Strength Shop Original 2028 Olympic Bar — Black E-Coat
A 28mm budget all-rounder with both steel bushings and needle bearings in the sleeve, coarse knurling and a centre knurl. 186,000 PSI steel, with a maximum suggested load of 250kg.
That is not a photograph of this bar. Product photography on this page is illustrative. We are licensing real images of each bar and will swap them in per product as they arrive — until then the pictures show a generic unbranded bar of that type, not the product named beside them.
Published specification
Every figure below is Strength Shop’s own published specification for this bar, quoted rather than measured. Where a figure is not published it is not listed — there are no estimates in this table.
Who this bar is for
A cheap way into a bar that will take both kinds of lifting. The 250kg suggested load is the honest limit here — it is a starter bar, not a bar to chase a 300kg deadlift on.
What this page is not
It is not a review. Nobody at OlympicBars.co.uk has trained on this bar, so there is no score, no star rating and no verdict here, and there never will be unless that changes and we say so plainly. What this page gives you is Strength Shop’s own numbers, laid out the same way as every other bar on the site so you can compare them, and a link to the shop so you can check the current price yourself.
Other multipurpose bars
One bar for everything — 28mm to 28.5mm, dual knurl marks for both grip standards, moderate spin. What most home gyms and most mixed-training gyms actually need.
Every figure is the manufacturer’s or retailer’s own published specification. An em dash (—) means they do not publish that figure — it is never a number we have guessed. “Tensile” is tensile strength in thousands of PSI. “Rotation” is bushings, needle bearings, or both in the same sleeve. No prices are listed here, deliberately: check the current price with the shop.
All multipurpose bars →Compare it against everything else
All 52 bars on one page, grouped by type, on the same set of published figures.
The full tableNot sure what the numbers mean?
Tensile strength, whip, knurl depth, bushings against bearings — what each one changes when you are actually under the bar.
Specs explained