Until I started using the Ultimate Body Press Elevated XL Doorway Pull-Up Bar, I didn’t fully grasp how much harder it was to do pull-ups on crappy bars. Our guide’s current top pick, the Ultimate Body Press bar is a model that, as staff writer Seth Berkman notes, came to be known as the “Texas” pick among testers because of its sheer size and horn-like handles. It replaced my previous bar, the Stamina Doorway Trainer Plus.
I never realized how low I was hanging on the previous bar. In fact, the first thing I noticed about the Ultimate Body Press bar was how close to the ceiling the handholds sat; overall, this bar has more grip positions than most other pull-up bars currently available, and it positions them so that you are higher off the floor. This design makes the bar accessible to a wider range of body sizes—and I, at 6 feet tall, can almost fully extend my legs when hanging, which opens up all sorts of leg lifts, butt flexes, and amateur trapeze chorus-line core exercises that I couldn’t really do before.
The size of the rig itself is what sets the “Texas” bar apart, as the longhorn-like upper bar flares out to include wide-set hand grips that most other in-doorway pull-up bars lack. The neutral grip positions on the Ultimate Body Press bar tilt slightly upward away from the wall above the door, leading to a natural range of motion as you lift your ears up toward your knuckles. The combination of grips and width makes more types of pull-up exercises possible.
The grips for overhand or underhand lifts also sit several inches higher than other bars’ primary grip points. But if you find that the upper bar on the Ultimate Body Press bar is too high, it also has a padded lower bar with a long, narrow grip; my preadolescent kids can easily grab that.
And there’s a clear difference in the quality of the grip relative to that of other bars I’ve tried. I saw early deterioration on the Stamina bar, and I ended up replacing that model’s pads with a nonslip sleeve called a Smartgrepp. In contrast, even after more than a month of daily use of the Ultimate Body Press bar with gloves (I like these Atercel gloves in large), a future pad change seems unlikely.
