Part of the data ring
WHITELIGHTS

Real judged lifts. Zero self-reported numbers. This is what strong actually is.

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Standards from lifts that counted.

Every number here comes from a barbell lift performed on a competition platform and passed by referees — 1,818,459 of them, from 443 federations. Find out exactly where yours sits.

Find your percentile →

SOURCE · OpenPowerlifting — 1,818,459 judged results, 443 federations · SNAPSHOT 2026-07-25

Intermediate Advanced Elite World-class 0255075100 5080110140170200 kg lifted →
kg

Percentile

29,914 judged bench presses, men, 82.5–87.5 kg

No lift entered. The curve is every judged bench presses in this class — add yours to it.

SOURCE·Judged competition results (OpenPowerlifting)·29,914 judged bench presses, men, 82.5–87.5 kg·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Not your class?

Showing men at 82.5–87.5 kg bodyweight — the most common class in the dataset. Pick your own lift, sex and bodyweight →

The data

Judged results

1,818,459

Lifters

580,559

Federations

443

Years covered

1964–2026

Every one of them a lift performed on a competition platform and passed by referees. Snapshot 2026-07-25.

SOURCE·Judged competition results (OpenPowerlifting)·Snapshot 2026-07-25 · 3,991,443 rows read, 1,818,459 raw results used·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Every strength standard on the internet is built from numbers people typed into a phone. Not one of these is.

580,559 LIFTERS · 443 FEDERATIONS · THREE REFEREES PER LIFT · REVIEWED JUL 2026

From 1.8 million judged lifts to one percentile

  1. Take only judged lifts. Every row is an attempt performed on a competition platform in front of three referees. Anything from a phone, a survey or a training log is not in the archive at all.
  2. Drop equipped lifts. Raw only — no squat suits, no bench shirts. A suit is worth tens of kilos and would silently inflate every figure on the page.
  3. Count each lifter once, at their best. Somebody who competes twenty times is one data point, not twenty, so the curve is a population of people rather than a population of meets.
  4. Split by sex and 5 kg bodyweight class, then by age band. A lift is a different achievement at 60 kg and at 120 kg, so a single national average would be an average of two different questions.
  5. Sort the class and read off the 99 cut points. Your percentile is the position of your lift in that sorted list — not a score, a rank against named people.
  6. Publish nothing thin. A slice with fewer than 500 lifters is not given a page: its tails would be noise dressed as a standard.
percentile(x)  =  100 × count(best_raw ≤ x) ÷ n

  class   =   sex  ×  5 kg bodyweight bucket  [ ×  age band ]
  n       =   lifters in that class, each counted once, at their best
  x       =   your lift, in kilograms

  band    =   01–19  novice        50–79  advanced      95–99  world class
              20–49  intermediate  80–94  elite

The full method, including what is excluded and why →

Why these numbers are different

Ask the internet what an average bench press is and you will get an answer built from numbers people typed into a training app. Nobody checked them. Nobody watched the lift. There is no depth requirement in a phone.

Every figure on this site comes from the OpenPowerlifting archive: 1,818,459 results from 443 federations, each one a lift that three referees watched and passed. The database is contributed to the public domain, so you can download it and check our arithmetic.

We count each lifter once, at their best, so somebody who competes twenty times does not count twenty times. We use raw lifts only, because a squat suit is worth 50 kg and would silently inflate every number on the page. Who these numbers describe. Everyone in this dataset entered a powerlifting competition. They are stronger than the general gym population, so a 50th percentile here is well above an average gym-goer — we would rather tell you that than quietly flatter you. Nobody has ever published a trustworthy random sample of what people lift in commercial gyms; what exists instead is app data that people type in themselves.

The full method, including what we exclude and why →

See all 10 sites in this family, with what each one answers

Published by

Amit Sharma

Auckland real-estate agent and marketer. Builds free, sourced data tools.