These Heavy Metal Gearheads Are Reshaping How We Lift
PLENTY OF SILICON Valley-style fitness companies are stepping up to help us find that sweet spot between getting soft and overtraining, thanks to vitals-measuring watches, and app-based workouts. Then there’s the gym machines that can monitor your reps and calibrate your next set accordingly. The bigger question, however, is whether in the rush to optimize your workout, something might be getting lost.
Bert Sorin, a former D1 collegiate hammer thrower is the president of Sorinex, an exercise equipment company that has outfitted the training facilities for teams across the NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. As he sees it, there’s a primal joy to being “dumb animals” who “just freakin’ get after it,” although he recognizes that some old approaches could use an upgrade.
Back in the ‘90s at the University of South Carolina, he’d throw five days a week for two hours, weightlift four days a week for another two, do plyometrics and sprinting every day, and take off just two weeks a year, one after indoor nationals and one after outdoor. His efforts got results. At 6’3”, 220 pounds, Sorin says he could snatch 275 pounds, clean 365, and squat 585 for a double. But those gains came at a price. “When you’re pissing blood, you know something’s probably not right,” he says. Now in his mid-40s, the costs keep adding up. “My back still hurts. My knees are always inflamed. We were definitely overtraining.”
Over the past few years, Sorin has joined several other innovation-minded gear makers to re-engineer what lifting heavy can and should feel like. From Rogue’s weight-distributing Elephant Bar to Kabuki’s more ergonomic Duffalo Bar and Sorinex’s totally balanced Center Mass Bells, these makers are ushering in a new Iron Age of kettlebells, barbells, and racks that may protect your joints, increase your range of motion, and push you to (safely!) crank out a few more solid reps. Here’s how that happened.
##
The Rise of Rogue’s Ultra-Durable Elephant Bar
In the fall of 2015, Rogue received a seemingly frivolous request. The powerlifting legend Terry Todd, who was then director of the Arnold Strongman Classic, wanted a new barbell for the event’s iconic one-rep max deadlift competition. The Classic had been using giant Hummer tires as weights, which created an awesome sight. “It looks inhuman and impossible,” says Ahmik Jones, Director of Product Development at Rogue Fitness.
The problem was, the tires raised the barbell too high off the floor, giving some lifters an unfair advantage. The easy solution was obvious: Even for guys pulling 1,000 pounds, the organizers could’ve reverted to a normal barbell with 45-pound powerlifting plates, which are a svelte 5/8 of an inch thick. But Todd felt that this would ruin the spectacle because the weights wouldn’t look as impressive as they are. So he asked Rogue to create a wider bar that could accommodate more massive 2-inch-thick bumper plates.
This presented a tougher engineering challenge. With all that weight distributed over a wider area, the bar would likely curve when it came off the ground, so it’d have to be longer, stronger, and more flexible to avoid snapping. It was an absurd but image-making endeavor, and Rogue had only nine months before the next Arnold Classic. Jones and his team got to work.
At first, they just increased the width between the sleeves of the barbell and invited a local strongman club to try out the new product. It curved flexibly, but never straightened out again, an acceptable design if there were only one lifter.
Next, they increased the diameter of the steel. Same problem, nothing seemed to be working.
So Rogue stared considering new materials. With just a few months before the Classic, they settled on a still proprietary variant of stainless steel. They made the bar extra thick—shifting form a 27mm to 29mm diameter, and invited the strongmen back. When those guys couldn’t deform the bar, Jones says that they loaded it with 1,200 pounds, hooked it up to a forklift, and dropped it 50 times in a row.
For every drop, Jones was the one pulling the release shackle. As the barbell crashed to the floor, along with 22 55-pound plates, he and his team inspected it, re-attached it, made sure no one was standing near, and started the process over again. It took hours, but the thing looked solid—at least, they hoped.
“It comes to a point where you've done all the testing that you can, and you just have to trust that you've thought of enough of the things that could go wrong,” says Jones. For the Arnold Classic, they brought three of the Elephant Bars, just in case. About two-thirds of the way through the event, Jones realized that the bar wasn’t going to deform, embarrassing him and the company.
Those Elephant bars aren’t available to the public; they’re used only for competitions. But the R&D process revealed another benefit that could help everyone: a more flexible bar will distribute weight better to relieve the pressure on your joints. So the company now casts many of its most popular barbells, including the Ohio Bar, Bella Bar, and the power and Olympic weightlifting bars out of the same material.
##
The Dawn of Kabuki’s Super Ergonomic Duffalo Bar
In 2011, a gym owner in Oregon named Chris Duffin was lifting super heavy when he detached two heads of his left pec and ended up needing shoulder and then elbow surgery. The doctors told him that he could probably lift again after a year of recovery but he’d never get stronger. He had peaked at 33 years old.
“I do not accept that as an answer,” he remembers telling them.
During his recovery, the gym owner thought a lot about the lectures he’d given on how to use proper form to avoid injury. But even with excellent mechanics, the flat shape of a barbell often forced his shoulders to rotate to get a full grip on the bar while squatting.
As he saw it, that might have contributed to his injury. It certainly wouldn’t help with his recovery either. A year after his surgery, in 2012, the engineer and power lifter took a conventional barbell to the press in his garage tool shop and slowly bent it into an arc between the sleeves on either end. Every so often, he’d pop it onto his back, do a few squats, and then refine the shape. Start to finish, it took about three hours. This was his first Duffin-inspired Buffalo Bar, aka the Duffalo Bar.
As Duffin tells it, he brought several of his new inventions to his gym, where early adopters liked that the bar’s curve sits more comfortably on your back, encouraging you to retract your shoulder blades and stay upright as you back squat instead of tilting forward. And because of the downward curve, it’s easier to grip the bar, reducing the pressure on the bicep tendon that connects at your shoulders.
Despite its popularity among his friends, Duffin says he never intended to take the bar to market. Then a couple years later, in 2014, he created Kabuki Strength, an Oregon-based equipment company that grew to work with nearly every MLB, NFL, and NBA team, and whose products are in over 1,000 training facilities.
Kabuki initially started off manufacturing high quality traditional equipment. But by 2015, Duffin decided to make his home invention available, too, and the bars became popular mostly through word-of-mouth in the community Duffin knows best: hardcore lifters. The Duffalo Bar has since become a staple in the training facilities of dozens of professional MLB, NFL, and NBA teams.
Kabuki believes the product can benefit everyone, even someone who’s never touched a barbell before. That means a lot of time on the road at trade shows, gyms, and college rec centers. During the pandemic, the company even offered 15 to 30-minute Zoom appointments where someone would answer your questions and teach you how to use the equipment. “We’re trying to get as many bars in people’s hands as we can,” says Jared Schuurmans, a former discus thrower for Team USA and the Vice President of Sales and Consulting for Kabuki.
At the same time, Duffin recognizes he may not be the best ambassador for pitching everyone. “I’m a larger, kind of intimidating person,” he says. The irony, of course, is that he can maintain that physique because of this innovation. He’s still benefitting from his own design.
##
The Creation of Sorinex’s Perfectly Balanced Center Mass Bells
For Sorin’s part, he never liked the clunkiness of dumbbells, so, in 2014, he and his team at Sorinex began toying with the idea of a spherical dumbbell, something nimble that would feel like a weighted extension of your hand. Sorinex produced a prototype. Then, they went to the patent office and discovered that it’d already been done—dozens of times over and dating back decades.
That wake-up call pushed Sorin to re-think the problem. “The simplest answer was the one that had not been approached yet,” he says. The company changed the design so that it was equally weighted not just horizontally or vertically, but on all three axes, like a sphere with a handle inside. Because it has truly centered mass, they called the Center Mass Bell.
Center Mass Bells are popular these days because they allow smooth and balanced movements—allowing you to lift heavy in a more natural way. Think of it like you’ve waved a magic wand, and now your fists weigh 20, 30, 40 pounds. That makes it easier to do everything from bench press to single-arm snatches to Turkish get-ups. Since the first prototype was launched in 2015, CMBs have been used by Joe Rogan, Gunnar Peterson, Cameron Hanes and collegiate football programs including University of South Carolina, Sorin’s alma mater.
If there’s at least one feature that seems to unify the these redesigns across companies, it’s simplicity. Each revision works because it’s still intuitive to use. Sorin’s actually been chasing that ideal for more than a decade, way back to when he drew the first blueprints for “The Rig,” in a cocktail napkin. The Rig, which debuted at the 2008 CrossFit games, allows lifters to combine squatting, pressing, and benching on one big structure that has upright supports with holes on all four sides. That way, you can place the J-hooks wherever and however you want, easily allowing an athlete of any size to do pretty much any movement that requires a rack.
In short, the equipment takes a bunch of otherwise clunky exercise stations and combines them. Similar models are also now standard at most gyms. And Sorinex is still thinking about how to improve theirs too. The company just patented a rack with LED lights that flash different colors depending on the velocity of your lift. “When you have all 80 kids in the room, the music is cranking, people are yelling and screaming, it's a different animal to try to take into account what those numbers are saying and doing,” says Sorin.
Maybe you never thought this gear as innovative, but it is. Each advancement helps you without over complicating, so you can just focus on getting after it. As Jones at Rogue told me, “You lift on the best barbell in the world, and it’s still heavy.” That’s a good thing.
You Might Also Like
