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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. A raw number means little on its own; a level tells you how you actually stack up. Works in pounds or kilograms, no signup.
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. Levels are unit-agnostic (a bodyweight multiple), so lb or kg give the same level.
What the levels mean
Every lift is scored as a multiple of your bodyweight, 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.
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 since been checked against the competition data rather than assumed. 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, which is what those two words should mean on a scale whose lower bands are a gym population. We deliberately did not move the bands 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.
The two Olympic lifts carry one further check. Our Elite snatch sits at 80% of our Elite clean & jerk, matching a study of 2,994 elite lifters placing top ten at World Championships and Olympic Games between 1998 and 2018, which found that ratio to be about 80% for men and 82% for women.
The app goes further than this calculator in one way. It grades your variations too, by converting each one 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 Bulgarian split squat 0.55. Each conversion is labelled on the lift with where its number came from, because most of them are our own coaching judgement rather than a published figure and you should be able to tell which is which. Lifts where the apparatus sets the number, or where you log a single dumbbell against a whole-barbell standard, are left ungraded rather than rated wrongly.
Sources: ExRx.net strength standards, Lon Kilgore's strength standards, OpenPowerlifting competition data (CC0), the Universidad de León analysis of snatch to clean & jerk ratios in elite weightlifters, plus the DOTS (2019) and IWF Sinclair coefficients used elsewhere in the app. The Male / Female toggle switches which standard you are compared against.
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 as described above.
Do they account for age? No, bodyweight and sex only.