Sportnow Olympic weight plates are a low-budget, no-name alternative to more expensive rubber-coated, tri-grip alternatives. But are they good enough for your home gym?
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Hey, what’s with all the weight plate reviews? Isn’t weight… just weight? Shouldn’t I be focusing more on which barbell I should buy instead? All valid questions. But finding good weight plates for your home gym is harder than it looks.
Purists will probably tell you that there’s no substitute for the good old cast iron plate. And they may be right.
However, as I’ve written elsewhere, the UK is a very humid country. Cast iron plates get exposed to a lot of moisture here, no matter how hard you try to keep it away.
I own lots of cast iron plates, and if you don’t clean and oil them regularly, they will get rusty. Bumper plates are a great alternative, and I own a set of them, too. But bumpers, particularly cheaper ones, take up a lot of space on your bar sleeves.
So the only real alternatives are stainless steel plates (expensive), cast iron plates coated in anti-rust paint (good, but also needing maintenance) or rubber-plated metal plates. Enter the Sportnow Olympic weight plates.
Sportnow Olympic Weight Plates: What I Like About Them
These are no-frills plates. Not the kind of thing you will find in a top-end gym. They are made by some low-key manufacturer I’ve never heard of. But they have two enormous advantages over more expensive alternatives.
The first is the price. On Amazon, the 2x5kg option costs £29 at the time of writing. The 2x10kg option usually retails for around £50. This manufacturer used to sell a 2x15kg set, which I have. But that seems to have been discontinued. I can’t find it listed in many places, and the sites that do list it say it’s out of stock.
That is already a decent price, but if you hang around for bargains on eBay, they do often pop up. Sometimes the eBay generic banner discount code (10-25%) can be applied to these plates, and the seller sometimes also puts them on sale.
I think £50 for two 10kg plates is a decent enough deal. But if you have the patience to wait for a price drop, the cost starts looking very tasty indeed.
Secondly, rubber-coated plates are arguably the best pick for a UK home gym. If, like me, your gym is outside in an unheated area (in my case, the garage), you will spend much of the year trying to keep the humidity off your plates. Cast iron plates get attacked by this humidity and will rust if you don’t maintain them.
But rubber-coated options? Not a problem.
There’s more to like about these plates, too. The weight is relatively accurate, impressively so for a no-name plate.
The tri-grip design is also a plus. Sure, there are a lot of tri-grip weight plates out there. But I like this design – it makes carrying plates around and clearing them onto weight plate trees very easy.
You can also use the grip holes for certain lifts, such as shrugs, pullovers and lateral raises. My workout buddy says he uses tri-grip plates for chest press exercises, which is interesting.
The Sportnow Olympic weight plates are also pretty durable. The coating isn’t pretty, but nor is it frail. The metal central hub is relatively scratch-resistant, too.
What I Don’t Like About Them
Primarily, it’s an aesthetic thing. The Sportnow Olympic weight plates don’t look like premium items. They don’t have the inimitable feel and sound of cast iron plates. You won’t look like as much of a badass lifting with these as you might with a gleaming set of Eleiko plates or a barbell full of clunking cast iron.
Also, although they aren’t prohibitively thick, they aren’t particularly thin either. On a regular-sized weight tree, I can fit four of the 10kg plates onto one branch. I feel they make up for that slightly with the diameter, which is just right for me. The 10kg is 32cm in diameter, while the 5kg is 24cm.
You can never really have too many 10kg and 5kg plates in a home gym. But if you are just relying on these plates, you will fill up your barbell pretty quickly for heavier lifts. That means you will have to supplement your collection with some more expensive 15kg, 20kg and 25kg plates from a different manufacturer.
Again, this might mess up your home gym’s aesthetic, if that’s important to you. For me, it’s not an issue, but others may well disagree.
THE FINAL VERDICT: SHOULD YOU BUY THEM?
If you can get a deal on the Sportnow Olympic weight plates and you are trying to stay on a budget, I’d say absolutely yes. They don’t look like premium gear, and they aren’t made by a firm most people know anything about. But they aren’t a total eyesore either.
At full price, you will probably find plenty of other weight plates that cost the same. But, as I noted above, the prices do tend to drop suddenly.
I also like the fact that (at least for the plates I’ve bought), the weight is fairly accurate. Not having to worry about maintenance is another brilliant plus.
If you can snare these in a deal and you aren’t fussy about looks or having recognizable-name weight plates, I’d say go for it.
I doubt you’ll regret it.
