Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat Review – 2026

Last updated on January 5th, 2026 at 07:22 pm

Belt Squats have been all the rage for awhile. It makes sense, they are basically a better Leg Press in terms of space saving, leg development, and carry over to building the squat. Not to mention, they cost much less. All reasons why home gym owners have been looking at them over and over and over. The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat has a fairly sizeable load potential, comes in a compact and moveable frame, and is potentially the solution to your belt squat needs.

I’ve had it in my gym for the past several months, and I’m going to share my thoughts here today.

Transparency Note

The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat was sent to me for free for sake of review and testing in my Adjustable Bench Showdown project. I do not have an affiliate link or any additional relationships with the team.

Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat Overview

Most belt squats come in a couple of form factors. They are either dedicated machines, like the Rogue Rhino. Or they come in a rack attached version like the REP Belt Squat. The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat kind of blends these two by leveraging the same platform piece they use for their lateral raise machine and leg developer. This means we get wheels, a portable platform that can go anywhere in your gym, even store away, and it breaks down. It also means that we aren’t forced to eat up part of our rack or dedicate real estate to it.

Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat Specs

• Brand: Gentleman Fitness Club
• Made In USA: No
• Dimensions:
• Recommended Weight Capacity: 400kg
• Weight:
• Assembly: Around 30 minutes

Shipping & Assembly

The team isn’t fully set up for US operations yet, so this isn’t something I feel like I can fully comment on. The products were packaged well, but instructions weren’t very clear. They weren’t even in English. And shipping required me to pay an import fee. Assembly was FAIRLY straight forward.

Again, I’d wait until they officially have operations in the US running to make any kind of final verdict here.

What Makes A Good Belt Squat?

I’ve talked to a LOT of companies over the years about belt squats. As someone who has tried rigging them up with a number of solutions including cable towers, loading pins, landmines, and more, I have my fair share of experience with trying to get after it in a home gym with a non-traditional belt squat.

There are THREE key items to address.

1 – We need to be able to hit full range of motion, mostly focusing on depth. Because we are using this to build our legs, we should probably be going through a full range of motion and hitting DEEP squats. A lot of lever based and cable based belt squats struggle here.

2 – We need to be able to get enough resistance without having to load every 45lb plate we own. I’m not interested in loading up 3 racks of plates to hit a sub-par set of 10 reps. I might as well just squat.

3 – We need to have a solid starting position. Many belt squats suffer from starting in the bottom of a squat. Since you can awkwardly stand up with quite a bit less weight than you can squat, this is a poor solution for taxing the legs effectively.

There are a few other items like keeping a good balance (some pull you forward), and having the movement FEEL correctly (more subjective than objective). And ideally it doesn’t take me 45 minutes to get set up. But the top three items are in my opinion requirements for a passable belt squat solution. If any of these isn’t met, then I’ll kick it to the curb.

If a belt squat can nail all three, we might be in business.

Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat Features

The lever arm on this thing is fairly long. This is good. The shorter it is, similar to the Freak Athlete Hyper Pro Belt Squat Solution, the more the weight will travel in an arc instead of just up and down. That means we’ll need more plates to feel it, it also means we’ll likely struggle to get a good range of motion, and it’ll pull us forward more. So the long lever on the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat is a good start.

The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat comes with some STOUT weight horns. You can see them FULLY loaded here with all my 45s. Keep in mind that I have deep dish plates. If you have something thinner, you’ll be able to load up even more. It claims a 400kg weight limit, which is pretty massive.

It has a kickstand to address the starting position issues. This allows you to have the belt squat up off the ground to start, but it can fold under itself when in use so you can still get full range of motion.

So on paper, we might be checking all the boxes.

Aesthetics and Finishing Touches

The machine comes with some unique finishing touches like the G cut out of the weight horn. The included belt squat belt is far from anything I would recommend, but it is serviceable at first. If you plan to make this a regular part of your training, I’d look into the Spud Inc Pillow Belt Squat.

The hitch pins, powder coat, and various details on the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat are more than adequate. They won’t win any awards, but we are mostly dealing with a budget and compact piece, not a high end professional belt squat.

Storage

The base is the same base they use for the Leg Developer and other attachments. The way the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat works, you almost can’t use the platform wheels the same way as I did with the Leg Developer though. You need to take the belt squat off the platform, put that away, and take the platform and put that away.

Because the belt squat has the very wide weight horns, the kick stand, and the pivot point, it isn’t easy to move around or store away. If these came off easily in some kind of attachment process, this would level this up immensely. As is, I struggled to find a home for this that wasn’t in the way.

The only other note here, is that the end caps on the base can fall off in transit. This is a common fault of plastic end caps compared to fully welded ones.

Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat Performance

Out the gate we have some of the same issues as the Leg Developer. The base holds the unit down, but when fully loaded we have a lot of movement. It doesn’t fully impact the performance of the exercise, just something to note.

Full Range Of Motion

We get a pretty valid passing score here, especially since I used their included belt. If I had used anything that had multiple adjustment points, this would have been a Solid A+. We can see in the photo above that I am able to get below parallel, and I probably had a LITTLE more range of motion that I could have taken if I wanted it.

Nothing is going to be as good as a solution as the Rogue Rhino, where the pulley is built into the platform, meaning you can get ALL the way to the ground without running out of room. But again, I managed this range of motion with a subpar belt. So I’m going to go ahead and say the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat is good to go on the range of motion test.

Resistance

Plate loaded machine are tough for bigger individuals, because you commonly need to load a LOT of plates. The lever arm for the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat is fairly long, so we don’t have a lot of loss in resistance in terms of the arching movement. But that said, this was 630lbs and I managed a set of 10 reps. Now that was a REALLY nasty set of 10, but still, 10 reps. If this was a regular piece to the puzzle in my training, I could see me easily surpassing this weight with higher reps.

So this is going to be a C grade. If you are a lighter athlete and don’t plan to push this hard and move this much weight, you can probably get away with the Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat without having to load every 45lb plate in your gym. For me, loading more than a dozen 45s and having to tap into my hundos eventually, would likely send me down a path of avoiding doing this entirely. And since there is a good chance I could only fit another 100lbs or so on here, even with my hundos in play, I might be out of room to progress without making changes to my plate offerings.

The Starting Position

This one is where we run into problems. The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat has a kick stand, which is awesome. BUT, that kickstand isn’t tall enough. The starting position still has you getting into a very awkward low squat position, shaking and shimmying into position, and then standing up with the weight.

It is BY FAR better than starting on the floor, or having to rig up some kind of chain solution, but it isn’t quite where we need it to be. This isn’t quite an F grade, but a D is probably correct. Solid attempt, but it falls short of the goal.

Should You Buy The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat?

This was so close. Set-up was fairly easy, but storage wasn’t well executed. We were able to get a full range of motion, but the starting position was lacking. And while we had room for a lot of plates, it still probably wasn’t ideal for larger lifters.

The good news is, I’ve been told that they are working on a V2. I think we’ll see some additional tweaks and additions to make this a MUCH more viable option.

In the meantime, I’m not sure I would jump on this. Wait for the V2, see what they got cooking, and go for that.

Other Options On The Market

There are a number of lever based belt squat options. I’d probably lean towards getting something that you can add the PorterPhysEd TNT HellBox and Squat Handle. This is going to give you better balance with an adjustable handle to hold onto, and level up your Belt Squat solution.

Wrap Up

The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat is a unique idea. I can see why you would want a non-rack attached solution, as my rack has continued to get busier and busier lately. But it needs to solve for a few more issues before we really can consider this a viable option.

💲Want to buy the The Gentleman Fitness Compact Belt Squat? Use this link.