Strength standards compare your best lifts with your body weight, sex and age. What they measure, rough numbers for the big lifts, and how to read them.
Strength standards compare your best lifts with your body weight, sex and age. They are good for one thing, showing which type of lift is lagging, and useless for the thing most people want from them.
What are strength standards?
Strength standards are reference numbers for how much a person of your sex, age and body weight typically lifts at each stage of training. The stages are usually called beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced and elite. The numbers are a ratio to body weight, because a 60 kg lifter and a 100 kg lifter who bench the same weight are not equally strong.
They come from large samples of logged lifts, so they describe people who train. Remember that first: an "intermediate" bench is intermediate among lifters, not among everyone.
Why is body weight part of it?
The weight on the bar tells you what you lifted. The ratio to body weight tells you what your body can move for its size. That is what changes when you train, and what you can compare between people. A squat of 1.5 times body weight means the same thing at any size. A 140 kg squat means something different depending on who lifted it.
It is also why gaining weight moves your ratio down even when the bar goes up. And why losing weight can move it up in a week when you lifted nothing new.
How do you read them honestly?
Follow 3 rules.
Compare types of lift, not single lifts
The useful signal is not "my bench is intermediate". It is "my pressing is intermediate and my deadlifting is novice", because that tells you what to train next. A big gap between 2 types of lift is the most useful thing a standards table gives you.
Ignore the label and watch the direction
Whether a table calls you novice or intermediate depends on whose table it is. Whether your ratio climbed over 3 months does not.
Do not treat them as a deadline
Standards describe a population, not a schedule. 2 people training the same way will pass the same mark months apart, and neither did anything wrong.
Where are the thresholds?
For lifters aged 18 to 29, the intermediate line in Trackist's table sits at these multiples of body weight for one rep:
| Lift | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Squat | 1.5x | 1x |
| Deadlift | 2x | 1.25x |
| Bench or another press | 1x | 0.65x |
| Pull-up or row | 1.1x | 0.75x |
Women's lines sit lower on every lift. That is why any table worth reading is split by sex. Age matters too: past the mid-20s every line drops a little each year, to 70% of these figures by 65.
The strength calculator shows all 5 levels, adjusts them for your age and scores your own lifts against them. Use the figures as a guide. Any table, ours included, is one reading of published data, not a law. The guides to the squat, bench press, deadlift and barbell row turn these lines into kilograms for common body weights.
When is the number useful?
It helps in 3 ways:
- It names your weakest type of lift. 4 categories, one clearly behind: that is the focus of your next plan, settled without argument.
- It shows progress the bar hides. Losing 4 kg of body weight while holding your lifts is progress a list of personal records will never show.
- It gives you a long-term direction in a hobby where weekly change is small and easy to miss.
When is it not useful?
It does not predict how you look, how healthy you are or whether you train well. A lifter at the bottom of a table who has trained every week for 4 months is doing better than one in the middle who has not been to the gym since March.
How Trackist measures it
Trackist's Strength Score uses this idea.
Trackist reads your best sets on the scored squat, hinge, push and pull lifts from the last 90 days. For each of the 4 categories, it takes your best estimated one-rep max in that window (the most you could lift once) and divides it by your body weight from your latest check-in. It places that ratio on a standards table for your sex and age band and turns it into a score from 0 to 100. The 4 scores are averaged.
A strict pull-up counts as a loaded set: once you log your body weight, Trackist reads it as your whole body weight plus anything you add.
2 details are worth knowing. Before your first logged set, Trackist seeds the score from your experience level and marks it as an estimate, so it starts somewhere sensible, not at zero. And sets older than 90 days drop out of the window, so the score can go down. A number that only ever rises is a decoration, not a measurement.
Strength Age starts from your age. It takes one year off for every Score point above the intermediate line for your age and sex, and adds half a year for every point below, within 18 to 70. It comes with one concrete next step: the category, the kilograms and the years they would take off. To move the number, read about progressive overload.
5.0 ON THE APP STORE · NO ADS
Log your next session in Trackist
Trackist writes a plan around your week and your gym, and suggests your next weight from the sets you logged. On the App Store now. Android is coming.
ANDROIDComing soon
5.0 ON THE APP STORE · NO ADS
Log your next session in Trackist
Trackist writes a plan around your week and your gym, and suggests your next weight from the sets you logged. On the App Store now. Android is coming.
