What’s going on guys? It’s Hai.
I recently sold off a bunch of stuff from my home gym, including all my iron Olympic plates. For these plates, I went with cheap irons that I found on OfferUp. Well, I quickly regretted that decision because those plates were just complete crap. But luckily, I was able to sell all the plates and to replace them this time around, I knew it was time to upgrade.
Now, I personally have always wanted bumper plates. I don’t do any Olympic lifts and the most plate dropping that I do is from barbell rows and deadlifts so it’s not like I need bumper plates. However, I just personally love the look and feel of them. What’s always turned me away from buying them was the price because they are typically much more expensive. Well, after some research, I came across Giant Lifting which happens to be a local fitness equipment manufacturer. Giant offers bumper plates and after some comparisons, it turns out that Giant offered some of the cheapest bumper plates for me. Again, they are local and I could just drive to their storefront for a free pickup. Potentially saving hundreds of dollars on shipping costs.
Giant offers a few different types of plates but in terms of bumpers, they offer crumb bumpers and virgin rubber bumpers. I personally was going to buy their contrast bumpers but the day that I went to the Giant warehouse, they released a brand new set of colored virgin rubber bumpers. From my understanding, these colored bumpers are going to offer nearly identical performance to the Giant Contrast Bumper Plates. Both are the same in dimensions, both have a weight tolerance of +/- 3% of said weight, and both are facility tested with 10,000 drops at 8ft.
All that being said, when I saw the colored plates, I just had to buy them because colored bumpers are my favorite form of bumpers. Again, it’s not like the colored bumpers are better. They just offer easier identification. But to me, colored bumpers just really add a pop of perceived quality to any gym and it’s what I’ve always wanted.
Now, I want to make it clear that I just got these bumpers and have only played around with them for a bit. I haven’t done any serious lifting with them so I can’t necessarily speak on quality or use life expectancy. I can only tell you that they look and feel really good in the hand. These are some badass plates for the price.
For me personally, a concern that I have with bumper plates, in general, is that they are typically thicker than iron plates. This means that you will be able to load fewer plates onto a bar. But a nice thing about these colored bumper plates is that they’re thinner than some other bumper plates in the market. We tested the plates out in the showroom and from what I saw, you can comfortably fit 5 of these colored 45lbs bumper plates on a bar and still fit a flip collar clamp. So, if you are lifting up to around 500 lbs and maybe some small change, these bumper plates are good to go.
Something to note is that with these colored bumpers, the 10 and 15-lb plates are 5mm smaller in diameter than the 25, 35, and 45-lb plates. This is because, typically, when all bumper weight plates are made to have the same diameter, as you load up the bar, as things get heavy, and as you start dropping the plates, because the 10 and 15-lb plates are thinner, they’re going to absorb a lot of the impact force. With these 10 and 15-lb plates being slightly smaller, they absorb less impact force and should last longer.
And that’s about it for now. I’ll be using these plates every time that I lift from now on so I’ll be able to get a lot of time in with them pretty quick. The only minor complaint that I have is that Giant currently doesn’t have a matching set of change plates so I had to purchase their Grip-X Change Plates which are essentially smaller versions of their Contrast Bumper Plates. These plates don’t aesthetically match the colored plates but that’s purely a complaint on aesthetics, not function. Hopefully, there will be some matching change plates in the future but other than that, I’m pretty happy with this purchase. The plates look great and I’m already thinking of picking up more if they perform as they should along with a few other things because Giant seems to be putting out some good quality equipment for an affordable price.
