Your Trusted Guide to Ride-On Toys in the UK
Buy the wrong barbell and you’ll notice within a session. Buy the wrong olympic weight plates and you might not notice for months — right up until the rubber starts peeling off the rim, the paint chips onto your carpet, or you realise the “20kg pair” you bought is actually a single plate and your … Read more
Stand in front of a barbell wall at any decent UK gym and you’ll notice something odd: the bars aren’t all the same. Pick up the wrong one and a lift that should feel controlled suddenly feels like wrestling a fence post. That’s the whole story behind 20kg Olympic bar vs 15kg Olympic bar — … Read more
A weightlifting barbell for beginners is any Olympic-specification bar — typically 20kg for men and 15kg for women, 2.2 metres long, with rotating sleeves — built to let a new lifter learn the snatch and the clean and jerk without the bar fighting them. That’s the textbook definition, but it doesn’t tell you much about … Read more
There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from feeling a plate shift mid-rep. You’re halfway through a heavy set of squats or bench press, the bar starts to tilt a fraction, and suddenly the lift isn’t about strength anymore, it’s about damage control. Barbell collars for home gym setups solve this exact problem, and … Read more
Somewhere around your third year of consistent bench pressing, one of two things tends to happen: your shoulders start grumbling every time you unrack a straight bar, or you plateau and start wondering whether a fresh stimulus might be exactly what your triceps need. A multi-grip barbell for bench press — also called a Swiss … Read more
There’s a particular frustration familiar to any lifter with cranky shoulders: you love squatting, your legs are ready to work, but getting a straight barbell into a comfortable position across your back feels like negotiating with your own joints. A safety squat bar solves that problem in a genuinely clever way — instead of gripping … Read more
Your wrists ache before your biceps even get tired — sound familiar? That’s usually the first clue that a straight barbell is the wrong tool for curls, and it’s exactly why an EZ curl bar for home gym training has become such a quiet cult favourite among UK lifters. An EZ curl bar is a … Read more
Buy the wrong bar and you’ll find out at the worst possible moment — halfway through a heavy set, when the sleeves won’t spin and the knurling feels like it’s made of glass. An Olympic barbell is the one piece of kit that touches every single session you do, from the first empty-bar warm-up squat … Read more
There’s a particular kind of dread that hits you the moment you type barbell under £150 into a search bar. You picture a bent shaft after three sessions, sleeves that seize up like a rusted gate hinge, or a knurl pattern so shallow it might as well be a rolling pin. Here’s the good news: … Read more
There’s a specific kind of dread that comes with googling “deadlift bar” at 11pm and landing on forty tabs of near-identical hexagons. You just want to know which one won’t rust by March. A trap bar (also called a hex bar) is a hexagon-shaped barbell you step inside of, so the weight sits level with … Read more