buying the right bar is the only way forward.
Either way Pullum Sports is the place to get advise and see what the difference between a a wide range of weight or power lifting bars is. |
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