How to choose an Olympic barbell

One: decide what you actually lift

Nearly every regretted barbell purchase is the right bar bought for the wrong job. Before you look at a single specification, write down honestly what you do in a typical training week.

If it is squat, bench press and deadlift, you want a power bar. If it is the snatch and the clean and jerk, you want a weightlifting bar with bearings. If it is a bit of everything — which is most people in most home gyms — you want a multipurpose bar, and you should be slightly suspicious of any advice that tells you otherwise.

Deadlift bars, squat bars and technique bars are specialists. They are excellent at one thing and poor at the rest, and none of them should be your only bar.

Two: shaft diameter

This is the number that encodes the answer to decision one, and it is the specification that changes how a bar feels more than anything else on the listing.

• 27mm — deadlift bar. Bends a lot on purpose. Unsafe to squat or bench with.
• 25mm — women’s bar, 15kg. Easier to grip and to hook grip, whips more.
• 28mm — men’s weightlifting standard. Useful whip, familiar hand feel.
• 28.5mm — multipurpose. Slightly stiffer, used by Rogue on the Ohio and Echo bars.
• 29mm — powerlifting standard. Noticeably stiff, almost no whip.
• 32mm to 35mm — squat bar, 25kg. Deliberately immovable.

The jumps sound trivial written down and are not. Stiffness rises steeply with diameter, not in proportion to it, which is why one millimetre between a weightlifting bar and a power bar is something you can feel the first time you load either one.

Three: bushings or needle bearings

The sleeves on every Olympic bar rotate. How freely they rotate is decided by what is inside them, and there are two answers.

Bushings are sleeves of bronze that the shaft turns inside. They give a slower, heavier rotation, they have almost nothing to go wrong, and they are what you want for the squat, the bench press and the deadlift — a fast-spinning sleeve under a heavy squat just lets the plates whip around and unsettle the bar. Several makers now use graphite-infused bronze, where graphite particles sit in the metal as permanent lubrication so the rotation stays consistent without maintenance.

Needle bearings are cages of small rollers, and they let the sleeve spin fast and freely. During a snatch the bar has to rotate most of a half turn while you get under it, and with bushings that rotation drags on your wrists. If you train the Olympic lifts, bearings are not optional.

A few bars have both in the same sleeve — Eleiko call it dual construction, Mirafit call it a hybrid setup — aiming at fast rotation for the Olympic lifts and controlled rotation for everything else. If you genuinely do both, that is the clearest attempt anyone has made at the problem.

Four: how much steel you actually need

Two numbers matter here, and makers publish them inconsistently, which is itself informative.

Tensile strength, in PSI, measures the steel. On bars sold in Britain the useful range runs from about 180,000 PSI at the budget end to 240,000 PSI at the top. Higher is better all else equal, and all else is frequently not equal.

The load or drop rating, in kilos, is what the maker has actually tested the finished bar to. These range widely among the bars listed here — from a 180kg rating on an entry-level women’s bar to a tested capacity above 907kg on a commercial weightlifting bar. Compare it against your own best lifts and leave real headroom. A rating is a limit, not a target.

If a listing gives you neither figure, that is your answer about the bar.

The two things people forget

Finish. In a heated commercial gym this is cosmetic. In a British garage in February it is not. Bare steel and black oxide grip beautifully and will develop surface rust if you ignore them; chrome, stainless and Cerakote resist it and feel very slightly less grippy. Several bars come in multiple finishes at different prices for exactly this reason, and it is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by accident.

Length and sleeve space. A 7ft bar is about 220cm. Specialist bars run to 230cm and 240cm, and a deadlift bar can be 235cm. Measure your rack, your platform and the walls either side, because you need room to walk round the ends. Then check the loadable sleeve length against the plates you intend to buy — 450mm bumper plates are thick for their weight and fill a sleeve far faster than thin calibrated steel.

What we are not going to tell you

Which bar is best. Nobody at OlympicBars.co.uk has trained on any of this equipment, so a ranking here would be invention dressed up as expertise. What this site does instead is put the manufacturers’ own published figures side by side, state plainly where a maker publishes nothing, and explain what each number changes when you are under the bar. The decision is yours, which is where it belongs.