The RELIFE Power Tower is a machine for push-ups, dips, pull-ups, and abs training. You get an almost complete Calisthenics Home Gym with just the RELIFE Power Tower. Of course, Power Towers are known for being very versatile, and if you consider the complete package of exercises you can do, they are very compact. Just one cleared corner of a sizeable room is enough to serve as a fairly complete home gym. There are many Power Towers, though, so in this review, we’ll see how the RELIFE Power Tower stacks up against the competition.
You can also watch my RELIFE Power Tower Review on YouTube:
🔑Key Takeaways
- The RELIFE Power Tower is a stable, all-in-one product that offers all the basic exercises a beginner Calisthenics practitioner needs.
- The cushions on the backrest and elbow rests are excellent. You can adjust their length to suit your proportions.
- The top bar is long enough for narrow, normal and wide exercises.
- For dips, it is best to keep the handles at their shortest position for adequate stability. This also means you need to put the backrest at its shortest position.
- For push-ups, the neutral-grip handles sit at a good distance for most people, but cannot be adjusted in width or grip style.
- The foam handles feel cheap but provide a little extra comfort for pull exercises.
- Our RELIFE Power Tower was delivered with small damages and bent parts in various locations.
Assembly of the RELIFE Power Tower
Power Towers are like Free-Standing Pull-Up Bars, but with many more attachments and are generally heavier and slightly larger. They come disassembled and require some work to fit together. We started by assembling the base since this makes it easy to attach the legs and bars later. It also ensures everything fits snugly without forcing anything if the base is already assembled and standing.
With the base and legs in place, the rest is only a matter of fitting the pieces into the right socket and applying a knob screw or nut and bolt. It took me around 20 minutes to build, after which the Power Tower is not meant to be disassembled again unless you’re selling it or moving houses.
The best place for a Power Tower like this is either near a wall or in a room corner, with at least 2 square meters of free space.
First Look at the RELIFE Power Tower
- Height: 142cm to 217cm
- Length of Top Bar: 105cm (with a 44cm foam centre).
- Width of Dip Bars: 61cm
- Width of Push-Up Bars: 61cm
- Grip Diameter: 32mm (including foam)
All the typical exercises for a Power Tower are there on the RELIFE. Power Towers are a great tool for beginners, since you can buy just one product and start with most, if not all, beginner Calisthenics immediately. The RELIFE Power Tower is such a product for beginners. Since everything that makes a Power Tower is present, we’ll focus our review on the RELIFE Power Tower’s grips, comfort, and stability instead.
The RELIFE Power Tower has a dark grey look with black and red accents. The cushions are important for ab exercises, and we’ll be testing those. In addition to the cushions, the RELIFE Power Tower has foam handles on almost all the grip surfaces. It’s no secret we are not fans of foam handles, but they are very common on Power Towers, so we’ll test those as well.
You can make a few adjustments to the RELIFE Power Tower’s dimensions. You can adjust the height of the pull-up bar, the length of the Dip Bars, and the backrest offset. The adjustments are all made with knob screws that can be unscrewed and removed, giving you the option to choose among several slots.
The top bar can go up to 217cm, which is nice and high. You can also set the top bar to a low height of 142cm for storage.
The foam covers are quite soft. This is comfortable on the hands and a popular choice for beginners. However, foam handles will limit your grip strength progression. You tend to outgrow foam grips quickly, and after that, a metal grip is better. The foam covers on the RELIFE Power Tower seem to be of mediocre quality as well, and ours are ripping at the edges after just a few workout sessions.
The grips, including foam covers, are all 32mm. For pull-ups, this is a nice diameter that you can fully enclose with your fist. However, for push exercises, this is less than ideal, and you can feel the bar pressing into the bones of your hands, which can strain your wrists.
Exercising on the RELIFE Power Tower
The RELIFE Power Tower offers a wide variety of exercises. You can do push-ups, pull-ups with different grip styles, dips, and leg raises, to name a few. For beginners, this covers a wide range of Calisthenics exercises.
For Push-Ups, the handles are a bit thin, with just 32mm. However, it is doable, and the foam makes the grip a bit more comfortable. You only get one setting at 61cm. If you have narrow or broader shoulders, this might not be the right fit for you. However, I feel that most people will have no problems with this width. You also only get one grip style, a neutral grip. This is a good grip for beginners to do push-ups; however, the Power Tower cannot compete with the grip and width variations of Parallettes.
For dips, the 61cm width was a bit too much for me, but still doable. You cannot adjust the width, but you can adjust the length. The further out you set the dip handles, the more room you get between yourself and the backrest. However, the RELIFE Power Tower starts rocking back and forth profusely at the longest setting. We advise you to keep the handles set to their shortest setting for acceptable stability, which kind of defeats the purpose of this feature for doing dips. Point in case: at the dip handles’ shortest setting, I hit my head on the backrest when that is at my preferred offset.
The issues with the dips are resolved by (temporarily) moving the backrest back to its shortest setting and keeping the dip handles at their shortest setting. Like that, I had enough clearance to do dips, and the Power Tower felt stable. If you have similar issues, this might mean you have to frequently adjust the length of all these components between exercises.
Adjusting the length of these is not hard and can be done quickly, though. For my ab exercises, I like a specific length setting for both the backrest and the handles. When set correctly for your body’s proportions, doing ab exercises on the RELIFE Power Tower is very comfortable. The cushions do a great job keeping your back and elbows comfy and free of undue strain. This also applies to doing toe touches, where the backrest does a good job of supporting your back and isolating your core muscles.
Doing pull-ups and chin-ups is also surprisingly comfortable, despite the foam covers. You get to do these exercises with a variety of grips, from narrow to normal to wide. For wide–grip pull-ups, you get slanted handles, which make these exercises safer. Our only gripe here is that the foam covers do not cover the whole bar. There is a sizeable area left uncovered around where the bar meets the legs. It would have been nice if more of the bar was covered with foam (if we’re going with foam anyway), so you get a bit more versatility in just how wide you’re doing your normal-grip pull-ups and chin-ups.
Overall, I am pretty positive about the RELIFE Power Tower. It is quite stable and has all the exercises you need for a good Calisthenics workout. The grips are comfortable, especially for pull exercises. The cushions and backrest are great, even.
I do have some points of feedback here and there. The keen reader will have noted my dislike for foam covers, but that is to be expected of Power Towers. Likewise, with all Power Towers, most people will have to bend their knees to do Pull-Ups and Chin-Ups. Power Towers also tend to feel quite claustrophobic, and if you make wild movements, like explosive pull-ups, there is a risk your elbows or knees bump into stuff.
All of these critiques are about Power Towers in general, so I’ll disregard them here. If you get a Power Tower, that is the tradeoff.
However, we’re not too sure about the product’s quality. The foam covers ripped quite easily after just a few workouts. And that’s not all. Some of the parts were already bent (metal tubes) or even broken (some plastic parts) when we received the RELIFE Power Tower. Now, we might have just been unlucky since this is a US company and we are located in Europe. However, it did occur in multiple different places on the RELIFE Power Tower, and we, of course, want to be transparent in our review and mention it.
Pricing Overview of the RELIFE Power Tower
The pricing of the RELIFE Power Tower varies a bit, depending on where you are in the world. Most commonly, I’ve seen them priced at around $170, and that often includes free shipping (in the US and EU) within a week. This also tells me that RELIFE has warehouses on each side of the pond, at least.
Conclusions about the RELIFE Power Tower
What do you get for your hard-earned money with the RELIFE Power Tower? You get a lot of variety in exercise, especially keeping the beginner in mind. You get to do your push-ups, dips, leg-raises and pull exercises with just one product. Considering all the different pieces of Calisthenics Equipment the RELIFE Power Tower can replace, it is compact and takes away a lot of guesswork.
We’re not fans of the foam grips (or any foam grips, for that matter), but they’re still comfortable enough for all exercises. When you set all the grips and the backrest to the right position for your body, the RELIFE Power Tower can be a pretty comfortable platform for exercise. The cushions and backrest steal the show here for being excellent.
With all the caveats that come with Power Towers in general (like being stuck to just the grip settings it can offer) and that we might have been unlucky with shipping damages, we can still recommend the RELIFE Power Tower to the beginner Calisthenics practitioner who wants a quick, stable and relatively inexpensive product that gets them going with the sport.
Frequently Asked Questions About the RELIFE Power Tower
Here are a few more frequently asked questions about the RELIFE Power Tower that we found online:
Does RELIFE ship worldwide?
Yes, RELIFE ships worldwide through their Amazon store. Delivery times in the US and EU are fast, and often shipping is free for larger purchases.
Is the RELIFE Power Tower worth it?
The RELIFE Power Tower is a good fit for beginner Calisthenics practitioners who want a single product that gives them all the required workout options. It is relatively inexpensive compared to the equipment it can replace and relatively space-efficient for the same reason. You also get the comfort of foam grips, and the grip styles are predetermined to minimise user error. For the more advanced practitioner, the RELIFE Power Tower (and any Power Tower) is too restrictive.
