This paper deals with the issue of motion control of a single rod cylinder-load system using simple adaptive control (SAC) method. Prior to controller design, the experiment of open-loop response has been performed. Based on it, design parameters of transfer function are obtained and used for controller design. The effect of parallel feedforward compensator has been investigated by computer simulation, suppressing the oscillatory motion. Through experiments it is conformed that the SAC method gives good tracking performance compared to the PD control method.