Strength Standards

Strength Standards: what are they?

A client who deadlifts 140 kg has no idea whether that is good, and "good" is not a coaching answer. Strength standards exist to fill that gap: they place a lift on a scale so the client can see the road ahead rather than a number in a vacuum. What they are not is a scientific instrument. Every published standard is built from a particular dataset - competition results, gym-app submissions, a training population - and those populations differ enough that two respected tables can put the same lift two classifications apart.

The classification tiers

Most systems use five levels, sometimes six. The labels are broadly consistent across sources even when the numbers behind them are not, and the descriptions below are what the levels are trying to capture.

How to use them well

Use standards to set the next target, not to hand out a verdict. The useful sentence is "you are here, and the next level for someone your bodyweight is about this much - that is a realistic six-month project." The useless sentence is "you are intermediate."

Use one source and stay on it. Because different tables are built on different populations, mixing them produces contradictions that undermine the client's trust in the whole exercise. Write down which table you use and apply it to everyone.

• Anchor the standard to bodyweight and sex; unscaled tables mislead badly at both ends.
• Compare the same lift, same equipment, same depth and same rules across retests.
• Say out loud that the classification is a rough context, not a grade.
• Look at the profile across lifts. A big deadlift with a weak press tells you what to program next.

What the standards miss

Every table hides the assumptions in the dataset it was fitted to. Standards drawn from competition results describe people who chose to compete and trained specifically for it, so they run high. Standards drawn from app submissions describe people who chose to log a number they were happy with, which biases in another direction. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.

They also ignore lever lengths, training age, injury history, technique standards and equipment. A deep, pause-free, competition-legal squat and a high-bar squat to parallel with a belt and knee sleeves are not the same lift, and comparing them against the same table is meaningless.

A better use: the strength profile

The highest-value output from running standards across a client's main lifts is not the individual classification, it is the shape. If someone sits at intermediate on the deadlift and novice on the overhead press, you have just found the next training block without any guesswork.

The same logic applies to left-right and push-pull balance, and to the gap between upper and lower body. Clients respond well to seeing this laid out, because it turns an abstract programme into an obvious plan: here is the thing that is lagging, here is what we are doing about it.