What’s going on guys? It’s Hai.
Over the past few months, I’ve been putting together a home gym. It’s coming along but one thing that I’ve desperately been needing is a dumbbell setup. Well, I decided to pick up the Titan Fitness Loadable 15 in Olympic Dumbbell Handle. If you can’t tell by the name, these are basically bare handles that you can use to load plates on and make your own dumbbells. These particular handles have a 6.25” gripping area and 2” wide sleeves that are 3.75” in length. The entire thing is 15” in overall length and weighs 8 lbs each.
Now, you may be wondering, why buy such a thing? Why not just buy dumbbells? No doubt, standalone dumbbells are the way to go if you want the most convenience and durability. However, if you’re serious and want an entire set of dumbbells without weight gaps, that’s going to easily cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Not to mention the large amount of space that’s required to rack all that weight. For many people, something like this is going to be the more logical route. It may take a little more time to change weights, but you’re potentially saving money by using olympic plates that you already own and the space needed to store these handles are minimal.
As previously mentioned, these handles are 15” in overall length but more importantly, the loadable area is only 3.75” making this Titan Fitness handle one of the shortest options on the market. Titan also makes a 20” and 36” version, each of those giving you more loadable sleeve space. So why did I buy the shortest version and the version that allows you to load the least amount of weight? Well, it simply comes down to range of motion. The longer these handles get, the harder it’s going to be to use them with a neutral grip. With any standard neutral grip dumbbell press, these 15” handles allow me to go down and come back up with full range of motion as the ends of the handles just barely touch. If these handles were longer, I’m going to have to hold my arms out further to compensate for the length, meaning I won’t be able to employ the full range of motion in the exercise, which can be counterproductive to what I’m trying to accomplish. I can turn my hands at the top of the press, but then I’d be changing the exercise, which may not be what I’d want to do.
But since the loadable surface of the 15” handle is so small, how much weight can we logically load on the handle? Well, this is larely going to depend on the type of plates and collars that you use. Here in my gym, I have some cheap no-name iron plates and exclusively use the Rogue Fitness aluminum collars. With this, I’m able to load two 10 lb plates and a 5 lb plate on each side for a total of 58 lbs with the weight of the bar. This setup does not fully seat on the sleeves and leaves a few millimeters of overhang.
In terms of actual use, I find that the diameter of my 10 lbs plates make them very usable. I personally wouldn’t go any wider so I won’t be using 25 lb plates or larger.
Overall, I’m fine with my decision to go with these 15” reloadable handles. I think getting a longer handle would be more cumbersome than it’s worth so this is just about the best that I can get. However, I would say that having more loading space would be nice and Titan could easily achieve this by making the gripping area narrower and dedicating more space to the sleeves. 6.5” for the gripping area just seems wasteful as relatively few people are going to be able to fully utilize all that space. With my plates and had these sleeves been a centimeter longer, I could’ve gotten away with (3) 10 lb plates and that would’ve been more ideal. But, it is what it is. I’ll put these to good use until I’m able to get my own dumbbell rack one day.
If you're considering buying any of the products mentioned, please support my work by using the links below.
Titan Fitness Pair 15in Loadable Olympic Dumbbell https://amzn.to/3EebMAW
Titan Fitness Single 15in Loadable Olympic Dumbbell https://amzn.to/3XyY3vg
Titan Fitness Pair 20in Loadable Olympic Dumbbell https://amzn.to/3SaRaiD
Titan Fitness Single 36in Loadable Olympic Dumbbell https://amzn.to/3YSD1J1
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