Best Weight Plates for Home Gym (Types & Why)

hey guys welcome back gluck here today we're going to talk about the various types of plates we're going to go over traditional plates whether they're machined or milled or coated in urethane and we'll go over your rubber base plates which are like your urethane or it could be recycled or a virgin rubber that is your bumper plates all right we're going to try to make this one quick because it is freezing in this garage jim we're going to start with um metal base plates so within metal based plates there's obviously tears you're going to have a cast iron plate that's what you would see in most gyms especially home gyms and then from there you can have a machined plate like these rogue deep dish or you can have it in case plate this one is encased in urethane or you can even have a calibrated plate which is normally steel so with cast plates the process is generally you take molten liquid you pour it into a cast it sits in that cast until it's cured it comes out they put a coating on it the nice thing about that is that makes them cheap because there's not a whole lot to that process cast it weight and coat it because of that process their weight tolerance can be all over the place so i've had 45 pound plates that weigh 41 pounds or 50 pounds um and that's obviously not really acceptable when you're loading a lot of plates on the bar and pretty much every company is going to make a version of these so i used to have a full set of rep fitness iron plates and i disliked them so much i sold them i have an unboxing video of it i used them for a few months but their quality was all over the place and their finish is all over the place sometimes it was semi-gloss sometimes it was gloss you know my tens didn't look like my 25s so eventually i decided to get rid of them and i kind of upgraded so rogue has cast iron plates capped has cast iron plates pretty much every company is going to have a variation of that same thing cast iron plates are normally within three percent of their stated weight if the company will guarantee that number at all now these are your cheapest option but if you're able to afford a little bit more i might jump to what i would say is the next tier which would be a machined plate now machine plates to me are maybe not my number one option i have much like you a bit of a hodgepodge mess of plates i have different plates for different reasons sometimes it's all i could get so what you're getting with a machine plate it's the same process to begin with you're still casting the iron but then later on you're gonna have a cnc machine come and mill whatever section the company wants so for these for example you're getting the the lip the back and the inside and that's going to remove any imperfections so you're getting in general a better plate now when i have cast iron plates like this one sometimes because the process is so short they cast it and then leave it you're gonna end up with imperfections but i've had ones where the imperfection is on the inside of the sleeve and then it's really scratching up my bar because they're machined you're also getting a lot more uniformity that is my plates all pretty much look and feel exactly the same and your milling can be almost glass-like like these rogue deep dish that they're making now and i have an unboxing video of or these are my old york milled plates and these you can actually see the milling marks and it's kind of a nice classic touch because of the process that a machine plate goes through you're normally going to get a better weight tolerance typically within two percent of their stated weight rather than the three percent of the cast iron or as an example of these rogue deep dish it's zero percent and then plus two percent and what that means is it will never be under 45 pounds but it could be up to two percent over 45 pounds and just like with cast iron plates there's a lot of companies that make machine plates rogue's going to have their deep dish line and then their machined line rep has their equalizers i own and have done an unboxing of the york legacies and you have ivanko and the list goes on all those that i've mentioned are an upgrade from a cast iron it's kind of up to you based on your wants and needs which one you're going to pick or if you have a preference so our third option would be an encase plate which is going to be something like this would you shut up back there okay take two another option would be an encased plate so an encase plate is just an iron plate and then they encase it in a material that materials need to be a rubber or urethane so with a rubber plate what you're going to get is it's going to be a little cheaper but the problem with rubber they mar they mark up easily the plate themselves and anything they touch i have marks on my platform from my rubber dumbbells as i slid them now you get that black mark that you've gotta grind out for some people if you're in a basement or a small space that rubber can smell if it's a recycled rubber that they're putting on there from there you can go to a urethane plate urethane is still rubber but it's going to be a thinner coating and it's also a more durable product it's not going to scratch itself or anything else as easily why do we want an encased plate the nice thing about these you don't have to maintain them since they're coated in something you can basically just ignore them for their life and that encasement gives them a little protection so they're a little more durable urethane also has no smell to it i can't even read my own nose you guys thought i was doing this from memory i should mention that just because this has rubber or urethane on it these are not bumper plates you can throw them around a little bit but that's not what they're designed for if you're going for an olympic lift you'd probably have to look for a bumper so your highest tier of metal plate would be a calibrated or a competition plate as you can see here just kidding i spent all my money on the rest of my garage gym so i can't afford those right familiar faces how those work is you're going to be calibrated within plus or minus 10 grams of the stated weight they're a machined plate they normally have a brass plug that they put in to get that weight exactly or within 10 grams of its stated weight the idea behind a calibrator or competition plate is essentially you want to practice like you play if you're a competitive lifter you want to be working with what you'd be lifting in a meet so you get as close to as possible because of their machining process and the quality control these things are expensive everything's gonna be milled down to exactly what it's supposed to be so you're gonna have the opening for the sleeve milled down to about 50 millimeters and they're gonna run to ipf or iwf standards again so these can be used in a competition the nice thing about them well pretty much everything is that they are thinner so you can fit more of them on the bar unfortunately most companies only make them in kilograms because that's what competitions are based in the rogue does have a pound version when it comes to shape maybe this is an oversimplification but there are a lot of things to worry about this more octagonal i didn't actually count maybe that's 12 sided not important shape versus a cylindrical shape now personally if you've ever deadlifted with this shape you will hate your life because that bar will roll back into your shins and it's absolutely terrible that is unless your bumper is big enough to cover it up also when it comes to shape some of these have handles rep equalizers and other ones will have handles cut into them and that makes them very easy to lift versus your typical non-deep dish plate which obviously this is very easy to lift because of its shape when i had my rep 45s they were actually bigger than my bumper plates which were also from rep and i hated them because loading them on and off was a pain in the butt because all the plates were different sizes another reason i sold it another factor people don't really talk about is the bevel so on these plates let's say for example you're somebody i work out with and you do this all the time try picking up this milled plate with no bevel it is a lot of fun especially if you just dead lifted or something else uh when it's on the ground you're trying to pick this up and you're tired you're going to hate yourself unless you want to do this all the time i hope in this video you can slowly see my regression as i get colder and colder and try to make it through this video so that leaves us bumper plates when you get into bumper plates there's basically four tiers you have a technique plate which is a plastic base plate that doesn't really go above 10 pounds i don't find them necessary for a home gym you could probably just use 10-pound bumpers if you need to then you have a traditional bumper plate which is what we're all used to and you have a training plate and a competition plate so competition bumpers are just like a competition steel plate the only difference between that and a training plate training plate is the same idea as a competition plate but it's not going to be quite as precise your quality control doesn't have to be as perfect making them a little bit cheaper but still incredibly quality plates so then the question is why use a bumper plate well if you're a crossfitter or you're doing a lot of olympic lifts or you need to stay quiet a bumper plate can make sense that rubber is going to absorb some of that sound as they're banging together you don't hear that as it hits the ground and if you need to drop them it's going to save your bar and it's going to save your floor now traditionally they're a little more expensive than your iron plates at least your cheap iron plates when you start getting a fancy machined plates and calibrated plates obviously they're not going to be any any cheaper but if you're taking base to base they are more expensive than a typical plate one of the issues i sometimes have with bumpers is the tens since they're so small and so thin they tend to wear away really fast they crack and they break much easier than others so on the lowest tier you'd have a crumb rubber bumper and that would be like a rogue us mill spec or rogue high temp or a rep color bumper now i've actually owned all three of those i thought they were really high quality especially based on their cost i used some of them for years i did eventually sell my rep color bumpers because i upgraded to these rogue urethanes so the problem with crumb rubber or recycled rubber essentially it's just chewed up tires broken down into crumb like shape and then melted back into that rubber shape of your bumper is for some people especially if your confined space they can smell and that's because of the bonding agent they use that smell typically is based on the quality a higher quality bonding agent's not going to smell as bad as a cheaper bumper could from there your next tier up a bumper would be a virgin rubber which i'm sure there's a lot of jokes in there but i'll do my best at avoiding them and that would be something like a fringe sport and the only difference with a virgin rubber if you couldn't figure that on your own is obviously it hasn't been used before and that just sounds wrong and the next tier up from that would be a urethane artistically roll it in that took like six takes so the nice thing about urethane they're gonna be thinner because you don't need as much material to get that coating on there it's just a higher quality rubber they don't they don't bounce as much actually this plate has pretty close to a dead bounce and because of how urethane works is there's no smell though they do cost a good amount more because of the process and again the quality of the material they're also near indestructible they don't nick and mar up as easily as a rubber plate would one of the things i should mention is a difference in thickness some bumpers can go up to four inches thick versus your typical cast iron plate which is going to be much thinner if you guys enjoyed this video please like and subscribe i am frozen i am going inside thank you i guess through this i'm getting cold

Channel: Gluck's Gym

Views: 62,901

Rating: 4.9598932 out of 5

Keywords: Weight Plates for Home Gym, best weight plates for home gym, plates for home gym, plates for garage gym, home gym, garage gym, bumper plates, rogue fitness, rep fitness, bodybuilding, powerlifting, crossfit, best plates, weight plates, olympic plates, home gym equipment, gym equipment, home gym setup, garage gym essentials, home gym ideas, home gym equipment for beginners, ggym, glucks gym, gluck's gym

Id: QA5fDDMPiLM

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020