Kabuki Strength Trap Bar

The age-old struggle of loading and unloading plates from your trusty trap bar is over. We are proud to introduce a simple, effortless solution – the built-in bar jack. Our design features 2x nearly inch-thick “legs” with tread to provide grip and stability when the bar is positioned in a vertical orientation for easy loading/unloading. We designed The Trap Bar to allow for an effortless transition from horizontal to vertical position, requiring minimal effort and taking advantage of human kind’s earliest discovery – the lever.

An industry-first, The Trap Bar by default comes with two sets of machined, knurled grips finished in bright zinc. The grips are easily swappable for your specific training need.

Another industry first, the 2″ Love Handles are an optional add-on for The Trap Bar that allows for both rolling (the grip will spin freely) or fixed usage. Each set of Love Handles includes adapters to allow for both rolling and fixed use.

Visualize a regular trap bar with the low handles (see illustration). The bar is a flat plane, stretching out in the X and Z axis. The handles are typically positioned at the center of mass (COM) and center of rotation (COM), so that if the bar was centrally fixed on two points along the X axis, where the handles are, it would be balanced (assuming its weight distribution is even along the Z axis. In theory, if you hold a regular trap bar perfectly on-center using the low handles, it should feel balanced. Practically speaking, the low handles always feel inherently unstable due to the bar’s inclination to dive one direction or another like a teeter-tooter – forcing the lifter to self-balance using their wrists. The higher handles don’t have this problem, and the bar is much more difficult to rotate forwards or backwards. For an extreme example of instability, imagine deadlifting on a trap bar with the high-handles, but upside down resulting in the fulcrum, or center of rotation, point being 6″ below the center of mass. Any minor shift or movement, and that bar is going to rotate and fall right out of your hands.

Our simple solution on The Trap Bar was to introduce a minor 1/2″ vertical offset for the low handles, placing them slightly higher than the centerline of the bar. This results in the same effect, but to a lesser extent, as the high-handles – the bar will have a tendency to return to center rather than dive forward or backwards. Think of a teeter-totter – it’s an inherently unbalanced mechanism just like a regular trap bar with low handles. Now, think of a swing – with the center of rotation much higher than the center of mass – it will always try to return to center.

In an effort to make The Trap Bar as versatile of an implement as possible, we opted to open up one end of the bar while still ensuring it retains a fully-balanced design. This open design allows for much more variation beyond your standard deadlift, including loaded carries, split squats, RDLs, and lunges.

Unlike most trap/hex bars on the market, The Trap Bar features machined sleeves with 16.5″ of loadable space. To cut costs, many trap bars use off-the-shelf DOM tubing whose diameter is less than a standard olympic sleeve, resulting in them being incompatible with all standard collars. Another side effect of this is that plates fit very loosely on the under-sized sleeves, resulting in lots of shifting, movement, and clanging of the plates.

Our sleeves are machined to tight tolerances like any other standard barbell, allowing for a snug fit for plates and compatibility with all standard barbell collars.

The Trap Bar is fabricated, manufactured, and assembled in-house at Kabuki Strength Lab, our dual-purpose training space and manufacturing facility in the beautiful Pacific Northwest city of Portland, Oregon. Each bar includes a hand-signed card by the Kabuki Strength employee who assembled it.

• Built-In Bar Jack to allow easy loading/unloading of plates
• Swappable Grips with 1″ and 1.5″ (included), and 2″ Love Handles (optional)
• Balanced Design for both high and low handles.
• Open Design to allow for a variety of unilateral and carrying movements
• Machined, full-length sleeves with signature end cap