Kg to lbs,
and what to load

A conversion is exact and a barbell is not. 1kg is 2.20462262 lb, so 102.5kg is 225.97lb. That number is correct and you cannot load it. What you can load, on a 45lb bar with a normal American rack, is 225lb, and that is 0.44kg lighter than your programme asked for. Knowing the gap is the point. Rounding it away silently is how a top set drifts.

The bar is part of the answer. An Olympic bar is 20kg in a kilo gym and 45lb in a pound gym, and those are not the same bar: 45lb is 20.41kg. A women's bar is 15kg or 35lb. A trap bar is anywhere from 20kg to 32kg depending on the make, which is why there is a box to type your own. If a calculator assumes 20kg it is quietly wrong for most of what an S&C athlete actually picks up.

Plates come in pairs. Everything here is per side and doubled, so an odd leftover is reported rather than hidden. If your gym stops at 1.25kg or 2.5lb, the nearest loadable weight steps in 2.5kg or 5lb, and this says so instead of pretending otherwise.

Rubber bumpers are drawn to scale. Metal plates are not, and the difference is real rather than a hedge. A bumper is 450mm across whatever it weighs, because the whole point of the thing is that the bar sits at loading height when you drop it. That is standardised and published, so those four figures are Eleiko's measured ones, the same numbers the weightlifting page draws with, and a check fails the build if the two ever disagree.

Metal is the opposite. Nobody publishes a figure for "a gym": one rack's 20kg is cast iron 25mm thick and the next one's is something else entirely. So for metal the diameters follow the usual tapering and the thickness follows the weight, which is enough to recognise a loading at a glance and not enough to measure with.

Below 10kg a bumper set uses metal change plates, which is not a simplification, it is what a bumper set is. So the drawing shows big discs all the same size and a couple of small ones that taper, which is what is actually on the bar.

There is still no sleeve capacity warning on this page, on either setting. The competition pages can tell you the sleeve has run out because they know every plate on the bar. Here the small plates are a guess, so the total stack height is too, and guessing at the point where a sleeve runs out would be inventing a number you might plan a session around.

The pound bumper thicknesses are estimates and the kilo ones are not. Eleiko publish their kilo training plates to the millimetre, 58, 50, 39 and 35. They do not publish the pound equivalents in the same way, so those four are scaled from the kilo figures by weight. Said here rather than left for you to assume the whole table is measured.

Kilo racks here are the usual UK commercial set: 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 2.5 and 1.25. Pound racks are 45, 35, 25, 10, 5 and 2.5. Neither is a competition set, and for calibrated steel drawn to scale use the powerlifting page or the weightlifting one.