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Strength Standards Calculator
Enter your bodyweight and your best lifts to see where each one lands, from beginner to elite, for your bodyweight and sex. Add your age to see a second level for lifters your age.
Enter a bodyweight, then the one-rep max for each barbell lift you want graded. Pull-up, dip and pistol squat take the weight you ADD instead, so enter 0 for a strict rep. To grade a variation, such as a front squat or a power clean, pick it from the list in place of the lift's name. Levels are adjusted for bodyweight, so set the unit your bodyweight is in; lb and kg then give the same level. Age is optional: from 40 up, and for most ages under 24, each lift adds a line with its level for that age, and the main level stays the same. Try other ages or the other sex to compare.
What the levels mean
Every lift is scored as a multiple of your bodyweight, adjusted for bodyweight as explained below, then placed into one of five bands:
- Beginner: new to the movement or to training.
- Novice: a few months in, past the very first jumps.
- Intermediate: a committed recreational lifter with a year or two of consistent work.
- Advanced: strong for the general population, approaching competitive numbers.
- Elite: competitive-lifter territory for your bodyweight.
Each band is split into thirds, Low, Mid and High, by how far the lift sits between that band's entry and the next one, so a lift a little past the Intermediate entry reads Low Intermediate. The thirds never move a level. They show how far through a band you are, which matters because a band can take a long time to cross.
Strength standards tables
The thresholds the calculator uses, as multiples of bodyweight. Each number is where that level begins. The second line in each cell is the weight it comes to at the reference bodyweight: 88 kg (194 lb) for men and 67 kg (148 lb) for women, where the bodyweight adjustment changes nothing. For pull-up, dip and pistol squat it is the weight added on top of bodyweight.
Men
| Lift | Beginner | Novice | Intermediate | Advanced | Elite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Back Squat | 0.75×66 kg | 1.25×110 kg | 1.50×132 kg | 2.00×176 kg | 2.50×220 kg |
| Bench Press | 0.50×44 kg | 0.75×66 kg | 1.00×88 kg | 1.50×132 kg | 2.00×176 kg |
| Deadlift | 1.00×88 kg | 1.50×132 kg | 2.00×176 kg | 2.50×220 kg | 3.00×264 kg |
| Overhead Press | 0.35×31 kg | 0.55×48 kg | 0.80×70 kg | 1.10×97 kg | 1.40×123 kg |
| Barbell Row | 0.50×44 kg | 0.70×62 kg | 1.00×88 kg | 1.30×114 kg | 1.60×141 kg |
| Pull-up | 1.00×bodyweight | 1.20×+18 kg | 1.40×+35 kg | 1.65×+57 kg | 1.95×+84 kg |
| Dip | 1.00×bodyweight | 1.25×+22 kg | 1.50×+44 kg | 1.80×+70 kg | 2.15×+101 kg |
| Pistol Squat | 0.90×bodyweight | 1.12×+19 kg | 1.35×+40 kg | 1.62×+63 kg | 1.98×+95 kg |
| Snatch | 0.35×31 kg | 0.60×53 kg | 0.85×75 kg | 1.10×97 kg | 1.40×123 kg |
| Clean & Jerk | 0.50×44 kg | 0.80×70 kg | 1.10×97 kg | 1.40×123 kg | 1.75×154 kg |
Women
| Lift | Beginner | Novice | Intermediate | Advanced | Elite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Back Squat | 0.50×34 kg | 0.75×50 kg | 1.25×84 kg | 1.50×101 kg | 2.00×134 kg |
| Bench Press | 0.25×17 kg | 0.50×34 kg | 0.75×50 kg | 1.00×67 kg | 1.50×101 kg |
| Deadlift | 0.50×34 kg | 1.00×67 kg | 1.25×84 kg | 1.75×117 kg | 2.50×168 kg |
| Overhead Press | 0.20×13 kg | 0.35×23 kg | 0.50×34 kg | 0.75×50 kg | 1.00×67 kg |
| Barbell Row | 0.30×20 kg | 0.50×34 kg | 0.70×47 kg | 0.95×64 kg | 1.25×84 kg |
| Pull-up | 0.90×bodyweight | 1.05×+3 kg | 1.20×+13 kg | 1.40×+27 kg | 1.65×+44 kg |
| Dip | 0.85×bodyweight | 1.00×bodyweight | 1.20×+13 kg | 1.45×+30 kg | 1.70×+47 kg |
| Pistol Squat | 0.90×bodyweight | 1.08×+12 kg | 1.30×+27 kg | 1.53×+42 kg | 1.80×+60 kg |
| Snatch | 0.25×17 kg | 0.45×30 kg | 0.65×44 kg | 0.85×57 kg | 1.10×74 kg |
| Clean & Jerk | 0.35×23 kg | 0.60×40 kg | 0.85×57 kg | 1.10×74 kg | 1.40×94 kg |
Pull-up and dip count your whole bodyweight and a pistol squat 90 percent of it, plus anything added. Away from the reference bodyweight the barbell levels shift a little, as explained below, so use the calculator for your own numbers.
How these standards are calculated
This tool uses the same thresholds as Ægir Iron's Strength Level page, for the same ten lifts. It is a hybrid on purpose. The lower and middle bands (Beginner to Intermediate) are calibrated to a general gym population using bodyweight-multiple standards, so a committed recreational lifter reads "Intermediate," not "Novice." Basing the whole scale on competition data alone makes almost everyone look like a beginner. The upper bands (Advanced to Elite) reflect competitive lifters, consistent with published standards and competition data.
The upper bands have been checked against the competition data. Taking every raw lift in the OpenPowerlifting dataset (1,762,136 rows, best per lifter), the Advanced entry lands at roughly the median competitor and Elite between the 78th and 94th percentile of them. The bands were not moved to the raw 80th and 95th percentiles of that set: those are percentiles of people who enter meets, and applying them would push Advanced above where Elite sits today.
Scaled for bodyweight. Two large studies of drug-tested raw powerlifters showed relative strength falling with bodyweight at every level, faster for women in the squat and bench press (Montenegro et al., 2026, using about 100,000 lifters), and a total divided by bodyweight still strongly tied to body mass where DOTS is not (Fahey, 2026, using about 760,000 meet entries).
Barbell lifts are therefore graded against a scaled bodyweight. At 88 kg (194 lb) for men and 67 kg (148 lb) for women, the level is set by your one-rep max divided by your bodyweight. A lighter lifter needs a slightly higher multiple of bodyweight for the same level, and a heavier lifter a slightly lower one: a 2x bodyweight back squat is the Advanced entry at 88 kg, reads Intermediate for a 60 kg man and sits inside Advanced for a 120 kg man. In measuring how much to adjust from roughly 1.8 million raw OpenPowerlifting results, women's relative strength fell with bodyweight faster than men's, so their adjustment is larger. The multiple shown beside each lift is your lift divided by your bodyweight, before the adjustment. Pull-up, dip and pistol squat are not adjusted, because their scale starts at one strict rep of your own bodyweight.
Why this adjustment. Four ways to answer the research were compared, and the simplest one that fixes the problem was chosen:
- Scale bodyweight, keep the thresholds (the one used). One small change to the formula, and a lifter at the reference bodyweight grades exactly as before. On raw OpenPowerlifting results, a lift divided by bodyweight moves with bodyweight (a correlation of about −0.2 to −0.5 depending on lift and sex), and the adjusted grade brings every lift to within about ±0.13 of zero.
- Grade with DOTS instead. DOTS is a good score for a powerlifting total, but it is fitted to the total, so it cannot grade a single squat, and it says nothing about the press, row, snatch, clean & jerk, or the bodyweight movements. It is used for the powerlifting total instead.
- Look the top bands up in published percentile tables by weight class. Those tables cover the three powerlifts only and come from competitors alone. Using them for Advanced and Elite would push most lifters down a full band, and it would leave the lower bands with the same bias.
- Leave the method alone and document the bias. Two large studies agree on the direction and the fix is small, so the method was corrected instead.
Two limits. The adjustment is measured on people who enter meets, so its exact size for a typical gym lifter has not been measured, though the direction should hold. And one exponent per sex slightly under-corrects at the very top of the scale, where strength falls with bodyweight fastest, so levels there move a little less than the evidence suggests.
The two Olympic lifts have one further check. The Elite snatch threshold is 80% of the Elite clean & jerk threshold for men and 79% for women, close to a study of 2,994 elite lifters placing top ten at World Championships and Olympic Games between 1998 and 2018 (Flores and Redondo, 2020), which found that ratio to be about 80% for men and 82% for women.
They have also been checked against weightlifting meet results, the same way the powerlifts were checked against OpenPowerlifting. Among the adult lifters in the US results that OpenWeightlifting collects (about 33,000 men and 27,000 women, from club meets to nationals), the Advanced entry for the snatch and the clean & jerk lands near the 60th percentile and Elite between the 91st and 94th, so neither ladder moved. The same data shows the bodyweight adjustment holding for men. For women it leaves a heavier lifter graded slightly low on these two lifts, because women's weightlifting strength falls with bodyweight even faster than their powerlifting strength does. It was kept as it is, so that one adjustment per sex covers every barbell lift.
Variations. A variation is graded by converting it to the main lift it belongs to: a front squat counts as 0.85 of a back squat, a safety squat bar 0.9, a power clean 0.85 of a clean & jerk. The result shows the conversion with where its number came from, because most of them are Ægir Iron's coaching judgement rather than a published figure. The front squat's is the exception, a value inside the commonly reported range of 75 to 90 percent. The calculator offers the variations people most often have a max in, with the same factors the app uses. The app grades more of them from your logged training, and leaves a lift ungraded when the apparatus sets the number, or when you log a single dumbbell against a whole-barbell standard, rather than rate it wrongly.
Adjusted for age, if you ask. Enter an age and each lift gets a second level: how it compares with lifters of your age and sex. The main level never changes. Strength climbs through the teens, levels off in the early 20s, and falls from the mid 30s, by under 1 percent a year to 60 and faster after. The age factor is the typical lift at your age divided by the typical lift at 24 to 39, after the bodyweight adjustment, so from 24 to 39 it is 1 and the two levels match. A man's typical lift at 50 is about 90 percent of the 24 to 39 figure and at 60 about 82 percent; a woman's is about 89 percent at 50 and 80 percent at 60. Your lift is divided by that factor and graded on the same bands, so at about 88 kg bodyweight a 60-year-old man's 1.4x bodyweight squat, Novice on the main scale, reads Intermediate for his age.
The factors were measured on about 575,000 raw OpenPowerlifting results that record the lifter's age, one best per lifter per year of age, combining the squat, bench press and deadlift. The bench press ages slowest and the squat fastest, but one factor per sex covers every lift, the same choice as the bodyweight adjustment. The snatch and clean & jerk decline faster from the mid 40s, so they use their own factors, measured on the US masters results in OpenWeightlifting and brought onto the same 24 to 39 baseline. Under 16 there is no age level. The data runs out at 71 for men and 66 for women on the powerlifts, and at 77 and 72 on the Olympic lifts, and past that the last factor is kept, which may read a little low for an older lifter. Everyone in the data competes, so a 65-year-old in it is one who still enters meets, and the factors likely understate how much strength a typical older gym-goer has lost.
Sources: ExRx.net and Lon Kilgore's strength standards, which are the published tradition Ægir Iron's bands sit in rather than tables the bands were calculated from, OpenPowerlifting competition results (CC0), used to check the upper bands and to measure the bodyweight adjustment and the age factors rather than to set the bands, OpenWeightlifting meet results (public domain), used to check the snatch and clean & jerk upper bands, to test the bodyweight adjustment on those two lifts and to measure their age factors, Montenegro et al. (Sports Medicine Open, 2026) and Fahey (European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2026) on why a lift divided by bodyweight favours lighter lifters, the Universidad de León analysis (Flores and Redondo, 2020) of snatch to clean & jerk ratios in elite weightlifters, Winter's published body segment masses with Low's 88.52 percent estimate for how much of your bodyweight a pistol squat lifts (a pull-up and a dip count your whole bodyweight, because the whole body hangs), plus the DOTS (2019) coefficients and the IWF Sinclair coefficients for 2025-2028 (the tables published by the Alberta Weightlifting Association) used elsewhere in the app. The Male / Female toggle switches which standard you are compared against, and the Age field adds the level for an age.
References
Every published source this page relies on, with what each one is used for. The list comes straight from the bibliography inside the Ægir Iron app, so the calculator, this page and the app cite the same work.
- Method Kilgore L (2023). Strength Standard Tables (review draft for the book Barbell Sports). Kilgore Academy.
- The published tradition the Strength Level bands sit in, and the tables they are measured against. The bands are ours, not calculated from these tables
- Method ExRx.net (n.d.). Strength Standards. exrx.net.
- Publisher of the Kilgore standards, the published tradition the Strength Level bands sit in. The bands are ours, not calculated from these tables
- Dataset OpenPowerlifting project (n.d.). OpenPowerlifting meet results database (CC0). openpowerlifting.org.
- Checking the Advanced and Elite bands against what competitive lifters lift
- Measuring how strength scales with bodyweight, per sex, for the Strength Level adjustment
- Measuring how strength changes with age, per sex, for the age-adjusted Strength Level grade
- Dataset Meston E and contributors (n.d.). OpenWeightlifting meet results database (public domain). github.com/euanwm/OpenWeightlifting.
- Checking the snatch and clean and jerk Advanced and Elite bands against what competitive weightlifters lift, and testing whether the bodyweight adjustment holds for those two lifts
- Measuring how the snatch and clean and jerk change with age, from the US masters bands, for the age-adjusted Strength Level grade
- Study Montenegro S, Wicker P, Wiedenmann T, Rappelt L, Donath L (2026). Percentile-Based Normative Standards for Strength Assessment Beyond Linear Bodyweight Multipliers in Competitive Powerlifters. Sports Med Open. 2026;12(1):136.
- Relative strength falls with bodyweight at every percentile (faster for women in the squat and bench), so Strength Level grades against a scaled bodyweight
- Study Fahey TD (2026). Body-mass normalization of powerlifting performance: development and independent validation of sex- and age-specific regression-residual scores. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2026.
- Why DOTS and IPF GL are the fairest of the meet scores: the least tied to bodyweight in 760,048 meet entries
- Why Strength Level grades against a scaled bodyweight: a plain bodyweight multiple still correlates about 0.47 with body mass
- Study Flores FJ, Redondo JC (2020). Analysis of the percentage ratio between the weight lifted in the snatch and in the clean and jerk by international elite weightlifters. Int J Adv Res. 2020;8(4):901-905.
- A consistency check between the two Olympic Elite bands: the snatch runs about 80 percent of the clean and jerk for men and 82 for women
- The program wizard's check that a snatch is not lagging its clean and jerk (0.81, the midpoint of the two)
- Book Winter DA (2009). Biomechanics and Motor Control of Human Movement (segment mass tables). Wiley.
- Summing body segment masses to estimate the share of you a movement lifts, where nobody has measured it
- Method Low S (n.d.). Estimates by the math: a general comparison of barbell squats to pistol squats. Eat Move Improve (online).
- A pistol squat lifts about 88.5 percent of bodyweight
- With Winter, the 0.90 bodyweight fraction the Strength Level pistol band is graded on
- Method DOTS formula (2019). DOTS relative strength score for powerlifting. Formula coefficients (2019).
- Relative strength score on the Meets chart, the share card and Strength Level
- Method International Weightlifting Federation (2025). Sinclair coefficients, 2025-2028 Olympiad (men's and women's tables). Published by the Alberta Weightlifting Association, hosted by the Polish Weightlifting Federation.
- Weightlifting relative strength on the Meets chart, the meet form and Strength Level
The numbers that are our own
None of the sources above sets a band. These three are Ægir Iron's judgement, anchored to the work named beside them:
- Strength Level band thresholds: Five bodyweight multiples per lift per sex, Beginner through Elite, on a 0.25 or 0.05 grid. Anchored to Kilgore strength standards, ExRx.net strength standards.
- Strength Level bodyweight scaling: Barbell lifts graded against reference^(1 - b) x bodyweight^b, with b = 2/3 for men and 1/2 for women, references 88 kg and 67 kg. Anchored to Montenegro et al. 2026, Fahey 2026, OpenPowerlifting.
- Strength Level age-adjusted grade: Graded ratio divided by a per-sex age factor: 1 from 24 to 39, a junior curve from 16 to 23, a masters curve from 40 (0.90 men and 0.89 women at 50), with its own masters curve for the snatch and clean and jerk. Anchored to OpenPowerlifting, OpenWeightlifting.
Every source behind every number in the app, beyond strength standards, is on the research page.
Common questions
What are strength standards? They express a lift as a multiple of bodyweight and sort it from beginner to elite, so you can compare your lifts against typical lifters of your bodyweight and sex instead of judging a raw number alone.
What counts as intermediate or advanced? It depends on the lift, your bodyweight, and your sex. Roughly, for men an intermediate back squat is about 1.5x bodyweight and advanced about 2x; bench press about 1x and 1.5x. Enter your numbers above for the exact level.
How are the levels calculated? Your one-rep max divided by bodyweight is placed against five per-sex thresholds per lift, hybrid-calibrated and adjusted for bodyweight as described above.
Do they account for age? If you enter one. The main level adjusts for bodyweight and sex, and an age adds a second level for lifters your age, as described above.
Why not just use DOTS? DOTS scores a powerlifting total, so it cannot grade one lift on its own or any lift outside the big three. It is still the right score for the total, and the app shows it there.