Spring Collars

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 durability. Weight collars, or weight clamps are charged with the very important purpose of holding your weight plates securely on your dumbbells and barbells.

Now, I'd consider it risky to overestimate just any old pair of weight collars. In general you have two types to select 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 I prefer to bet on quality and I've found that my peace of mind comes in the form of the self-locking spring-loaded kind. These mechanisms are held in place by springs that lock the plates tightly in place and are only released when you do it manually. I personally found after trying both spring and screw-on collars that spring clamps will never loosen during an exercise like their bolt counterparts sometimes do.

Spring-loaded collars are also the most convenient 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 release them into locked position. Spring loaded collars are also just as easy to remove. You just squeeze the handles together and slide the collar off to remove or change your plates. Heavy-duty steel spring collars with rubber grips are sold in pairs for about $15 online, but be aware that different sizes may be needed for Olympic bars versus standard weight bars.

I've seen a few derelict weightlifters at my gym ignoring the rules and lifting without using weight collars at all. Now I'm one of those in and out types in the gym. I get in there do my workout and get out without wasting any time, but I do it all with safety in mind. 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. I hope I don't have to warn you that locking down your plates with collars is very important and close to the top of every gym's membership rules. So, just because you're setting up a gym at home doesn't mean that securing your plates isn't just as important as it is at your local YMCA.