Review:”The Iron Gym”

Santa Claus apparently is aware of my current fitness fetish, and graced me with one of the much-ballyhood, infomercial-promoted “Iron Gym” units. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a chin-up bar that you can hook to a doorframe and take down without any permanent mounting hardware.

Now, if you buy it off the infomercial, they’re going to up-sell you on so much crap and shipping costs that you’re going to spend $70 by the time you’re done. On the other hand, you can hit your local Wal-Mart, CVS, or Walgreen’s and pick one up for under $30. You don’t get the ab straps, you don’t get the extensions, and you don’t get the longer bar, but what do you get?

Yep, a solid chin-up bar for less than $30.

So I’ve been using this for the past couple of months. At first blush, I had to laugh, because the infomercials advertise how you’ll get a “ripped, muscular physique” using the Iron Gym. When you pull out the brochure included with the product, the very first page is five diet tips, and then one tip to tell you to do the exercises included in the brochure to build muscle.

Yep. Basically, I could sell a bronzed Nike tennis shoe and sell it as The Iron Shoe, and successfully claim that you can get a ripped, lean physique by following these five diet tips and holding this shoe up in the air for 10 minutes every day. And I’d be right. It’s the diet that makes your abs show up. All it takes is a low body fat percentage. No device will make them show through 20% body fat.

But I digress.

Anyway, if you are in need of a chin-up bar, the Iron Gym does the trick. I could do two consecutive chin-ups in January, and now I can do six. Then take a break, come back, and do six again. After several sets, eventually I fatigue the muscle enough that I can’t do at least four, and I call it done for the day. My eventual goal is to be able to crank through twenty chin-ups without stopping, and twenty pull-ups without stopping so that I can be that guy who cranks out the chin-ups and is ready for more.

I’ve done some ab work hanging from it, and am tempted by the ab straps to make those easier with less strain on my hands and shoulders. My ab workouts have reached the point that I need to do leg lifts, and doing so from a hanging or dip position gives much more resistance than doing leg lifts on the floor. My only difficulty is preventing my body from swinging, and I bet that the hanging straps — or some DIY solution, since I’m too cheap to lay out the 10 bucks to order them — would help prevent the swings.

Push-ups? Sure, it works fine, and I don’t get the pain I usually get in my left wrist after a set using this instead of flat-on-floor pushups. Extra star since this works as advertised, and if you really want to do hard-core incline chest exercises to rip the pectoralis major muscle, put your feet up on a chair.

Dips? Yeah, the Iron Gym sucks for dips. Get yourself a chair instead, it works better with a much better range of motion.

Sit-ups? My couch does a much better job at holding my feet down.

But for a chin-up bar that you don’t need to permanently mount and that doesn’t damage your house, it does a great job. I store it in the laundry room, hang it from the bathroom door frame for my chin-ups, then remove it when I’m done. It’s convenient, takes little space, gives me a nice upper-body workout when I can’t get to a gym, travels easily, and is worth the $30 for those features alone. I like the multiple grip positions; in particular, the two perpendicular bars seem to really help me chin-up without additional aggravation to my delicate rotator cuff.

The reality is, you could go to the hardware store and pick up some spare pipe and mounting hardware for $5 to install a chin-up bar in your house that will give you equal benefit. The Iron Gym’s real benefits are portability, ease of use, and convenience with a chin-up bar that isn’t an eyesore when it’s not in use. Plus it doesn’t scratch the doorframe; nobody needs to have any idea that I use the bathroom door-frame for home workouts.

I give it four stars out of five. It only loses the one star because the infomercial exaggerates its benefits; you need to diet to get a ripped, lean physique, and some of the exercises they tout on the infomercial simply don’t work as well as they let on. The Iron Gym helps with the upper-body workout, works as advertised for chin-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups, but won’t get you there by itself. And particularly it won’t get you there if you don’t use it.

If you’re in need of a home chin-up bar and will use it, go pick one up today. If it’s going to gather dust in the garage, or if you have space to mount a chin-up bar permanently in your house, give it a pass.

–Matt B.