Strength Score

Instructions

Enter your sex, body weight and optionally age and body fat %. For each category, pick an exercise and enter your best recent set or straight sets. You don't have to fill in every category, but it's recommended since your overall strength score is based off of all four. Sets should be less than 5 and reps should be less than 10 for most accurate results. In addition, be sure your weight units match your body weight units. Mixing units will skew results significantly.

Lever/Planche Instructions

If you're looking to find your score using an exercise like the front lever, back lever, or planche there's a little extra work you'll have to do. First, you'll need to use the Lever/Planche Moment Calculator to find the moment at the shoulder joint based on the progression step that you're using. This moment gets entered as the weight value on this page. Next, since these exercises are isometric, you'll need to convert your hold time into reps. A simple estimation is that two seconds equals one rep, so divide how ever many seconds you held the exercise for by 2 and enter that as the reps value. When reading the results on the generated standards table, remember that the lever results will be significantly higher than the other exercises since they are the moment about the shoulder, not in weight like the others.

What does my score mean?

Your strength score shows how strong you are relative to your sex, body weight, age, and body fat %. By accounting for many of the main determinants of strength potential, it can be used to directly compare your strength development to almost anyone other person. Scores range from 0 to 100, with 100 representing a world record performance. Scores are also split out into ranks to give a better idea of your level of strength compared to the general population.

Strength Ranks

The primary purpose of the ranks is to help with setting realistic goals and give you some benchmarks to work towards. The time frames for each rank are fairly broad as there are many factors that affect the development of strength. However, they assume that you're generally healthy, with no underlying conditions or injuries and have the mobility to perform all the exercises correctly. They also assume that your diet is reasonably good and that your training is both consistent and effective.

Why should I use these strength standards?

They are designed to be more accurate, objective, balanced, and representative of average strength development than other strength standards.

Accuracy: To accurately account for body weight, these standards factor in the allometric relationship between body weight and strength. Essentially, as body weight increases, strength does too, but just not as quickly. So someone who weighs 10% more is not expected to be 10% stronger. That means that the commonly used strength to body weight ratios are largely inaccurate for comparing relative strength development. A 200lb person with a 1xBW bench is further along in their strength development than a 120lb person with a 1xBW bench even though their ratios are the same.

To further improve accuracy, the standards account for actual weight. This is the total amount of weight lifted, including bodyweight and added weight. For example, when you perform a squat, you're lifting a percentage of your body weight plus any added weight. That means if a 200lb person does a squat with 135 lbs, they're actually lifting about 280 lbs. Factoring this in improves the accuracy of one rep max calculations for exercises that move a significant portion of body weight, especially at the lower ranks. Despite being calculated using actual weight, all the numbers shown in the table are added weight.

Objectivity: The standards for each exercise are determined one of two ways. The first way is by setting the upper limit using the world record. Being able to set the rankings based on different percentages of the world record would be ideal. However, due to the nature of some lifts, this doesn't end up being realistic or supporting balanced strength development. For example, 50% of the world record squat is significantly harder than 50% of the world record pull up. In order to keep things balanced, a lower limit is set for each exercise based on where the average untrained trainee starts.

Balance: The second way the standards for an exercise can be set is by using the exercise's ratio to another related exercise. This is necessary because many exercises don't have official or well documented world records. While this method is more subjective, the use of ratios helps the standards represent a balanced development of strength while still being reasonably objective.

Representative: Each rank is intended to represent a different time period in a trainee's development of strength. The increase in weight between each rank is equal. However, each rank coincides with an increasingly longer time to reach than the last. This lines up with the decreasing rate of strength development as trainees get more advanced.

What don't these standards account for?

The standards specifically don't account for two factors: height and lean body mass. Incorporating these would significantly change the meaning of the standards. Rather than showing how strong someone is based on their body weight, they would show how good someone is at using whatever amount of muscle they have. While this is certainly interesting, separating out the lean body mass portion of strength development is not the aim of these standards.

The Fitness Score System

Strength is just one of the components of physical fitness. For more score calculators like this, check out the resources page to find your cardio score, body composition score, and more. The different component scores are designed to be comparable to each other as well. This means you can compare how you strength stacks up against your cardiovascular endurance. As part of our highly customizable workout tracking, these scores are automatically calculated and can be seen on your fitness dashboard.