How much does a barbell weigh?

A men’s Olympic barbell weighs 20 kg, which is 44 lb. A women’s Olympic barbell weighs 15 kg, or 33 lb. Those two are set by federation rules and are the same in every gym that owns a real one.

Every other bar in the building is a manufacturer’s decision rather than a standard, and the honest answer for a trap bar, an EZ bar or a Smith machine is a range rather than a number.

People use the two interchangeably and they are not the same bar. A 20 kg bar converts to 44.1 lb. A bar actually built to 45 lb weighs 20.4 kg. The gap is 0.4 kg, which is smaller than the smallest pair of plates most gyms own, so it will never change how a session feels.

It does change a logbook. If you train in kilograms on a bar sold in pounds, every single lift you record is 0.4 kg heavier than you wrote down, and a competition bar will feel very slightly lighter than what you have been training on.

The clips holding the plates on are usually spring collars weighing a few hundred grams, and they are ignored by everyone including the people who made them.

Competition collars are different: up to 2.5 kg each, so 5 kg for the pair. A competition bar loaded with collars starts at 25 kg, not 20. If you are working out what to load for an opener, that 5 kg is the difference between the right weight and a weight you have never lifted.

The barbell plate calculator lets you set the bar to 25 kg for exactly this reason, and then works out the plates around it.

Nobody can tell you from a web page, and anyone who gives you a single number is guessing. A Smith machine bar runs on rails and is usually counterbalanced, so what you feel is the bar minus the counterweight, which is a design choice that differs between machines in the same chain of gyms.

The felt weight is commonly somewhere between 5 and 20 kg, and on some machines it is close to nothing. There is one reliable way to find out on your machine:

1. Hang a luggage scale or a hook scale from the empty bar and lift it off the catches. What it reads is your answer.
2. If you have no scale, load the bar until it just balances against a known free weight setup you can already compare with. Crude, but better than assuming 20 kg.
3. Write the number on your phone. It will not change, and you will need it every time you log a Smith machine lift.

Until you know it, do not compare Smith machine numbers with barbell numbers. They are measuring different things.

Because it is a fixed cost paid on every set, and it weighs more than most people’s first few plates. Someone benching 60 kg is lifting 20 kg of steel and 40 kg of plates, so the bar is a third of the lift. Forget it and their logbook is out by 50%.

It also decides what is loadable at all. Every total you can build has to be the bar plus an even split of plates across two ends, which is why what to load for a given weight is arithmetic rather than a guess, and why some numbers on a programme simply cannot be made with the plates in front of you.

If the number you are chasing came from a percentage of your max, the one rep max calculator gives every training percentage with the plates for each, and the DOTS calculator scores the resulting total against your bodyweight.