CANPA Multifunction Power Rack Review: 800lb of Cage for Under £500

There is a point in every home gym where you stop buying gadgets and buy a cage. The CANPA Multifunction Power Rack is a decent place for that to happen: around £477, an 800lb rating, 2 inch square steel, a multi-grip pull up bar across the top and plate storage at the back. It is not a Rogue rack and it does not pretend to be. It is a competent, heavily specified home cage from a brand that has sold a great many of them, and for most people in a garage that is exactly the right purchase.

What you get

The main frame is 2 inch square steel with front and rear uprights, which is the specification that matters most and the thing cheap racks skimp on. Thin-walled 50mm tube flexes visibly under a heavy squat; 2 inch square section does not. CANPA rates the frame to 800lb, around 363kg, which is well beyond what nearly any home lifter will put on it.

The barbell support arms adjust across 17 holes per side, with 1 inch spacing on standard holes so most aftermarket accessories fit. The main frame itself has six height positions. That combination is what makes a cage safe to train alone in: you set the arms just under your bottom squat position, and a failed rep lands on steel rather than on you. Anyone training without a spotter should treat that as the whole point of the purchase rather than a feature on a list.

Across the top sits a multi-grip pull up bar, and at the back is an Olympic plate storage bar, which does double duty as ballast to stop the rack shifting.

Assembly and stability

Budget an afternoon. Racks in this class arrive as a heap of steel sections and a very large bag of bolts, and the order you tighten them in decides whether the finished cage is rigid or rattly. Bolt everything loosely first, square the frame against the floor, then torque down. Nearly every owner complaint about wobble traces back to skipping that step rather than to a manufacturing fault.

Once it is up, stability comes down to what is on it. Empty, the rack is light enough to rock a little if you dump a heavy bar into the J-hooks. Loaded with plates on the rear storage bar, it plants. If your floor is smooth concrete, put rubber gym flooring underneath, both to stop it walking and to save the slab when you drop something.

What it lets you train

Everything that matters, provided you buy a bar and plates. Squats, front squats, overhead press, bench press with your own bench, rack pulls at any height the 17 holes allow, plus pull ups and inverted rows from the top bar. That covers the compound lifts that drive most of the strength adaptation people are actually after.

The case for barbells over machines is often overstated by both camps, and the research is calmer than the arguing. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 studies covering 1,016 participants found no difference between free-weight and machine-based training for hypertrophy or jump performance, with strength gains simply specific to whichever modality was trained (BMC Sports Sci Med Rehabil, 2023). What the rack genuinely gives you is progression without a ceiling and the freedom to train the back squat and deadlift properly at home, which the NHS's request for muscle-strengthening work across all major muscle groups on at least two days a week is far easier to satisfy with than with a bag of resistance bands.

Squat depth is worth a note while you are setting the catch bars. Done with sensible loads and decent technique, a deep squat is safe for healthy knees, and full-range work tends to produce greater strength gains than partial reps (scoping review on the deep squat and the knee joint). Set your safeties for where you actually squat, not where you wish you did.

What it is missing

No cable system. That is the single biggest gap, and it is the reason to think carefully before ordering. Racks at a similar price from Gym Master and Strongway offer an optional or included dual pulley, which adds lat pulldowns, tricep pushdowns and cable rows to the same footprint. Our Gym Master GM1 power rack review covers the obvious alternative, and the best power cage UK guide ranks the field.

The counter-argument is honest enough: the pulleys on cages in this price bracket are usually the first thing to develop play, and a rack that does one job well beats one that does two adequately. If you want cables, a separate cable machine will be better than any bolted-on pulley at this money.

You will also need a weight bench, a bar and weight plates before a single rep happens. Add roughly £250 to £400 for those, and cost the whole setup rather than the rack alone.

Recommended reads

1. The best power cages in the UK
2. Gym Master GM1 power rack review
3. The best weight benches in the UK
4. The best weight plates in the UK
5. Back squat technique guide