Spring Bars, and their Use

When it comes to the apparatus holding your weight plates on your bar you want to be able to bet your life and limb on its toughness. Weight collars, or weight clamps are charged with the very important purpose of holding your weight plates firmly on your barbells.

In general you have two types to choose from a screw-on style collar that operates like a big nut and washer combination, or a spring-loaded collar. Now, when it comes to weight collars usually people’s peace of mind comes in the form of the self-locking spring-loaded kind. These spring collars are held in place by springs that lock the plates tightly in place and are only released when you do it manually.

Spring collars are also the most suitable and inexpensive way to secure weight plates on a bar. All you do is load your plates on the bar, squeeze the handgrips, slide them onto the bar end and let go them into locked position. Spring collars are also just as simple to remove. You just squeeze the handles together and slide the collar off to take away or change your plates. Heavy-duty steel spring collars with rubber grips are usually sold in pairs, but be aware that different sizes may be needed for Olympic bars versus standard weight bars.

A few derelict weightlifters at the gym ignore the rules and lifting without using weight collars at all. This could be very dangerous for a person. You could imagine how cool you’d feel if your weight plates slid off your bar and fell on your foot, or even worse injured another member of the gym or destroyed the gym’s equipment. So always lock down your plates with collars is very important and close to the top of every gym’s membership rules.