Strength standards

Often people will want to know “am I strong?” The answer is “strong for what?” What is “strong” for a soccer player will be a limp dishrag to a competitive powerlifter. I think of strength levels in terms of the person's goals, and how it affects how they look, feel and perform. The chart below lays it out, this is how things look in a community gym, in an athletics club or strength centre they'd look different. This chart applies to adults under 50 years old with no major health issues, medals and certificates are given to my clients when they achieve these levels.

Level		Overhead	DL	HV	PU	weekly	invested	diet/rest
Bronze	everyday	50%	100%	1	20	1-6hr	1-6 months	both okay
Silver	sports	67%	150%	5	40	4-10hr	3-12 months	one good
Gold	strength sports	75%	200%	10	75	8-16hr	6-24 months	both good

Everyday strength is what you need for day-to-day life.

• Looks - unless you were really squishy or puny your physique won't change much, though your posture will improve.
• Feeling - the ordinary aches and pains people get from sitting around at work and the like will tend to disappear, it won't fix actual medical issues but will sometimes mitigate them, your feelings of general vitality will have improved a lot.
• Performance - able to put things on high shelves, turn mattresses over, change tyres, shift refrigerators, participate in recreational sports without fear of straining anything. Friends will know you as “that strong person” and ask you to help them move house.

Sports strength is what you need to do well in serious sports, or for a job requiring serious physical work, like labourer, infantry soldier, fireman, etc. This is about as far as you can go if you also want to run marathons. 

• Looks – nobody will have to ask you if you work out. People will check you out in the gym and notice your lifts.
• Feeling – you will rarely get sick, though in the course of getting this strength you might have pushed too hard or used poor technique and got an injury or two. You will usually feel good physically, and are much less likely to be injured during your sport.
• Performance – everyday physical tasks are easy for you, if you have any sports skills at all you'll be one of the better players on the team, friends will ask you to help them move house or do the landscape gardening and then go and have a coffee while you do it.

Strength sports are those where being strong is a major part, not only powerlifting and weightlifting, but rugby, wrestling and so on.

• Looks – you will stand out as well-built even if dressed, everyone in the gym will know who you are, and newbies will ask your advice, follow it for half a session and then ignore it.
• Feeling – your health and wellbeing will change often, sometimes feeling great, other times being hit with illness and injuries; few people get to a double bodyweight deadlift and stay there or higher for years without getting run down from constant hard training or without hurting something.
• Performance – with sports skills you'll stand out and could turn professional, provided there are enough places in your chosen sport. However this would only be beginning strength for strength-specific sports.

DEFINITIONS

The standards are based on lifts. The overhead is simply getting the weight overhead, whether by a strict press, push press, snatch or whatever. The deadlift a conventional or sumo barbell deadlift. A heave is a chinup, pullup, etc – whatever hand-facing and grip width you care to use is fine, but it must be from dead hang; a pushup is, believe it or not, a pushup.

The standards are minimums, and all four must be achieved for the level to be attained; if you bench more than you deadlift and cannot do a single chinup, then you lack balance in your strength and physique and will be prone to injury and looking silly. As well, we are interested in lasting strength; if someone deadlifts twice their bodyweight once and then never again, they can't be Gold.

Weekly means the total time which must be spent on training each week to achieve these lifts; maintaining them will require 1/3 to 1/2 this time, though in practice people aiming to "just maintain" tend to go backwards instead. This is time training, not time spent wandering around the gym looking at the hot chick on the cross-trainer or the hot guy doing chinups, or sitting reading the paper between sets of lat pulldowns, or chatting to the bros between sets of cheat curls. The overlapping ranges of the times are due to different levels of natural talent, age, diet and so on.

Invested means how many months are required for a dedicated newbie to achieve this level. Most people will never achieve even Bronze level, because they don't apply consistent effort over time, instead doing pointless exercises, constantly changing workouts, not progressing the resistance, and generally buggerising about. But a dedicated person who uses correct technique over a full range of motion and progresses the resistance will take this amount of time to do it.

Diet/Rest refers to how switched-on the person has to be to achieve this. You can get Bronze level with an ordinary diet and rest (though not poor diet and rest), to achieve Silver at least one of the two must be good, for Gold both must be good. Someone with both a poor diet and rest may briefly achieve some of the lifts at a higher level, but won't achieve them all, and their lifts won't be lasting – a year from now they won't be as strong, they'll have fallen back due to inconsistent training or injury.

EXCUSES

“But David Beckham doesn't deadlift twice his bodyweight!”

Are you David Beckham? Spectacular skill makes up for ordinary strength, so that some sportspeople can get away with not being very strong. However, people with ordinary or merely good sports skills need strength to help them. Many sports teams lack a proper strength and conditioning programme; they usually lose matches and have players frequently out due to injuries.

“But I'm small!” “Yeah! And I'm big!”

The three barbell lifts are given in proportion to bodyweight, since that is how people see things in everyday life and sports. Nobody expects a 50kg person to lift as much as a 100kg person, nor will there be many 50kg rugby fullbacks or 100kg soccer midfielders. If you are underweight for your height and frame and so find these lifts difficult, eat and get bigger. If you are overweight and so see these lifts as impossible, eat less, get smaller, then as you drop weight from your frame you can add weight to the bar. 

“But I'm a girl! And I'm old!”

The lifts are in proportion to bodyweight, and women tend to be smaller than men. Of course, men have more lean mass than women which lets them lift more. So we'd expect the men to do more reps of the same weight than could a woman. As for age, age causes surprisingly little decline in current and potential strength. The biggest factor is years of being sedentary, and whether there is consistent effort over time. 


Younger people and men can expect to be on the lower side of the invested time to achieve the lifts, older people and women the higher side. However, individuals vary more than do genders, ages, etc. And the biggest variation is whether people are willing to put in the hours each week, the months of training, of good food and rest. Most aren't.

As personal training clients I have a 49 year old woman with low-grade multiple sclerosis who in six months and 52 sessions has achieved all of Bronze except the heaves, I had a physically healthy 23 year old man who will never achieve any of them; the difference is that she applied consistent effort over time and he would not.

THE MEDALS

When my PT clients achieve the lifts two sessions in a row, I give them a medal and a certificate. One day when I was giving one out, another trainer saw it and said, "but doing a chinup is really hard for a woman!"
"Yes, that's why I give them a medal for it."
"You should lower the standards."
I'm 40, she's 20, we're different generations and have different experiences of receiving recognition for achievements. 
Some from the black iron gym world will scoff at the idea of people getting a tinny medal and certificate for such lifts. I would suggest they take a look around their local mainstream commercial and community gyms and see how many people can achieve them. 

CONCLUSION

That (for example) Gold level requires 8-16 hours a week 6-24 months does not mean that everyone who has gone to the gym for 90 minutes a day six days a week for two years is Gold level. They might have spent two years walking slowly on the treadmill watching Oprah, doing crunches on the Swiss ball, half-squats in the Smith machine or doing six different kinds of curls with their bros.

The strength standards chart gives a reasonable expectation of the results a dedicated person can get in the gym given the time and effort they put into progressive resistance training and improving their diet and rest. It works. Do it.