This Gigantic Pull-Up Bar Is a Beast to Store. But It’s the Best of Its Kind.

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.

The two pull-up bars I’ve brought into my home have been quite challenging to store when I’m not using them. Note that this is coming from someone so prolific at shoving stuff into random closet crevices that my family refers to me as “the squirrel.”

Though the Ultimate Body Press bar is slightly bigger than the Stamina model, both have an awkward L-shaped frame that is imbalanced almost any way you lay it down. The Ultimate Body Press bar fits a doorway just fine, but it’s a fish out of water anywhere else in the house—it’ll slip off a shelf, tumble out of a closet, or flop over when propped in a corner. Here are a few of the “solutions” I’ve come up with so far:

• put it over the rim of a bathtub (blocks tub access)
• hook it around the edge or arm of a couch (prevents you from sitting on one end of the couch)
• wedge it under a bed (creates a toe-stubbing hazard in the dark)
• leave it in the doorway (bumps your head; keeps you from closing the door)
• stand it up between a dresser and the wall (blocks drawer openings)

The true answer might be some kind of retractable hinge or secret elevator that folds it into a dedicated cavity within a wall or ceiling.

If you commit to doing pull-ups regularly, you may see some strength improvement in yourself. That could come at the expense of your doorframes, though. The Stamina bar’s padding gave way and eventually allowed its frame to mar my doorframe molding. But the hard-resin bracket of the “Texas” bar is still holding up well, and it doesn’t seem to be doing (further) damage to the wood.

The Ultimate Body Press bar also has serious advantages in overall sturdiness and durability over other bars. This model includes well-machined hardware—its lock nuts and bolts aren’t slipping out of position, as the Stamina model’s more basic threaded connections eventually did.

Like many pull-up bars, the Ultimate Body Press bar wedges into the doorframe to avoid requiring a hardware mount, and its beefiness and its sturdy frame hold it securely perched in the doorway. You can’t shut the door to the room with the bar installed, but another minor advantage lies in the fact that attempting to do so doesn’t send the whole rig crashing to the floor, as I found with the Stamina bar.

In reading about others learning to master the pull-up, I’ve found it a comfort to see that I wasn’t the only one struggling to do this exercise. I could have saved myself a lot of that struggling if I had known to go ahead and get the “Texas” bar.

This article was edited by Seth Berkman and Alexander Aciman.