- This becomes your weapon,
that allows you to really attack your legs,
from every direction,
get your back loaded movements, get your deadlifts,
and you've got it all covered.
I think that's the guy who this is for
and he's gotta be short.
I'm Ebenezer Samuel,
the fitness director here at Men's Health.
In each episode of MS Strong,
I'll be joined by a fitness expert
and we will unbox, test, and rate the latest
and greatest fitness gear
to determine if it is indeed MH Strong.
We at Men's Health love the trap bar deadlift,
but if there's one issue with training with trap bars,
is that they can feel a little bit constricting
and a little bit tight.
And that's why a new innovation on the market,
something called the open trap bar
is helping to answer that.
Today we're gonna take a look at a Eleiko open trap bar.
It's a device that's been on the market for a little bit
has some advantages and has some disadvantages.
Why don't we go through them Josh?
- So let's go over a couple of facts about the bar first.
First it comes in at 55 pounds,
easy to set up, just come here, easy to rack
in unload and load it up and you can load it back up.
- It's rated up to 500 kilograms as well.
That means it's a big boy trap bar.
We can get some weight on there.
It's also made of round to two steel
which means it's incredibly durable
and it's gonna present some really cool aspects
that will cover a little bit later as well.
And then the final thing on here is to handle,
some trap bars standard offer high handles
and low handles, giving you a couple options.
There's only one option on this trap bar.
We'll explain to you how that affects things up next.
- So the open bar allows you to do some reverse lunges here,
with their regular closed trap bar.
It hinders you from doing certain things
as you can't do the reverse lunge.
Sometimes as well just being able to maneuver around it
as well is pretty tough
and just getting in and getting out of it,
Sometimes, you know, for me
I know I've had times where I've tripped
over the bar coming out of it because,
as soon as you put it down, it can tilt to one side.
So, you know, it just gives you
that flexibility of getting in and out as well.
- Yeah, exactly.
It's super natural.
It winds up being a great way in general.
I think with open trap bars, what they bring is
all of a sudden we can do Bulgarian split squats with the
with our arms, at our sides, we can do lunges.
We can do walking lunges.
There's this whole world
of moves that we could kind of do with a trap bar.
But now we can do them that much more easily
with the open trap bar.
I was gonna say, I really like the fact too
that on top of the, like, you can change this.
It's so quick, you can do it between sets.
I can do a set up 135 racket.
We can make that adjustment ultra quickly.
So it's not, it's so much easier, right?
And it's also, you can make this adjustment multiple times
and you can get so much weight.
I was noticing even when you were just moving it
on to there, you've got these extra long sleeves.
I feel like a lot of trap bars have shorter sleeves.
So especially if you're working with bounce plate,
or you're working with the giant rubber plates,
you can't get that much on here very easily.
I think we could fit three, four, five, rogue plates on here
and you can get some load on, you can really take advantage
of the fact that the trap bar goes high weight, right?
The final, big advantage too
I think is just the versatility because it is a trap bar
but because we have the round of tube steel,
we can also use this as a Cambered bars.
It's not something you often see in the gym
but once you set this up as a cambered bar
essentially you can do squats.
You can do lunges, we can load our
back a lot more easily than we could with the barbell.
So there's added versatility there as long
as you know what you're doing in the gym, right?
So those are the strengths.
Now let's cover a couple things we don't like as much
about the Eleiko open trap bar.
And for me, one of the prime things I don't love
about this trap bar,
it's just the overall weight distribution.
When I get into position in theory,
with an open trap bar and what makes them awesome is
that they're going, it's going to feel just
like a regular trap bar.
It's gonna feel nice and balanced when I pick it up.
But when I pick up this trap bar, I do feel a little bit
like my, I want to tip to, to the front.
It doesn't feel as evenly distributed.
Now this is fine for my average, for your average
135, 225 pound deadlift.
But if I'm starting to max out,
the last thing I want to really have to do,
is worry about dealing with a lot
of little correction in my forearms.
I want to focus on really moving the heavy weight.
And that's something that concerns me a little bit
about this trap bar that I'm not as crazy about
- For me,
It's just where the handles are.
You know, I feel like I have to get pretty low
set myself up, you know
down here, which if I don't have the mobility to get there
it's gonna be tough for me.
But as I go down
it really puts a different kind of strain for me.
I just don't like them being here as opposed to
if they're a little bit higher here just a little bit
you know, it'd be better for me.
I don't like that where they're placed at for me
for the taller guys.
- Exactly, and in theory, we can get
around that by just, you know, putting this trap bar
on paths or putting it on blocks to get a little bit height.
But at the same time when I'm training,
I don't want to have to worry about that.
- Correct.
- So the easy fix,
the better thing that lake could have done here
is give us a high handle option
because having that high handle option
in low handle also lets us train other things.
Like I can't see you
especially doing say explosive jump deadlifts.
And so there are
different motions that suddenly we can't approach
because we don't have the option
of the high handle on there.
- Correct
- The final negative to me is just overall.
If you look at this trap bar, yes, it is great to train in.
It is a little bit ungamely to store because it is long
and we like the length, but that length is kind
of a double edge sword because it is long and also wide.
And therefore, it takes a little bit
of time to figure out how to put this in your gym,
where you're gonna store this in your home gym.
It doesn't stand necessarily very well vertically.
You essentially the best way to store it is to
flip it this way,
but if you don't have a lot of real estate
that can be challenging.
So I'm just not as crazy about the storage of this.
It's a little challenging.
So now let's address who this is for and who it's not for.
And I think the guy who gets the most
out of this trap bar is the guy who has really
really experienced in the gym he want.
And he wants to get more
out of this than a trap bar deadlift.
There are better options out there
if you're just here for a trap bar deadlift.
But if you wanna use your trap bar for Bulgarian
split squats, for lunges, for moves like that
now we're starting to get into, okay
we need an open trap bar.
But then from there, I think we also wanna stack
on top of that, we can get squats
and a whole bunch of back loaded exercises onto it
but you have to be relatively advanced
in your training to really appreciate that.
So I think this is
for the advanced guy who wants to get away from the barbell.
He's gonna get a lot of his standard pressing
and rowing training from dumbbells.
He wants to avoid the barbell and this is your space saver.
This becomes your weapon that allows you to
really attack your legs from every direction,
get your back loaded movements, get your deadlifts
and you've got it all covered.
I think that's the guy who this is
for and he's gotta be short.
- Yeah, and it's not for me, you know
because for a guy like me
who's grew up playing basketball and things like that.
And I wanna work
on my player metrics where the handles sit at,
it don't work for me.
I'm not able to come down into that full range
of motion that I want to when I'm jumping up, or where it
where it stops at is not optimal
for me to get right back up into my next jump.
I sort of feel like I have to reset myself
in order to get right back up.
- Yeah, I think if you want athletic motions
if that's what you're chasing,
you do wanna work on your hip mobility in general
but you don't wanna have to worry
about that with your trap hour exercises.
And this is not the trap bar
for the guy who wants to do anything explosive.
This is a trap bar for somebody who wants to lift heavy.
That's why we've got the length.
It's a trap bar for somebody who wants to get versatility
out of it, with their squats as well.
But you're at not a trap bar for a tall guy,
not a trap bar for the athlete.
It just doesn't work that way.
The last thing is cost too.
This is definitely for somebody who's looking to
make an investment in their home gym.
It's gonna run you 799,
so you want to think about this and you want to make sure
that you have four or five motions that you can get out
of this and you can get those exercises out of it, as long
as you're advanced and as long as you're under sixth street.
So last thing we're gonna do, we're gonna give you
our MH strong rating.
This is from an average guy's perspective.
Do you need this in your home gym, in your garage gym
on a scale of one to 10, I'm gonna give this a five.
Yes, it's really cool, but it's a lot easier to
kind of manage barbells.
You're a lot more used to that.
And again, if you can't get five moves out of it
if you aren't gonna take advantage
of the cambered squat phase of this,
then it's not worth it.
But there are limitations too.
That's what I was a little bit disappointed in.
I really wish there was a high handle option.
If there was suddenly, this becomes a more athletic trap bar
and I would definitely give it a higher mark.
- And that's the Eleiko open trap bar.
You know, it's a cool new innovation, you know, it's very
it's very innovative, but it's very advanced.
Like we said, we do not recommend it for someone like me,
but we recommend it for someone who's advanced
and someone who's ready to get the most
that they can out of it.
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