If you don’t know what allometric scaling is, or if you want to learn more about allometric scaling’s usefulness for determining someone’s relative strength, check out this article.
One more note before we dive in: As consistent Stronger By Science readers are aware, I’m very fond of allometric scaling for normalizing strength to body size as opposed to more commonly used methods such as strength to bodyweight ratios or Wilks scores, so that’s what I’ll be using in this article. For the purposes of this article, I’m only looking at the raw, open class results – with 7,444 discrete results for men and 4,844 for women over the past 4 years, this is a huge, informative, and (surprisingly) clean dataset.
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Since this is about how to get stronger for powerlifting, I don’t think you could find a dataset much better or more useful than “all competition results for the largest federation in the world.” Obviously, “all drug-tested results from all federations” would be better, but in sticking with one fed, that helps control for slightly different rules and equipment, different degrees of rule enforcement, etc. The complete 2012-2015 spreadsheets are on the website, and /u/ferruix on Reddit helped me get a clean copy of the 2016 results (by the way, if you want to see up-to-date, sortable meet results across all powerlifting federations, you need to check out his site OpenPowerlifting. Recently, however, I realized that the USAPL has all of its results online and easy to access. With over 1,800 survey responses, I’m quite confident in the data (and it matches my own observations quite well), but since the sampling was non-random and the lifts were self-reported, there’s a chance that some of the people may have lied about lifts, or that the sort of people who’d respond to a survey like that are fundamentally different from people who wouldn’t respond. The strength goals laid out in that article were based on a survey I sent out to my readers. My next stab was this article, which I still think is pretty solid, but which some folks took exception with. It was still a useful article because it provided a scoring system for each lift based on actual data, but I knew I could improve upon it. The problem with this approach is that there’s probably more that separates elite lifters from day-to-day folks than just lean body mass (such as muscle attachment points, normalized muscle force, and many other factors discussed here). It took a theoretical approach, based on data showing the relationship between lean body mass and strength in elite powerlifters. The first time I addressed strength standards was in this article.
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