How Strong Should You Be? Strength Standards, Honestly

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, usually labelled beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced and elite. They are expressed as a ratio to body weight, because a 60 kg lifter and a 100 kg lifter benching the same weight are not equally strong.

They come from large samples of logged lifts, and they describe people who train. That is the first thing to hold onto: an "intermediate" bench is intermediate among lifters, not among humans.

Why body weight is in the equation

Absolute load says what left the floor. Relative load says what your body can move for its size, which is what changes when you train and what you can compare across people. A 1.5 times body weight squat means something specific at any weight; 140 kg means something different depending on who lifted it.

This is also why gaining weight moves the ratio down even when the bar goes up, and why losing weight can move it up on a week you lifted nothing new.

How to read them without lying to yourself

Three rules.

Compare patterns, not lifts. The useful signal is not "my bench is intermediate". It is "my push is intermediate and my hinge is novice", because that tells you what to program next. A big gap between two patterns is the most actionable thing a standards table gives you.

Ignore the label, watch the direction. Whether the table calls you novice or intermediate depends on whose table it is. Whether your ratio climbed over three months does not.

Do not use them as a target on a deadline. Standards describe a population, not a schedule. Two people training identically will pass the same threshold months apart, and neither of them did anything wrong.

Roughly where the thresholds sit

For a rough orientation on the four big patterns, for a trained adult, expressed as a multiple of body weight for a single heavy effort:

Women's thresholds sit lower on upper-body pressing and closer on lower-body work, which is why any table worth reading is split by sex, and why age bands matter after about 40.

Treat those figures as orientation. Any specific table, ours included, is one reading of published data and not a law.

Where the number is genuinely useful

• It names your weak pattern. Four categories, one clearly behind: that is your next block's emphasis, decided without an argument.
• It shows progress that the bar hides. Losing 4 kg of body weight while holding your lifts is progress that a personal-record list will never show you.
• It gives a long-term direction in a hobby where week-to-week change is small and easy to miss.

Where it is not useful

It does not predict how you look, how healthy you are, or whether you are training well. A lifter at the bottom of a table who has trained consistently for four months is doing better than one in the middle who has not been in the gym since March.

How Trackist measures it

Trackist has a Strength Score built on exactly this idea, and it is free on every tier.

It reads every loaded set of the last 90 days and sorts them into four categories: squat, hinge, push and pull. For each, it takes your best estimated one-rep max in that window and divides it by your current body weight from your latest check-in. That ratio is placed against a standards table for your sex and age band, interpolated into a score from 0 to 100, and the four are averaged.

Two details worth knowing. Before your first logged set the score is seeded from your experience level and marked as an estimate, so it starts somewhere sensible rather than at zero. And sets older than 90 days leave the window, which means the score can go down — a number that only ever rises is a decoration, not a measurement.

Strength Age turns the same ratio into the age at which the median trained person of your sex and weight has your strength, with one concrete next step attached: the category, the kilograms and the years it buys.

Download Trackist free on the App Store, or read about progressive overload, which is how the number moves.