He Could Not Do A Pull-Up For 30 Years. Then He Changed His Grip.

A $39 pair of hooks turns any bar into a neutral-grip bar. We read 1,614 owner reviews across the whole Swissies line to find out whether that matters, and the same sentence kept coming back from men who had quietly stopped doing pull-ups years ago.

Sean Alder

Contributing writer · August 28, 2026 · 9 min read

The Short Version

Swissies V2 are a pair of hard nylon fiberglass hooks that drop over a bar you already own. Once they are on, your hands hang below the bar with the palms facing each other instead of gripping the bar itself. That is the entire product.

They are not rings. Rings hang on straps and swing. These clamp onto the bar and stay where you put them, which is the whole reason people with cranky joints keep mentioning them.

The Same Sentence, Over And Over

Read enough gear reviews and you learn to skim. People praise the packaging, complain about shipping, and say the thing feels solid. Useful, but not interesting.

This product’s reviews break that pattern. A large share of them are not written by people chasing a better workout. They are written by people who had quietly stopped doing an exercise, and who are surprised to be doing it again.

Two of them describe exactly the arc in the headline above. A man who stopped, and a man who started again, with a grip change in between.

Neither man is unusual in that pool. The pattern repeats on the V2 itself.

None of those people are describing a training breakthrough. They are describing an exercise coming back onto the list after it had come off. Four separate joints show up in that handful alone.

Worth saying plainly, because the reviews will not: a pair of plastic hooks does not treat anything. What the people above changed was the position their arm was held in while loaded. Whether that is enough for your particular joint is a question for you and whoever looks after it, not for a review site.

Your Forearm Has A Second Setting

Grab a normal pull-up bar overhand and look at your forearms. The two bones in each one are crossed over each other. That is pronation, and holding it under bodyweight for a few sets is a position most people never think about because the bar gave them no choice.

Turn your palms to face each other and those bones uncross. Your wrist stops being twisted, your elbow tracks in a slightly different line, and the load arrives at the joint from a different angle. Nothing about the exercise changes. Only the geometry does.

Commercial gyms have sold this idea for decades in the shape of a multi-grip bar bolted to a rack. It works. That version also costs several times what a pair of handles costs, it lives in one building, and the grip width was decided at the factory.

The handles do the same job by moving the hand off the bar instead of moving the bar. Because they slide, you also choose the width, which the reviews suggest matters more than anyone expects.

What You Are Actually Buying For $39

Here is where a gear review earns its keep. The mechanism above is free. What matters now is whether this particular piece of hardware is any good, because the idea has been sold before in worse forms.

They are moulded from nylon fiberglass, the same material Kensui uses in the EZ-VEST PRO and the EZ-BOOT. That is the honest answer to the first question everybody asks, which is whether plastic belongs anywhere near your bodyweight. The pair is tested to 800 lb, and the whole pair weighs 1.3 lb.

Three details separate them from the first generation, and all three are the kind of thing you only notice once you have used a worse version:

• The hook is rubber lined. It grips the bar instead of sliding along it, and it does not chew up the knurling or the paint on a bar you care about.
• The handle is knurled, not smooth. Most reviewers rate it as the grippy kind rather than the sharp kind. A 32 mm handle is thicker than a standard bar, so expect your grip to be the thing that quits first for a session or two.
• There is a carabiner loop on top. That single hole is why these leave the pull-up bar and end up on cable stacks, which is most of their value once the novelty wears off.

Kensui Swissies V2

$39 a pair · 4.88 from 181 reviews · 100 days to send them back

Get the Swissies

Measure Your Bar Before You Order

This is the one number that decides whether the rest of the article applies to you. Kensui’s spec table puts the V2’s maximum bar diameter at 50 mm, which is just under two inches and covers the overwhelming majority of home pull-up bars and commercial rigs.

Owners of genuinely fat tubing back that up. One buyer this month reported them fitting a 2 inch bar with room left over, which also happens to be the upgrade the V2 was built for.

One caveat on Kensui’s own page, and we would rather flag it than pretend we did not see it. The marketing copy says the hook is compatible with bars up to 2.5 inches, while the spec table on the same page says 50 mm, which is about 1.97 inches. Those are not the same claim. We have used the spec table number throughout, because it is the conservative one and it is the one the compare table publishes.

If your bar is genuinely fatter than two inches, the MAX version lists 55 mm and is the safer $10.

One Pair, Five Stations

Most people buy these for the pull-up bar. Judging by what owners actually write about, the pull-up bar is where they spend the least of their time.

The carabiner loop turns them into cable handles. That same hook drops onto a barbell for rows and deadlifts. They clip to bands, and they sit on the grab handles of plate-loaded machines. A pair weighs less than a water bottle, so they travel in the same bag as your shoes.

That range is the quiet argument for buying a pair of handles rather than bolting a fixed neutral-grip bar to your rack. A rack attachment gives you one station. Two hooks in a gym bag give you whichever station is free.

Where They Fall Short

The average sits at 4.88 across 181 reviews, which is high enough that the critical ones are worth more of your attention than the glowing ones. Three complaints come up repeatedly, and all three are fair.

• They are plastic, and some people want metal. One five-star reviewer still wrote that it “would be cool if next time they were more of a metal/steel.” The nylon fiberglass tests to 800 lb, so this is a preference rather than a failure, but it is a real preference.
• The handle has no padding. “I do wish, however, that they had some rubber padding,” wrote one four-star buyer. The knurling is grip, not comfort. If your hands want cushioning, the MAX and its palm support is the version to look at.
• $39 is not nothing for two pieces of moulded plastic. A four-star reviewer put it flatly: “Just wish they were a bit cheaper.” The counter-argument is what a rack-mounted multi-grip bar costs, but if you are only ever going to use one bar in one room, that comparison is doing a lot of work.

We would add a fourth that nobody wrote down. A 32 mm knurled handle is a real jump in thickness from a bar, so your first few sessions will end with your hands giving out before your back does. That evens out, but it is worth knowing before you assume something is wrong.

Who Should Skip These

Three groups, honestly.

If your bar is fatter than two inches, buy the MAX or measure again before ordering anything. Anyone who already owns a rack with a welded neutral-grip attachment and never trains anywhere else has bought this outcome once already. And if you want a grip that rotates freely through the pull, rings do that and these do not. They stay where you set them, which is a feature for some people and a limit for others.

What is left is a large group: anyone whose pulling comes from a straight bar, a barbell or a cable stack, and whose wrists or elbows have opinions about it.

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