GYM MASTER GM3 Power Rack Review: Rack, Cables and Bench for £800

Buying a power rack, a cable system and an adjustable bench separately in the UK is an expensive way to fill a garage. GYM MASTER's answer is the GM3 package: an 11-gauge bolt-down rack with a dual pulley tower and an FID bench, sold as one £799.99 line item on Amazon UK. On paper that undercuts the equivalent kit from the specialist British strength brands by a few hundred pounds.

The honest headline is that it mostly delivers, with one condition attached that will disqualify a good number of buyers before they read any further. The GM3 has to be bolted to the floor. Not "should be", not "recommended for heavy use". GYM MASTER specifies it, each foot carries three 11mm holes for the anchors, and the rack is not designed to be a free-standing unit you can shuffle around the room.

Who it's for

Garage gym owners on a concrete slab, principally. If you have a solid floor you can drill into, a ceiling above 220cm, and roughly 1.8 by 1.4 metres of floor to give it, this is one of the better value strength setups on Amazon UK right now. It suits the lifter who wants to squat, bench, press and pull in one station without adding a separate lat tower later.

It's the wrong buy if you're upstairs on floorboards, if you rent and can't drill, or if you want something you can fold flat between sessions. In those cases a wall-mounted folding rack or a squat stand makes far more sense; our best squat rack UK guide covers the alternatives.

Build quality

The frame is where the money went, and the gauge tells you most of what you need. At 3.0mm 11-gauge steel with a 400kg rating, the GM3 sits in the same structural bracket as racks costing a few hundred more, and comfortably above the 2mm 14-gauge tubing you find on sub-£400 cages. The gunmetal powder coat is even and holds up to plates being knocked against it.

The details are better than expected at this price. The J-cups are laser cut with UHMW plastic liners, which means your barbell knurling survives contact with them rather than being slowly ground flat, and that's a genuine mark of a considered design rather than a spec-sheet number. Safety bars use a pin-and-pipe design, which is the right choice for a home rack: they're quick to reposition and they don't rattle in the uprights the way cheap flip-down arms do.

Adjustable uprights and an integrated pull-up bar round it off. The foot plate is 30cm high and 35cm wide, giving you a usable step for high pull-up bar work.

The cable system

The dual pulley tower is the reason to choose the GM3 over a plain cage, and it's also the biggest compromise. It's plate loaded, taking standard 2in Olympic plates on weight poles, rather than using a selectorised stack with a pin.

In practice that means lat pulldowns, cable rows, triceps pushdowns, face pulls and cable flies all work properly, with a 180kg ceiling that nobody reading this will trouble. What it also means is that moving from a heavy pulldown to a light face pull involves sliding plates off a pole rather than moving a pin, which slows down supersets and drop sets. If circuit-style training is your thing, factor that in.

The bundled attachments cover the essentials: a straight bar handle and a wide lat pulldown bar. You'll probably want to add a rope and a single D-handle before long, and those are cheap.

The bench

Including an FID bench in the package is what tips the value calculation. It adjusts through flat, incline and decline, rates to 350kg, and measures 125.5cm long with a 69.5cm base width and a 46cm pad height when flat. That pad height is standard and works for most people's leg drive on a bench press.

Adjustable inclines matter more than people assume. A 2020 study measuring EMG activity at five bench angles found upper chest activation peaked at 30 degrees while the middle and lower portions were highest flat, so having both settings on the same bench genuinely changes what you can train. Our chest exercises guide sets out how to build a session around that.

Assembly and installation

Set aside a full afternoon and find a second pair of hands. The rack, the tower and the bench arrive as separate flat-packed elements, the uprights are heavy, and getting the cable tower squared up before final tightening is the fiddly part. Owners consistently report the instructions as adequate rather than good.

Then the bolting. You need a hammer drill, appropriate concrete anchors, and a floor you're allowed to drill. Do not skip it, and do not run the rack unbolted "just for a while": the safety bar system is designed around a fixed frame. If your floor is timber, this rack is not for you.

Value

Priced against the UK market, £799.99 for a bolt-down 11-gauge rack plus a 180kg cable tower plus an FID bench is strong. Assembling the same three items from a specialist British brand typically lands past £1,100, and often past £1,300 once you add the lat attachment. What you give up is the weight stack, the commercial rating and the longer warranties those brands offer.

Two sessions a week on this covers the muscle-strengthening side of the NHS guidance for adults, which asks for work across all the major muscle groups on at least two days a week alongside cardio, and the WHO makes the same case for strength training in its physical activity fact sheet. A rack in the garage removes most of the excuses.

If the cable side is what you're really after and you'd rather not drill, our best cable machine UK guide covers freestanding options, and best power cage UK compares the cages on their own.

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