Where’s the best place to position the PIVOT Bed?

The best place to position the PIVOT Bed in your room is where there’s enough space on either side of the bed for you to perform the type of exercise you plan on doing. If you intend to perform strength training exercises and want to use a power rack you’ll also obviously need to consider the width of a barbell. It’s important to note that this applies to any power rack, not just the PIVOT Bed and Rack solution.

Overview

There are some natural limitations on room size when using a barbell. A full-size, Olympic barbell is 7’2” long (2184mm), and that’s generally unwieldy in a bedroom. In short, if you can’t fit a barbell in your room, you can’t use a power rack, regardless of a space-saving solution like the PIVOT Bed & Rack. This is because of the following: 

• a barbell must have room on each side to load weight plates; 
• because it must be racked onto the J-hooks on the rack uprights; 
• and because the rack is mounted onto the PIVOT Bed, the position of your bed may have to change to give you enough room to use the barbell.
  

Barbell size 

For most people, we recommend a short “6 foot” barbell (~1800mm). Sure, if you lift a lot you’ll max out what you can load on the bar, but for the vast majority of us this is only going to be an issue with deadlifting as long as you have enough large plates. A 2000mm barbell is a good compromise and you should think hard before opting for a full-size barbell simply “because that’s the official standard and what they have in commercial gyms”. That’s not a good reason to buy a huge barbell which will be difficult to use in your home, and you’ll also need to store a full-size barbell on a wall or similar. They’re too big to fit under the bed in our storage solution as they’d stick out from the foot of the bed when it’s horizontal.

Please see our other note on Power Rack Measurements and Barbell Advice.

Can I place my bed against a side wall?

Unless you have a mattress measuring 1600mm or wider, the short answer is ‘no’, as long as you want to use a barbell. As even an 1800mm barbell is wider than our widest bed (1750mm total for an EU king size), placing the bed against a side wall would normally mean you cannot even rack the barbell as it would hit the wall. Loading it would be impossible. While we have a solution to this, by offsetting mounting of the power rack, there are limitations to what we can do here. We can’t ‘magic-up’ more space than is available and the infinitely easier solution is not to place the bed against a side wall.

Offset Power Rack Mounting

With the exception of the smaller beds (1400mm wide mattresses), the PIVOT Power Rack can be mounted in two different positions, allowing you to either have it attached centrally to the bed frame, or offset to one side. You’ll be able to switch it by removing a few bolts and reattaching to the alternative mounting holes and this should only take a few minutes. You do not need to order a specific mounting when ordering, you’ll get them as standard.

It’s important to note that the rack is fixed in width, and therefore each width of bed allows a different amount of offset. Please refer to the table below for the available offset on your choice of bed size.

How much space do I need to leave between the bed and wall?

We’ve found that 200mm between the end of the bar is the lowest we’d like to go to make loading it reasonable. In absolute terms, it’s possible to manage with just a little more than the width of your weight plates, but this will be very awkward, become tiresome and is potentially dangerous. Furthermore, you’re liable to bang the bar into your wall when exercising and therefore potentially damage your home. Placing an EU king against the wall and mounting the rack in the offset position will give you 175mm of space to load your bar, so it’s doable, just.

So what do we recommend? While this may displease some of you, our recommendation is simple: don’t place the bed against the side wall unless you absolutely have to.

Measurements

The measurements in the table below are all in millimetres and are all based on an 1800mm barbell. Note that the drawings are not to scale (as we are using them to illustrate multiple bed sizes). If you want to use a 2000mm barbell, add 100mm to the measurements A and B.

In the table, we have kept the distance from the barbell to the wall constant at 200mm, and adjusted everything else for each size of bed and whether the rack is mounted in its central or offset position. A lot of you will be most interested in measurement A, as that is the recommended distance you should have your bed from a side wall.

PIVOT Bed with Centrally-mounted Power Rack

PIVOT Bed with Offset-mounted Power Rack

 To read the table, choose your bed size on the left (there will be two rows), then choose the row which has your planned Rack Offset. The measurements A, B & C to the right are the measurements for your setup, so take note of them and consult the diagrams to see which measurement is which.

 Note no offset is possible on smaller beds (1400mm wide mattress), as there simply isn't enough space for it to be worthwhile.