With that in mind, I recently paid Death Grip Strength Tools to build me something deeply unreasonable. A true three-inch diameter barbell with no knurling, no helpful ridges, and zero interest in being comfortable. It is cold, smooth steel and looks almost comic until you try to lift it. Then the joke turns on you.
The first time I deadlifted it, I knew I had made a good decision and a bad decision at exactly the same time. My forearms lit up, although not in the familiar way. This was my hands suddenly realising they had been overpromoted. My thumb became decorative (a line I stole from a strongman), my fingers spread wide, and the bar sat there as if it had no intention of being held. I have lifted on thick bars before, but three inches is different. It feels less like pressing a barbell and more like negotiating with a greased lamppost. Naturally, I love it.
As far as I can tell, this is one of the thickest working barbells currently in use. Maybe the thickest. I am happy to be corrected because, frankly, I would love to know what other lunatics are building. The size is fun, but the real interest is what this bar opens up. Thick grip work is one entry point into a much older world of odd lifts, challenge objects, homemade equipment, strength performances, and public tests designed to make difficulty obvious to anyone watching.
That last point is important. Modern strength sport often needs explanation. A good lift may depend on federation rules, bodyweight, equipment standards, whether a pause was long enough, whether the plates were calibrated, whether the lifter was drug tested, whether the jerk was locked out, whether the deadlift hitched, and so on. I enjoy all of that because I am a nerd and cannot be helped. But old strength performances often worked best when the object explained the problem immediately. A thick bar does this beautifully. The hand does not close. The fingers cannot settle. The audience understands the problem before the lifter moves.
The What
The inspiration for my new toy is the Suicide Milo, a barbell made famous in 1938 by the South African physical culturist and weightlifter C.G. Pillay. I wrote about it years ago on Physical Culture Study after finding a reference to it in The Superman magazine from December 1938. The bar has been described as probably the thickest barbell ever used by a strongman. It measured three inches in diameter, which puts it beyond the famous Inch Dumbbell and well beyond Apollon’s axle.
To put that in context, the Inch Dumbbell is usually discussed with a handle around two and three eighths inches, sometimes given slightly differently depending on the source. The Apollon Wheels axle comes in just shy of two inches. Anyone who has trained grip knows those are already horrible sizes. Three inches is another kind of nonsense.
Pillay himself makes the story better. He was around five feet seven inches tall, weighed roughly 147 pounds, and was a vegetarian. I enjoy that detail far more than I probably should because it irritates several modern strength culture clichés at once. Old-time physical culture was always stranger than people want it to be. It had meat men, milk men, fasting men, fruit men, beef tea men, vegetarian strongmen, mail-order prophets, medical entrepreneurs, and plenty of people who were probably just making it up as they went along.
The Suicide Milo was not remarkable because it needed an impossible load. Its genius lay in making ordinary-looking poundages act badly. At an Eastern Province weightlifting championship in Port Elizabeth on March 21, 1938, Pillay reportedly performed an 85.5-pound one-hand clean and press, a 142-pound one-hand jerk from the shoulder, a 120-pound two-hand snatch, a 152-pound two-hand military press, and a 168-pound two-hand clean and jerk. The report claimed he did this “without exerting himself to any degree.” The Eastern Province Weightlifting Union then offered £50 to anyone who could match him. There were no takers.
That £50 offer is the bit that still grabs me. The bar was a piece of equipment, yes, but it was also a trap laid in public. Pillay knew the object but others did not. The crowd did not need to know much about lifting to understand the situation. Here is a bar that looks wrong. Here is a man who can lift it. Here is the money. Now let us see who else fancies himself.
Why Thick Bars Are Horrible
Thick bars are fascinating because they change difficulty without simply adding weight. That is their magic trick. Add plates and you make a lift heavier. Thicken the handle and you change the relationship between the body and the object. The fingers open. The thumb loses authority. The wrist has to work harder. The bar wants to roll. Suddenly the hand, which usually disappears into the background of a lift, becomes the whole drama.
This is why thick grip work gets under your skin. It is instantly understandable and endlessly annoying. You do not need a lecture on biomechanics to appreciate it. Pick up a normal barbell and then pick up a three-inch bar. The difference is immediate. The weight may now be modest, but the object has changed the rules.
There is also a practical historical point here. Odd implements allowed performers to create difficulty without needing endless plates. Iron or shot cost money. Equipment had to be made, stored, carried, shipped, repaired, and explained. A travelling performer did not always need more weight to create a better act. Sometimes he or she needed a worse object. A thicker handle, fixed globes, a non-rotating axle, an awkward anvil, a barrel, a person, or a stone could make a manageable load into a public problem.
That matters because it helps explain why the old physical culture world is full of strange things. These objects were entertaining, but they were also efficient. They packed difficulty into shape. They kept the performer’s advantage. They made the feat visible. They also gave the audience a story they could repeat afterwards. You should have seen the size of the handle. You should have seen the wheels. You should have seen the anvil.
Apollon, Inch and the Joy of Unfair Objects
Take Apollon. Louis Uni, better known by his stage name, had one of the great challenge objects in strength history. The Apollon Wheels were made from railway wheels and an axle, weighing roughly 366 pounds. They became famous not only because they were heavy, but because they looked like something that had escaped from industry and wandered onto a stage. After Apollon, only Charles Rigoulot, John Davis, and Norbert Schemansky lifted the original set overhead. Schemansky reportedly jerked them three times, because apparently one act of madness was not enough.
The Apollon Wheels are useful to think with because they show how strongman objects worked. They were difficult in several ways at once. The axle was thick. The wheels were fixed. The object did not behave like a modern barbell. You could not rely on spin, balance, or familiarity. It was heavy, awkward, and visually absurd, which is exactly why it worked so well. A crowd could understand railway wheels overhead. No one needed a spreadsheet.
Thomas Inch played a similar game with his famous dumbbell. The Inch Dumbbell is usually given as 172 pounds, with a thick handle and fixed globes. Plenty of strong people can lift 172 pounds in some form. That was never the point. The point was whether they could lift that 172 pounds when the handle was thick, smooth, and determined to roll out of the hand.
This is the trick behind many challenge objects. They are unfair in a very specific way. The performer trains on them, learns their habits, then invites others to fail. That failure is not incidental. It is part of the show. The public sees a strong person humbled by an object that the owner handles with confidence. The object becomes a credential. Famously Mark Henry, the winner of the first Arnold Strongman, took roughly a year of training before he pressed the dumbbell.
George F. Jowett’s famous 172-pound anvil belongs in this same family. Jowett claimed he could grip the horn with one hand, clean the anvil to his shoulder, and press it overhead. The anvil now sits in the Stark Center, although the story refuses to become tidy. Historians have questioned whether Jowett really cleaned that exact object. I almost like that better. The anvil survives as feat, evidence, argument, and folklore all at once.
That is not a problem unique to Jowett. Strength history is full of half-settled claims, promotional exaggeration, real feats, staged photographs, honest confusion, and objects that outlived the certainty around them. As historians we want the clean answer. Did he lift it? Was it the same object? How much did it weigh? Those questions matter. But the mess also tells us something. These feats lived in memory because the object gave the story a body.
Strongwomen and Objects That Explained the Feat
This was not only a male world, even if it is often remembered that way. Strongwomen understood the value of objects that made strength instantly readable, perhaps even more sharply because their performances were always filtered through assumptions about women’s bodies.
Katie Sandwina is the obvious example. Born Katharina Brumbach, she became one of the most famous strongwomen of the early twentieth century. The stories attached to her still have their old force. She defeats Eugen Sandow in a lifting contest (which is not true to be clear). She lifts her husband overhead (which is true to be clear!). She works in circus settings where audiences came expecting novelty and found a woman calmly reversing the order they thought they understood.
That reversal needed objects. A husband overhead is a simple image. A bent bar is a simple image. A lifted weight, a chain, an anvil, a human body held aloft, all of these things helped make power legible. The audience did not need to understand training methods or muscle physiology. They understood that a woman had taken an object, or a person, and made the expected hierarchy look foolish.
This is one reason odd lifts matter in the history of performance. Training is private, repetitive, and usually boring to watch. Performance has to condense that labour into a moment. The right object does that work quickly. It tells the audience what is at stake. It also gives them something to remember. Sandwina lifting her husband is not just a feat. It is an image with social teeth.
The Blacksmith Before the Algorithm
The modern gym did not emerge from a tidy world of clean equipment and sensible programming. It came out of health reform, circus, vaudeville, medical entrepreneurship, mail-order commerce, nationalism, self-improvement, and people trying to make a living from bodies that could do unusual things. That is why the history is so enjoyable. It is never just exercise. It is always exercise plus business, theatre, belief, vanity, medicine, nationalism, and sometimes absolute nonsense.
Hippolyte Triat’s nineteenth-century Paris gymnasium helped make systematic weight training visible with globe barbells and dumbbells. Alan Calvert’s Milo Bar-Bell Company, founded in Philadelphia in 1902, helped move weight training into the home through mail-order equipment, progressive loading, and a more respectable language of heavy exercise. Standardisation mattered. It made training more repeatable. It made equipment easier to sell. It made competition fairer. It made strength training less dependent on the secrets of performers.
I like that world too. I like Olympic bars. I like plates that weigh what they claim to weigh. I like being able to walk into a gym and know roughly what I am dealing with. But standardisation also made strength a little less strange. Straight bar, known diameter, known plates, known lift, known comparison. Useful, absolutely? Complete, no?
Older physical culture kept more room for awkwardness. A stone was not a defective barbell. An anvil was not failed gym equipment. A thick bar was not a normal bar made worse. These were different tests. They asked different questions of the body. What can you grip? What can you balance? What can you control when the object does not help you? What happens when strength has to solve a problem rather than repeat a pattern?
Why Thick Grip Still Gets Me
This is what my three-inch bar has reminded me. It has already made me feel like a beginner again, which is irritating, humbling, and probably good for me. It does not care that I have trained for years, written about old strength culture, or lifted awkward stones. It just waits for my hands to fail. I miss that.
Last weekend I tried, and eventually succeeded, in lifting the Coffey Stone made famous by Jon Cegielski. It was awkward, I complained to my wife about its thickness and corners or that I couldn’t get a grip. Next I moaned about how it didn’t budge for 20 minutes before finally lifting. And then I appreciated how rarely I find a challenge in my home gym that is about my strength but also my ability to be flexible. I needed to think of different ways to lift it, different angles and heights etc. I was not a beginner persay but an experienced beginner. It is glorious.
On a normal barbell, grip often hides in the background. You wrap the hand, squeeze, and get on with the lift. On my suicide bar, grip is the first obstacle. Every clean starts with uncertainty. Every press feels like the bar is considering rolling somewhere inconvenient. Every deadlift becomes a conversation with fingers that would prefer to resign.
That is why thick grip work has such a hold on people. It is simple enough to understand immediately and difficult enough to stay interesting for years. It rewards patience, wrist position, thumb strength, skin tolerance, and the sort of stubbornness that makes no sense until you feel a thick handle start to move.
It also keeps training playful in a way I value more as I get older. I do not mean easy. Play in strength training often involves frustration, failure, and doing things that look stupid to anyone with sense. A thick bar invites that. It lowers the ego while raising the difficulty. Nobody feels fully competent on it at first, which is part of the fun.
There is also the historical echo. You know Pillay. You know the Suicide Milo. You know Apollon’s wheels, Inch’s dumbbell, Jowett’s anvil, Sandwina’s stage. Then you put your own hands on the bar and remember that history is much more fun when it is heavy.
Bring Back the Weird Stuff
So yes, I am keeping the phrase. If someone has a thicker working barbell, please show me because I want to see it and will probably make several poor financial decisions afterwards. The original Suicide Milo was three inches. Mine is three inches. Most commercial thick bars and axles are smaller. A three-inch working barbell is not normal gym equipment. That is exactly why I wanted it.
The claim is fun, but the history is better. I like that a small item in a 1938 physical culture magazine can still cause trouble. I like that it sent me to a modern blacksmith. I like that in a world of apps, wearables, AI coaching, and perfectly branded gym equipment, one reasonable answer is still to ask someone to make a lump of steel less reasonable.
My three-inch bar is not replacing my Olympic bar. I still want normal training, normal progression, and the clean pleasure of adding weight to familiar lifts. I also want the thing that refuses me. I want the lift that makes sense only after you touch it. I want the object that turns strength back into a problem.
This bar is an entry point into a weirder history of lifting, where strength was tested through thick handles, awkward objects, public challenges, and feats that made sense the moment you saw them. It is also, more simply, a horrible thing to lift. That may be the best endorsement I can give it.
I would genuinely love to know what other stupid implements people have trained with. Stones, anvils, barrels, thick handles, homemade disasters. Send them on. I am clearly not making sensible financial decisions in this area anymore.
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