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. 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, roughly?

Here is a rough guide for the 4 big types of lift, for a trained adult, as a multiple of body weight for one heavy rep. In the table, squat means squats, hinge means lifts that bend at the hips like the deadlift, push means presses like the bench, and pull means rows and pull-ups.

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

Use these figures as a rough guide. Any table, ours included, is one reading of published data, not a law.

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 every loaded set from the last 90 days and sorts them into 4 categories: squat, hinge, push and pull. For each one, 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.

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 turns the same ratio into the age at which the median trained person of your sex and weight has your strength. 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.