Movement Made Fatbars Review 2024: Thick (50mm) Mini Parallettes

The Movement Made Fatbars live up to their name. These mini Parallettes feature a hefty 50mm (1.97”) grip. According to Sondre Berg, the man behind Berg Movement and Movement Made, this gives it a lot of advantages when it comes to grip and control. Time for me to take a closer look at the Movement Made Fatbars and review all the pros and possible cons for you. That way you know what you’re getting in your hands. Spoiler, those hands will be filled! No pun intended. I bought the Movement Made Fatbars out of my own pocket, so you won’t have to spend any of your money before knowing exactly what the Movement Made Fatbars are about. Let’s go!

You can also watch my video Movement Made Fatbars Review on YouTube:

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First Look at the Movement Made Fatbars

Here’s a rundown of my first look at the Movement Made Fatbars as they came out of the box. The Movement Made logo is immediately prominent on all four sides of the Parallettes. The logo is crisp and burnt into the wood. The natural shapes of the logo play well with the wood grain, color and texture.

There are two anti-slip pads on each foot which are see-through. They are recessed into the wooden frame. There is a text on the bottom between the anti-slip pads that reads: “Sustainably made with love in Europe.”

The wood looks and feels very nice and solid. The grain doesn’t have any flaws or observable weak points upon closer inspection. It has a uniform, satin finish. Overall, it seems like a very good product at first glance. Arguably the best part is the wonderfully fragrant woody smell the Movement Made Fatbars emit. Since my first look and every time I walk past them or handle them, I simply must sniff at them first. They smell that good!

Dimensions

Here are the basic dimensions for the Movement Made Fatbars:

• Width: 14 cm (5½”)
• Height: 9.5 cm (3¾”)
• Length: 21.5 cm (8½”)
• Handle Length: 14.5 cm (~5¾”)
• Diameter Grip: 55mm

These dimensions still put the Movement Made Fatbars in the Mini Parallettes category, albeit on the longer end.

Materials

The wood is sourced from a Rumanian FSC certified beech forest. The FSC certification ensures that all forestry guidelines are met and that the trees are sustainably harvested. For each tree felled, enough saplings are planted to ensure that the total tree population does not diminish. The beech wood of the Movement Made Fatbars is the same wood that the Minimalistic Gym Rings are made from.

I don’t make it a secret that I like the feel of wooden grips and especially beech wood. It just feels right to the touch when sanded to a satin finish. It has the right amount of traction with just your bare hands and the right amount of give when you’re gripping the handle firmly. I also liked the feel of the Minimalist Gym Rings, so it’s no surprise that I like the feel of these Movement Made Fatbars as well.

Anti-Slip Pads

The recessed anti-slip pads are excellent and give superb traction. Me and the whole team at Calisthenics Worldwide even feel that these are the best anti-slip pads we’ve seen so far. We tried moving the Parallettes by sliding them across the floor with force but just couldn’t. Once on a dry and flat surface, the only way to move them is to pick them up entirely.

The pads are tougher than they look at first glance. They are not just glued on but are recessed at least half-way into the wood as far as I can tell. This gives you great confidence that these wooden Parallettes won’t slip away underneath you and that the anti-slip pads won’t simply peel off with repeated use.

The 3 Advantages of Having Thick Parallettes

The 50mm grips are thicker than your usual parallettes (which are commonly 38mm). This additional girth should give you 3 different advantages according to Movement Made:

1. Fewer injuries
2. Better comfort
3. More control

The thicker bars can help with injury prevention as you have more surface area to grip. This means less pressure on the joints, or rather that pressure is better dispersed over a wider area.

We also liked the extra surface area for all the exercises you typically do on Mini Parallettes. Where it really shines is with inverted stuff like Handstands, where that added surface area also helps prevent pinching (since all your weight is now laid on to your hands). There it really makes a difference comfort-wise to have that additional girth with 50mm grips, where the standard 38mm grips tend to dig into the flesh of your hands and “sit on the bone” almost.

Whether the thicker bars give you more control I must leave up in the air and probably comes down to personal preference. We find that we still prefer to do our Parallettes exercises on the standard 38mm grips when it comes down to control (except for handstands). It could also be that we’re just not used to the 50mm grips as much as we’re used to 38mm grips. 

If you have large hands, all our feedback about control flies out the window and these grips might be just perfect for you for all exercises.

Exercising with the Movement Made Fatbars Mini Parallettes

Like with all Parallettes, using a hammer grip or straight bar grip reduces the stress on the wrist compared to exercising with your hands on the floor. The Movement Made Fatbars are stable enough to use normal, narrow and wide grips, which makes all typical Parallettes exercises possible with just this set. Their handy size and negligible weight also make them ideal for transport and exercise on vacation or at a Calisthenics Park. 

With their stability and perfect anti-slip features, the Movement Made Fatbars opens up the full suite of Parallettes exercises like Push-Ups and Push-Up variations, L-Sits, V-Sits, Handstands and of course transitions from sits to handstands.

Mastering the Planche is also possible using the Movement Made Fatbars, starting at the Planche Lean, Tuck Planche and so on until and beyond the Full Planche.

What and Who is Movement Made?

Movement Made was founded by Sondre Berg and if you’re into Calisthenics you’ll probably have heard of him. Sondre Berg is a Calisthenics beast, coach and influencer. He also owns the Berg Movement App, a very high-end and skills-based Calisthenics App.

Movement Made focuses on making minimalistic, functional but still sleek looking Calisthenics equipment. This blend of form and function is typically Scandinavian, and so is their insistence on making environmentally friendly products. Whether you like the look I leave up to you, but the high-quality mark and sustainable production methods are of course objectively very good things.

Conclusions About the Movement Made Fatbars

Would I recommend the Movement Made Fatbars? From my personal experience, I find it hard to recommend the Movement Made Fatbars based only on the thicker handles. It could be that I and the rest of the Calisthenics Worldwide team are so used to 38mm bars that any advantages the 50mm handles have is wasted on us. It’s not that 50mm is unheard off, though. Some gymnastics equipment like the pommel horse have 50mm bars. That shows that the Movement Made Fatbars do have a useful grip size.

Our (and your) preference in grip size aside, the Movement Made Fatbars are a very good product. The wood is in excellent shape and comes in the perfect satin finish for your hands. They also smell lovely of freshly felled lumber and that this lumber is sustainably harvested is also a good thing. With all the rest of these Parallettes being excellent already, the superb (best we’ve seen so far) anti-slip pads make the Movement Made Fatbars a high-end, high-quality product.

They are stable enough to do all your Parallettes exercises, including or perhaps in particular Handstands and handstand transitions. These exercises, where all your weight goes directly down through your hands into the Parallettes is where we noticed the extra comfort the thicker grips bring most.

The Movement Made Fatbars are very fairly priced to boot compared to its competitors, with a price tag of €69.- excluding shipping. For this price you get the finest quality woodworking, sourced from premium, sustainable beech wood and the ability to do all the exercises you would expect from a set of mini Parallettes.

If that sounds as appealing to you as it did to me, get your own set of Movement Made Fatbars here:

Frequently Asked Questions About the Movement Made Fatbars

A few more frequently asked questions about the Movement Made company.