Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar – The MOST Expensive Multi Grip Bar – 2024 Review

Last updated on July 13th, 2024 at 11:00 am

Intek has been a longstanding producer of awesome equipment, but gets left out of the discussion a lot. Their new multi-grip bar arrived and I’ve spent close to a full year tossing it in and out of my workouts and I am excited to share my feedback. I’ll put it up against the Kabuki Kadillac Bar, my long time favorite Edge Fitness Systems Football Bar, and compare to the other offerings on the market today. The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is the MOST EXPENSIVE Multi Grip bar on the market, will it be the best?

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Transparency Note

I’m a big fan of an hourglass figure, but I’ve never taken one for a ride in barbell form before. So when Intek offered to send me this bar for a review, I was pretty excited. I don’t have an affiliate or anything, they aren’t paying me anywhere, just a free bar for me to take on a ride and share my thoughts with all of you.

Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar Video Review

Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar Overview

Intek certainly isn’t the first to make a multi grip bar with a cut-out for your head. There was a company called Reps Direct that made one years ago. This bar was popular on the old BodyBuilding.com Equipment Forums as it had a lot of awesome features. You had customization options, knurling, rotating sleeves, etc. Then you had the T-Grip Barbell as well, which was sold by American Barbell. The number of people who have owned this and still claim it to be the BEST multi grip bar, is staggering.

Unfortunately, neither of those are available anymore.

You’ve got a TON of options for multi grip bars, cambered multi grip bars, you name it… but if you want a multi grip barbell with this similar shape and design, Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is the only current option I could find. So let’s dig into why you might want to consider it, what else they have that makes this bar special, and ultimately what I think of this bar, so you can decide if it is the right decision for your home gym, or not.

Who Is Intek Strength?

Intek is a company that PRIMARILY focuses on producing equipment meant for High Schools, Colleges, and professional sports teams’ gyms… making some of the finest Bumpers, Iron Plates, Bars and dumbbells available. Their KRAFT Steel and DELTA Series dumbbells are my holy grail dumbbell set. Made in the USA, unbelievable aesthetics, and the most important piece is the self leveling logo. Something you never knew you needed, but now it will haunt your dreams.

But we are getting distracted… today, we are talking about the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar.

Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar Overview Specs

• Brand: Intek Strength
• Made In USA: Yes
• Dimensions: 6ft 7inches in length
• Weight: 42 lbs
• Weight Capacity: 500 lbs
• Knurling: Yes
• Finish: Black powder coat throughout
• Assembly: none

This bar is made in the USA, clocks in at 42lbs and 79.24” long, so it is a bit shorter and lighter than a traditional power bar. It has standard Olympic sized sleeves so your normal collars will work. It has a 500lb weight capacity. Since it is a bench and press bar, 500lb is likely enough for all but the strongest athletes on the planet.

The bar is fully welded with a black powder coat finish. The bar has two neutral grip handles, and a single close grip angled handle, which are all knurled. The knurling, like on most powder coated bars, is sufficient. It won’t win any awards, it’ll leave those looking for a BITE left unsatisfied, but it is far from the smooth powder coat finishes we might be accustomed to with similarly finished bars.

Why A Multi Grip Bar?

One of the original purposes for a multi grip bar, was to alleviate shoulder strain. The angled/neutral handles allowed less demands on the shoulder, often increased triceps activation, and ultimately led to a more friendly bench press variation.

In recent years the VAST majority of multi grip bars came out with a camber to them, kick started by Kabuki with the Kadilac bar. These provided a couple of potential benefits.

First being extended range of motion. More range, means more strength and hypertrophy development potential. Second, these bars had incredible balance. By having your hands sit higher than the weights themselves, we let gravity and physics do their thing and this alleviates the balancing issues of a traditional multi grip bar.

After a number of discussions between Intek and their strength coaches, a lot of them said they’d never have their athletes use a cambered bar for bench. The extra range of motion serves little to no purpose for a baseball player, football player, or athlete in general. And the potential for a tear can end a career. BUT they really wanted that shoulder friendly pressing option, paired with the perfect balance they achieved.

So Intek went to work.

Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar Performance

Looking at the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar quickly, you might miss a couple hidden gems here in the handles. What Intek has done, since they didn’t go with the camber, is offset the handles from the center of the bar. If you look closely, you can see that they are set UP inside the hourglass frame here, which means the weight is slightly below your hands when pressing, giving us the same balancing effect as the cambered bars WITHOUT the need for the actual camber.

The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar has a MUCH needed addition for the wide body multi grip bar, the ring marks onto the handles. These help you identify the center, which can be difficult with the wider multi grip bars.

In use, it took me a few sets to get the feel of this bar. Because you have to find the right placement for your hands on the rings, your first set might be lopsided forward, the second backwards, but eventually you’ll find that right dead center feel for your own movement pattern. And since it is marked, you can repeat it every single time. I went from, “I’m not sure about this” to “oh, that’s pretty damn good” before the end of the first workout.

Overhead Press

The cut-out of the hourglass figure itself means we can effectively use this bar for overhead press without it feeling like you are always just a slight misstep away from clocking your chin. Your head sits perfectly inside this space, allowing you to keep that bar close, avoid the chin and nose, and keep a straight bar path. This makes for a stronger position, and in my experience a happier shoulder. The first time I used the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar for overhead presses, I texted my guy at Intek to tell him how good it felt. Legit, just a very nice experience here for those that enjoy overhead pressing.

Bench Press

For bench, I found the range of motion here to be much more shoulder and pec insertion friendly. That extended ROM from the Kadi was never my favorite. This feels right. Having your hands slightly up paired with the bigger body of the Intek bar definitely adds to reducing the ROM even more, potentially even making this a reduced ROM compared to a traditional power bar.

And if you need to go the extra mile and REALLY take the tension off the shoulders, Intek has this add-on pad you can toss on that works like a board press. Overall, the bar balances well, reduces that ROM and strain, and achieves what Intek set out to do.

A couple additional wins for the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar

If you wanted to go from close grip to wide grip on the Kadi, you had to adjust the j-cups because of the distance change. That isn’t a factor here, so if you like to set up for regular grip, then close grip in subsequent sets, this is a good choice.

The lack of camber also adds to the balance of the bar inside the rack. The Kadi and most cambered type bars are known for rolling on you in the j-cups. The Intek bar doesn’t do this.

If you’ve read my Kadi review, you know it did some damage to my Mutant Metals Snap Back Rollers because of how wide it was and the aggressive powder coat. The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is still a bit wide on the frame, but because the powder coat isn’t so over the top, paired with the tapered ends, we get a little more love… so my Snap Backs are happy.

The Not So Good of the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar

Ok, so the overall performance of the bar is good. It fits well in the rack, sits well in the hands, and overhead presses like a dream. What are the downsides?

First, we have a few choices that don’t align with the bigger boys on the market today. REP Fitness, the Kadi, the MG4C, and the vast majority of high end multi grip bars today have machined sleeves. So, you get the ability for a nice end cap, the smooth sliding on and off of plates, you name it.

The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is powder coated, much like my older Edge Fitness Systems Football bar was. I can state that Intek’s powder coat is better than the likes of Rogue, who can’t seem to figure out how to powder coat a specialty bar… but it leaves a little to be desired amongst its peers. You can see it has some wear and tear already, and will likely continue to alter over the years.

Take a look at the end cap, instead of a more traditional polished end cap, we have a rubber end. This is nice if you store your bars in a multi bar vertical storage, because you don’t need rubber pads. But again, from a polished aesthetic stance, it isn’t exactly what I’d expect.

The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar has the one angled close grip handle… I never used it. It felt too close for anything I wanted to do. So ultimately, you have two neutral handles, unless you plan to do curls with this bar.

The Price

Which takes me to the price. The Kabuki Kadi from Rogue is $495 right now, the MG4C is going to land somewhere in the $500 range depending on the number of handles you buy. The REP Fitness Cambered Swiss Bar is $290, with the Bells of Steel Arch Nemesis clocking in at $200.

The Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar clocks in at a whopping $575, making it the most expensive of the options on the market. So you are forgoing some of the finer design details on the sleeves, arguably buying a less labor intensive design to build, and still spending more money on the bar, which is a hard sell.

Wrap Up

The bars above aren’t all created equal, some have angled handles, some have straight handles, some are cambered, you name it.

My Edge bar was a football bar, so was my Kadi. I liked angled handles. I also like the neutral handles of the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar. So I’m not positive that one is better than the other. In theory, the neutral should be more shoulder friendly than the angled. But at the end of the day, I think we are arguing over something that likely doesn’t translate to much difference.

There are a lot of people who really enjoy a cambered multi grip bar. If you do, the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar obviously isn’t the right bar for you. That extra ROM is going to be missing. There are a couple of bars that achieve a similar improved balance effect, but none are doing everything that the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is doing.

If you are willing to look past the aesthetics of the sleeves, to grab a multi grip bar that performs exceptionally well, is American made, on purpose does NOT have the extended ROM of a cambered bar… the Intek Strength Neutral Grip Bar is a great performing bar and possibly the only solid option on the market that ticks all of those boxes. You are unfortunately going to pay for it.

I’ll leave ya with this… I sold both my Edge Fitness Football bar and Kabuki Kadillac Bar, in favor of keeping this bar for my go-to multi grip bar.

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