Equipment Reviews

The IronMaster Super Bench has been a fairly popular adjustable economy bench over the years. Used mostly in home and garage gyms, it’s one of the few decent alternatives to commercial-grade adjustable benches for beginner to intermediate lifters. It’s versatile, strong, relatively affordable, and for the average lifter the pros tend to outweigh the cons. [...]

This is an in-depth review of the Rep Fitness Adjustable Bench; one of the few adjustable benches that manages to pull off flat, incline, and decline without costing a fortune. It has a wide range of settings, comfortable pads, and a strong, heavy-gauge steel frame. It’s not a commercial bench, but it’s solid, versatile, and priced attractively [...]

The Thompson Fat Pad is a replacement pad for flat utility benches and commercial benching stations. It was developed by legendary powerlifter and equipment guru, Donnie Thompson, in an effort to overhaul the simple, narrow pads typically found on benches. Essentially, Donnie wanted to create a pad that maximized power in the bench press while simultaneously [...]

The E-Maxx Bar (aka “the SuperQuake”) is a member of Bandbell’s Bamboo Bar family of bars – a line of hand-made specialty barbells designed around the principle of Oscillating Kinetic Energy (OKE). The SuperQuake has the same hardened ash & composite resin shaft as the original Bamboo and Earthquake Bar, but because it’s over 6″ longer and has [...]

The Rogue EZ Curl Bar – easily one of the most well-received and sought-after pieces of training equipment released in the last year. An instant success; just about every batch made available since its initial release has sold out the same day (it took me over three months to catch one in stock and place [...]

Last spring I published a full review of the California Bar; American Barbell’s flagship WOD bar. If you happened to read that review then you already know that I discovered it to be a great mid-range WOD bar with a long list of pros. I found the overall quality, reliability, and performance to be outstanding for such a reasonably priced [...]

Athletes who focus their training around the two explosive Olympic lifts have a tendency to buy higher performance, more dependable training equipment than athletes who don’t Olympic lift at all; items like whippy, 28 mm bearing bars, competition-style bumper plates, and $200+ shoes. They buy this expensive equipment not just because of the edge that it can [...]

This is a review of the new Rogue Fitness Stainless Steel Ohio Bar. In this comprehensive review I’ll go over the Stainless Steel Ohio’s technical specs, the benefits of stainless steel, knurl pattern, sleeve rotation, and elasticity. I’ll also compare the SS Ohio to the American Barbell SS bars, comment on comparisons to other stainless bars, and finally [...]

You have a lot of options when shopping for new kettlebells. You can run down to Wal-Mart or Dick’s Sporting Goods and buy some inexpensive, plastic-coated kettlebells that’ll hold you over for a little while; you can order some half-decent scrap iron kettlebells from online fitness outlets or CrossFit shops; or you can spend a little bit [...]

This is an in-depth review of the Vulcan Absolute Power Bar; the black oxide and raw steel variant (the other variant being entirely stainless steel). While the two Absolute Power Bar variants are similar they are also very different, so this review is not quite as relevant when it comes to the SS Absolute. The [...]

I purchased a pair of Rogue’s new Olympic Competition Collars and have been using them for about a good month now. I thought I’d spend a few minutes going over some of the finer points of these collars while also giving you my opinion of them. You know, just in case you have these on your radar. Update 2017: [...]

A few months back I picked up a couple pairs of the Thompson Fatbells. After having spent a good amount of time messing around and training with these bad boys, I figured I’d spend a few minutes telling you what I think about them. For those of you who have no idea what a Fatbell is, well they are [...]

This is a review for the California Bar, American Barbell’s first multi-purpose (dual-marked) Olympic bar. The California is basically a WOD bar; American Barbell’s version of the Ohio Bar. It’s an American-made jack-of-all-trades; and it’s one of the best-built bars in its class. This particular review is for the original California Bar; the zinc-plated version [...]

In this review I’m going to take a look at the Sport Bumper Plates, American Barbell’s basic bumper plates. I realize that basic bumpers do not exactly make the most exciting reviews, but people need bumpers, and these are a viable option. Update January 2018: A price change has caused me to have to revisit [...]