Strength standards: how do you know if you’re strong?

What is your strength level?

Your strength level is your max compared with everyone else’s, from beginner to elite. Benchmarks exist: from 809,986 raw, drug-tested competition entries, researchers calculated them for the squat, bench press and deadlift by sex, age and weight class, from the 10th to the 90th percentile (van den Hoek et al., 2024).

These levels are still rough. In 393 adults aged 16 to 64, from beginners to elite strength competitors, age, body weight and height all weighed on their max in those three lifts; and sorting people into levels lumped very different strengths into the same level (Isenmann et al., 2026).

Why does a heavier body lift more, but less per kilo?

The catch is your body weight. A muscle’s strength depends mostly on its cross-section, its surface measured across; your weight, on your whole volume. And a bigger body is wider, but also longer: its volume grows faster than its cross-section, the way a cube grows faster than its face. So theory predicts that being twice as heavy makes you about 1.6 times stronger, not twice (Montenegro et al., 2026).

Across six muscle groups, strength measured without movement followed that prediction on average, with fairly large differences from one person to the next (Jaric et al., 2002). So the heavier you are, the more you lift, but the less for each kilo of body weight.

Twice as heavy, twice as strong?

No. Researchers pooled the results of 457,471 strength competitors aged 20 to 35 (308,743 men, 148,728 women), competing raw in drug-tested federations. Their total, the sum of squat, bench press and deadlift, rises with body weight, but much more slowly: twice as heavy, they lifted on average about 1.5 times more in men and 1.4 times more in women, even less than theory. Body weight explained only 30% of the differences in total in men and 18% in women: from one person to the next, the differences stay large (Montenegro et al., 2026).

Among the very best, the 20 biggest totals in history in each weight class, that extra is even smaller. For the authors, it’s probably because past a certain amount of muscle, the extra kilos hold proportionally more fat and water: a hypothesis, not a measurement. It’s an analysis of competition results, not an experiment, and drug testing doesn’t guarantee that everyone was clean (Montenegro et al., 2026).

Should you divide your load by your body weight?

People think dividing your load by your weight fixes it: in fact, it favors the lightest. Since load grows more slowly than weight, that ratio drops as weight goes up (Montenegro et al., 2026). To compare strength, a review also recommends a correction that follows the square-cube rule rather than a simple division (Jaric, 2002).

Across 760,048 raw, drug-tested competition entries, the “load divided by body weight” score stayed clearly tied to body weight (average correlation 0.47 for adult totals), far more than scoring formulas such as Wilks, DOTS or Goodlift, between 0.06 and 0.1 (Fahey, 2026).

That’s why competitions sort lifters into weight classes: you win in kilos, within your class, and a formula is only used to compare athletes across classes (Montenegro et al., 2026). In 1999, the international federation (IPF) was already adjusting its results for body weight with the Wilks formula, since maximal strength varies with body mass (Vanderburgh and Batterham, 1999).

Who should you compare your max with?

To place yourself, compare your max with people of your weight and your sex. Sex matters on top of weight: in 65 weightlifters, men stayed stronger than women even after accounting for body weight and height (Stone et al., 2005). But both progress at the same pace: across nearly 1,900 competitors followed between 2003 and 2018, women and men gained strength alike, in kilos and relative to body weight, and the strongest men at the start progressed more slowly (Latella et al., 2020; Latella et al., 2022).

And the only person with your exact body is you: your age, weight and height all weigh on your max (Isenmann et al., 2026). So compare yourself with you, a few months ago. That’s advice drawn from these studies, not a tested result.