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Patenting the obvious
Eleiko patented an obvious way to balance an open-back trap bar — an idea that wasn't theirs, and one we'd already solved in 2018. On patents, pricing, and protecting the obvious.
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by Adarsh Gopal
Patents can be incredibly silly — vague, and of course stating the obvious.
Take Eleiko. One of their patents essentially argues that their mechanism of counterweighting a trap bar is unique.
Open-back trap bars have a balance issue. The front end is heavier because there’s a connector in the front that’s absent in the back. The open back allows for a more comfortable setup and easier lunging. The normal way to balance this is to insert a weight into the pipe so it doesn’t feel lopsided when you lift it.
This is an obvious solution. But Eleiko patented it, and they keep folks from using the idea. The catch: the original open-back trap bar wasn’t Eleiko’s idea — Intek made the first one. And the idea to balance it is obvious. We balanced our own open-back trap bar in 2018 by welding a piece at the back, much the way a vegetable vendor balances a weighing scale. Should something so obvious be patented?
Here’s another one: Eleiko patenting a dumbbell whose handle rotates.
When you lift, your wrists often compensate for the fact that a fixed dumbbell doesn’t want to rotate. Think about pulling a dumbbell from mid-thigh to shoulder height — at some point the weights resist the change of direction, and your wrist subtly twists to make up for that lack of rotation. On lighter weights this isn’t much of an issue. But with heavy loads, that extra stress — especially during presses, cleans or snatches — adds up. The wrist is a relatively delicate joint compared to the elbow and shoulder. Allowing the dumbbell to spin reduces the torque on the wrist and lets it roll more naturally into position.
We’ve had our own implementation of this since 2016. We skip the bearings, since they’d rust in our environment and wouldn’t handle the drops. It feels obvious. So why would Eleiko patent such an obvious idea? I have no clue. Europeans can be heavy-handed bureaucrats who seem to enjoy behaving like this.
And Eleiko escalates the madness with their pricing. They charge a bomb for their equipment, and it isn’t justified — all while keeping others from using obvious ideas that weren’t original or theirs to protect in the first place. Indian pricing of Eleiko products is even crazier, thanks to greedy taxes and distributors. But I digress.
Some ideas are obvious. And it takes a greedy, power-hungry corporation to keep others from using them.