Hi folks, welcome back to the Stronger Is Better podcast brought to you by Starting Strength Gems. What I'm going to talk to you about today is basically how strong should you be. Strength standards, however you want to think about it, but it's a pretty common question or pretty common concern for folks to ask what should be my goals or what numbers should I aim for. And on top of that, a lot of people have skewed ideas about where their ultimate potential is or what they should be striving for, usually because they don't have a frame of reference. So people will default to looking at strength standards, whether it's on a website, different organizations may have strength standards, organizations that may appeal to you. based on your hobbies or your, your career or your goals. So what I want to do is kind of go through why having a strength standard or an idea or a goal in mind in terms of numbers on the bar is important, but also how to think about these things realistically, because it's pretty easy. for discussions or even, even documented strength standards for organizations or for teams to get pretty silly when they're not rooted in good fundamental thinking. Okay. So, uh, basically if you've asked yourself, how much can I lift or how much should I lift? This is what we'll be discussing. All right. And where that, where that answer comes from is obviously going to depend on who you're asking and that individual's background and their frame of reference. So my. intent today is going to be to try to explain from my point of view, perspective as clearly as possible where my answer to that question would come from and how you may want to consider the response to that question for yourself. So we've already established the importance of increasing strength, and I won't rehash the whole thing again, but increased strength means larger muscles, increased ability to produce force, increased force production, and how you best acquire that is through strength training, and the most efficient way to improve. force production capacity is using a barbell and so on, right? So all of the stuff about why we do things the way we do them and why the best use of your time outside of your chosen hobbies, activities, or sports in the gym is going to be with a barbell, increasing weight on the bar as often as possible, okay? Stated. Stated in the simplest possible terms. So if you're... If you're on board with that, and most people are, the next kind of logical thing that will happen, aside from learning how to do the lifts and all the technical questions that may come along with the execution of the lifts, coaching, and so on, for the person who's actually training, for the coach who's actually training, the sort of next thing to think about is what am I trying to get out of this and where should this be headed? Okay, so I've already discussed how the weight on the bar serves as the best, it's not even a proxy, but it serves as the best measurement for your ability to produce force, therefore the best measurement of your strength, and also the best measurement of progress along this program. So it's natural to wonder where should I quote unquote end up or where should I aim, what number should I aim for? Throughout this process. OK, now the real simplest answer is, unfortunately, it depends on a lot of factors. Right. And the other part of the real answer is that it's going to be determined almost completely by your ability to stick with this very hard process of adding weight to the bar and doing all the things that are required outside of the gym in order to continue training productively. OK, so we're going to have to assume a couple of things in order to have a productive discussion about how strong should you be and strength standards in general. So so you have to consider the factors that are going to contribute to continued productive training under the bar. So in an optimized strength training program, it's not only about doing the correct. Correct program based on your level of training advancement or. you know, a program that takes advantage of your training advancement, it's not only that, it's also, or even more so, all the things that contribute to the success of that program. So if we're going to have a productive discussion about how strong you should be, then you can't forget about all of that stuff. Okay, so I'm going to set that aside for a minute. And let's, assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that at least most of those factors will be accounted for or taken care of, right? So in other words, what you want to accomplish, or what you what somebody thinks you can accomplish, is going to have to be informed by, not only the program that you're doing, but also whether or not you're able to stick to that. program. And then also whether or not you are adhering to the requirements of that program and to the recovery aspects of that program. Okay, so in other words, are you considering all the all of the challenges that you're going to have to deal with? And then also, are you considering, trade offs in your particular situation based on what you want? So, for example, and this is a pretty obvious example, if you started training at the age of 55, the strength standards or the expected outcome for you is going to be different from somebody who starts training at the age of 17 or 18, right? That's kind of obvious. If you are a strength athlete or you want to be a strength athlete, that number, those numbers that you're going to be chasing are going to be different from somebody who is doing a different sport, definitely something like a high endurance activity like marathon running or long distance cycling, and then everything in between, right? So all of those things need to be considered. So I'll try to speak as generally as possible and as big picture as possible so that... You can figure out where your particular situation lies and then how you should be thinking about these goals, okay? So again, let me go back to the real answer. So the real answer is... So this whole thing is going to be sort of a moving target. So that means that it's definitely okay to have a target that you're looking for, but also realizing that that's going to be a moving target depending on all of these factors that I've just covered. So you may get there faster. You may get there slower. Depending on your experience and your frame of reference, your goals may be unrealistic in terms of not just how long it's going to take you to achieve those goals in terms of a long time frame, but even unrealistic in terms of you don't know that you could actually reach these goals fairly quickly. Meaning, I've had folks who have been doing CrossFit for years and are squatting in the mid-200 pounds and tell me that their lifelong goal is to squat 350. And then when I tell them, well, when you start strength training, when you start a dedicated strength training program, you're probably going to squat 315 within a couple of months, if that. And so. So that's an instance where the goal is unrealistic, but not in terms of not meeting that goal, but in terms of you're right there. You're already basically at that goal. So anyway, I think it's helpful to break up the question of how strong you should be into maybe three different categories. And this is kind of just what I thought about as I was writing some notes down for the show. So the first one or one of the categories would be just personal goals, right? So this is going to be most trainees who aren't involved in any serious competitive lifting activities or aren't required to fulfill some kind of a strength objective for their job or for the organization they're with. So a strength standard that they need to meet, right? So this would be most of us, right? What are reasonable goals for me to hit? So personal goals would be one. The second would be something like an evaluation. So there are organizations. That may have strength. Strength standards in order to receive a promotion or to receive recognition and so on and so forth, right? So that would be a strength standard for evaluative purposes. And then the last one would be competitive standards, right? So competitive standards would be how strong do you need to be in order to be competitive within a strength sport? So I believe – I can't think of any other categories, at least at the moment, for which the question of how strong should we be would fall in, right? So if you guys can think of one, let me know. So we'll deal with each one, and I think I'll start with the simplest one, which is competition, so competitive standards, all right? So again, the question is how strong should you be, and let's deal with people who are – Okay. Working within the confines of a competitive activity. So for example – powerlifting, Olympic lifting, strongman, and so on. The most clear example is going to be powerlifting because powerlifting is the sport of lifting as much weight as possible in the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. So those are the three heaviest movements that people can do. with a loaded implement. Standards are generally pretty good across the board and it's a good test of just raw strength. So we'll talk about strength standards in terms of powerlifting because it makes a lot of sense. And then hopefully with that discussion, you'll be able to take it into any other sports. So the reason I say it's pretty simple for, strength standards within a competition setting is because you have pretty much all the data you need. If you're competing in powerlifting, you can go on the organization's website, look at records. You can look at meet results from, you know, local meetings, local meetings, regional meets, state meets, and national meets. And just very clearly see where you stack up against people within your weight class and within your experience level, right? And an experience level in powerlifting doesn't even matter, right? It's just the weight class and how much did you lift. So it's nice and clean, very, very simple. And again, the answer is, what weight class are you in currently? What are people doing within that weight class in terms of total and then also in terms of each individual lift? And then where do you currently fall, right? And it's going to vary between your average local meets versus your state meets versus your national meets and so on. So it'll vary. So depending on what level of competitor you are or how strong you are, you may look at the next level up, right? So if you're competing in local meets and you can access the meet results from local meets in your area, you can see how you stack up against people locally. And then if you're at the top of that... In terms of total, then you look at the next level of competition, which would be a regional or a state meet, and so on, right? And if you just want to look at the national records, you want to look at the international records, fine. But basically, you can take this data that's readily available on the internet, look at weight classes, and then see where you are. And that'll be just a great gauge for competitiveness within those weight classes and then inform what you should do. So obviously, what you should do is get stronger and lift more weight within that weight class. If it makes sense, once you're competitive within a strength sport to go down a weight class or even go up a weight class, you'll make that decision based on where you are and how long you've been competing, right? So my opinion is that no one... Who is competing for the first time and really not competing for... Some fairly high stakes should worry about changing weight classes, cutting weight, or increasing body weight in order to win at powerlifting. But again, that's up to you. So again, pretty straightforward. And here's another thing. You can look, even as a lifter who's training at home or in a commercial gym and just training for the sake of training, that the numbers that people are lifting in powerlifting competitions or strengthlifting competitions can give you a good idea of what somebody can achieve at your body weight, right? At your body weight, at your weight class. So if you're thinking about what is the ultimate sort of potential of somebody about your size, that can serve as a good way to look at it. Look at what people are lifting in powerlifting competitions. Now, you have to temper that with the understanding. That the higher the level of competition goes, the more specialized the people competing within those organizations are. So what I mean by that is, if you're going to be looking at national or international records for powerlifting and deciding and giving yourself a bunch of anxiety about how much weight you lift compared to those numbers, you have to realize that those people are specialized athletes in terms of force production. Now, you may have aspirations to do that, and that's great, that's fine, but individuals who are performing at the highest levels of anything have made significant tradeoffs in order to achieve those impressive performances, and you may very well be ready to do that. But if you're not a competitive athlete actively competing and looking to improve your standing within your competitive organization, then... The strength... Strength standards, according to competitive outcomes, are interesting and they can serve as a frame of reference for you, but it might also cause some problems, right? So here's what I mean. There are people who will look at competitor X and say to themselves, oh, that person weighs however much they weigh and they lift this much. I'll never do that, and therefore I'm not going to train or whatever, right? So that's pretty silly, but it has to be said because some people will frame things that way, right? So again, competition is pretty straightforward. Even though it's straightforward, people still kind of mess things up. I'll have conversations with lifters about people who have been training for years and competing actively, and they're just very worried about their total or worried about their deficiency in one of the three lifts. And then when you go and pull up the record. The actual competition, like what are people actually doing in these competitions? You come to find out that they're just doing really well and blowing everybody out of the water. And in order to, so is the goal to win the meat, is the goal to win your weight class, win best lifter or whatever, or is it to increase the weight on the bar? Uh, they should kind of go hand in hand, but if you're at the, if you're at a very high level of competition, um, the reality is that in order to continue adding weight to the bar, you may have to go, you may have to get heavier and go up a weight class or get heavier and then cut weight. These are all competitive circumstances that most of us don't have to worry about. Okay. So anyway, competition stuff's pretty straightforward. You have the, you have the data, you have weight classes, you have totals, they're published online. You can go look at them. And you can either decide what you want to do in your competitive training or, Or if you're just a non-competitive lifter, you can look at what people your size are doing and decide whether your sort of like long-term goals are realistic based on what's happening at the competitive level, right? So the next sort of category I want to talk about in terms of how strong should you be would be something in the nature of strength standards for evaluative purposes, right? So what I mean by that is if you're part of an organization that has strength standards associated with it in order to move up in the organization to receive recognition or, you know, any number of things. Usually, you know, physical standards are going to be some kind of a PT test or something like that. Very rarely is there actually like a strength standard associated with a job, but it happens in our organizations that do have strength standards. Even if they're even if they're kind of informal. Okay, so let me say a few a few words on on the strength standards. In terms of comparing yourself to other people who are not strength athletes, okay? And I think that's maybe the primary distinction because it's sort of the same thing as I was talking about with the competitive athletes. But again, the main differentiator is that the competitive athletes are specialized. So when we're talking about strength standards from a non-specialized population of people, usually it's in the context of some other thing going on, right? So you are working in a physical capacity either through law enforcement or military. You're part of a sports organization or a hobby organization that has a recognition component associated with physical fitness, and then they've decided to use strength as the primary driver of that. That happens, and that's great. So what are realistic standards, and how should we think about those? Okay, so this is a pretty important topic. Especially as strength. training becomes more popular and more people and organizations start to implement strength standards within whatever it is that they're doing. So that's obviously a positive development if that occurs. But there can be some fundamental misunderstandings in the application. And while. it's a good idea to have some kind of a strength standard because we're following the understanding that training is going to be driven by evaluation. So if you can, I think especially people in large institutions understand this, if you can drive how people train, the most effective way to do it is going to be by evaluating a certain aspect of physical fitness that you want. So if we can implement a strength standard, then people are going to start training to that standard. Again, that's great. I don't want to discourage anybody from implementing any strength standards, but the strength standards have to be realistic. And the realism aspect, or the realistic aspect of it comes from the understanding of what strength training looks like, what it requires, and where is the inflection point between training for strength in the context of improving physical capacity versus training for strength in the context of specialization and optimal strength performance. Okay, so there's an important distinction there that needs to be taken into account. So if your strength standards are based off of powerlifting numbers, which that's definitely a way to look at it, where you take powerlifting numbers and you pick an organization or you pick published data and you say to yourself, okay, so if this is the person's body weight, this is what they should be able to lift. And then potentially you categorize. You know, into like levels or into. Um, into ranks based on how close you are to the highest, highest performers within an organization or within a, I'm sorry, within a weight class or a weight group. Right? So that's a problem because if you're looking at powerlifting standards or you're looking at powerlifting performance, then within the weight class, you're going to have a range of numbers that are going to be representative of all of the people who are competing within the weight class. So it's a selected group first and foremost of people who are interested and have paid for and signed up to go do a competition. So already the level is maybe a little bit higher, uh, in terms of, in terms of what's realistic. But then also if you're, if you're, if you're engineering your, your strength standard to go from, to get the highest level of achievement from, If those are tied to the highest levels of performance in a sport like powerlifting, then that may be counterproductive to your objectives because it's going to require people to specialize in strength training in order to achieve that generally, right? So, for example, if you've got – and I don't have any numbers in front of me, unfortunately. I should have done this. But if you're looking at a strength standards chart and you're basing it off of powerlifting numbers, you could have a lifter who weighs 165 pounds and the top of that weight class, like how much people are lifting in that weight class, let's just say for the highest number in the data that you're looking at, you've got 165-pound individuals. You've got 165-pound individuals deadlifting 485 or 500 pounds, all right? That may happen. So if you've now set your range of your strength standards from – 225 to 500 for people who weigh 165 pounds, you've skewed that entire range towards specialized strength athletes. And the lighter people are, the more difficult it's going to be to achieve numbers like that. So basically what you're doing is you're holding back the progression of people within that system, within that strength standard system, by requiring that they move towards specialization, towards strength. And if there's other requirements of the job or the activity or the hobby, then people are either never going to meet those standards and then you have to compromise, or people will just disregard the standards because they're totally unrealistic. So going online and looking at how much weight people are lifting and then generating your strength standards based off of that is sort of taking an observation. Like saying, okay, this is what's happened. And then now based on what's happened, I'm going to derive some standards based on what's happened. But you're not taking into account that what's happened here is actually done by people who are trending towards a specialization in strength. So that's the point I'm trying to get across here. Okay, so if we if we take a different approach, which is to think about what it is that we want to accomplish with a strength standard like that, and then build it from a more basic understanding, and we should end up with standards that don't require people to specialize. Okay, there should still probably be recognition for high levels of strength performance, because that's our ultimate goal is more force production, right? But if your standards inadvertently require that people go into. Specializations and strength, you may end up with, with with trade offs in other areas. So again, in the context of trying to keep this fair. general, it's going to be tough to give exact guidelines for how to set up a strength standard because it's going to depend on the organization, what that organization does, and then what are their desired outcomes with the strength standard. It may closely mimic what standards should be for a personal goal. I'll get into that much more here in just a minute. In terms of setting up. strength standards for evaluative purposes, just make sure that you're considering whether the standards that we're setting up are asking too much out of people who are doing other things. If you're involved in an organization that has people training various things at the same time and then strength is just one component of it, you can't also expect those people to be essentially power lifters. in order to progress through your strength standards system, okay? So that's the main goal there. So for competition, you already have everything you need. You go online, look at the weight classes, see where you stack up, all right? Keep in mind where you are based on your competitive career and how long and how successful you've been up to this point. For strength standards in terms of evaluating people against each other, right? So you are the person who is establishing standards and then also comparing person A to person B to person C, and then you've decided that you're going to use a strength standard as one of the ways that you will evaluate and categorize folks. Just make sure that you haven't set up a system that requires specialized strength training performance out of the people you're evaluating. If you're using strength standards. As a way to evaluate people and compare them amongst each other, then your strength standards have to make sense. according to the two-factor model of performance, right? So we can't expect people who are doing jiu-jitsu or running or riding a bike to specialize in powerlifting. It's just not going to work. So I left personal goals as kind of the last category because it's going to work backwards, right? We can talk very generally and pretty simply about the competitive standards. We can talk, again, pretty generally about evaluative standards because in order to go any deeper on that, basically if I were advising somebody, I'd have to ask more questions like what is it that you do, what is it that you want out of the people that you're evaluating, and then how does strength fit within the overall big picture, okay? So the thing that we can talk about universally, though, is personal goals, right? So you're going to have personal goals even within the context of these other categories, whether you're being evaluated. Or you're in competition. And the other thing is that your personal goals should sort of match up with what's happening in these other categories up to a certain point, right? Up to the point of specialization. So as a quick aside, when I talk about specialization, what I mean is that your orientation training-wise has shifted almost entirely, or not almost, but entirely to getting stronger. When you specialize, what that means is that you have chosen to follow the trade-offs that lead towards the most strength acquisition at the potential detriment of other things, okay? The good news is that that doesn't happen until you're pretty far along in the strength training process, okay? So very few of us are going to get to the point where you have to decide, I'm now a strength specialist, quote-unquote, and I'm not going to be strong. I'm not going to do anything else other than focus on driving up the weight on my squat, bench, deadlift, squat, press, deadlift, clean and jerk, and snatch, and so on, right? So that specialization aspect is pretty far off for most of us, and for the most part, you're going to be pretty safe training as though you're going to be specializing in strength and then worrying about tradeoffs down the line when the time comes, all right? So basically what I'm saying is that for most people most of the time, you don't have to worry about this whole specialization thing until you've been training for quite a while, like maybe a couple of years. The kind of strength that you can acquire within that time falls well within the ability to do any other activity that you want to do, okay? So let me get that out of the way first so that people aren't thinking that they're specializing in strength training with like a 275-pound squat. That's not the way it works, okay? Okay. We're talking about… Everything in your life. is geared towards adding more weight to the bar. All right. So, so let's talk about some goals, standards, or answer the question of how strong should I be? And, uh, just, just in terms of, of, uh, an individual person thinking about their situation and thinking about how to orient their, goals in the gym. Okay. So this is usually whenever this question gets asked, the best way to answer it is like, where are you now? And follow the process. And then the. goals will become apparent. Um, as you, as you start training, it's helpful for people to have, some numbers in mind. It's helpful for people to have some realistic expectations of what they can do because most people without a frame of reference really have no idea. Okay. So that's going to be my intent now is to give you some, give you my thoughts on what's reasonable for most people. Most of the time, the best way to handle this is to think about it in, terms of where you are currently and how long you've been training. So if I were to just start. throwing out numbers and say, for example, and you guys may be familiar with these numbers, so you're an average size guy. You should be able to overhead press 200 pounds. You should be able to bench press 300 pounds. You should be able to squat 400. You should be able to, deadlift 500, right? So 200, 300, 400, 500, that's all perfectly reasonable, but it lacks context, right? So if you're just starting training today and you came in and you squatted 85 pounds or 95 pounds on the first day, 400, 405 looks very, very far away, right? So far. away in a lot of instances that people will just disregard that and not even attempt to pursue it. Okay. So what, what strength coaches have is the perspective. What good strength, strength coaches have is the perspective to understand. That an average-sized guy who's been training productively for, you know, whatever, eight months, a year, if that, should be able to hit those numbers because that doesn't represent a strength specialization. Okay, let me say that again. So a 200-pound press, a 300-pound bench press, 400-pound squat, and a 500-pound deadlift does not represent a strength specialization. It may seem like that when you first start training, but the accumulation of strength happens quickly at first, and then it starts to slow down, and then this is where that timeline starts to look really, really long for people. But the truth is that going from, like, a 225 to a 315 squat is not very difficult. Going to a 315 to a 405 squat is more difficult. But if you're training seriously, you should be able to achieve that. But then going from 400 to 500. So that's going to take some effort, right? It's going to take some time. So. So when I think about like an inflection point, it's like going from 405 to 500, that's going to be a long timeline and potentially moving into specialization for strength or more towards specialization, spending more time, more resources, more energy on achieving that 500-pound squat. The other things to consider with those initial numbers I've thrown out without much context is that those strength levels also don't represent massive fundamental changes in terms of your appearance, your body weight, and also your lifestyle. So I think that's another way to think about the specialization conversation is that while going from a 100-pound or so squat to a 405 squat. You will definitely look different. You'll look better. You'll be carrying more muscle mass, but you probably won't look completely different or transformed. from how you looked when you first started, unless you were really underweight, right? But, you know, we're talking about an average guy, average size guy. You're going to look more muscular. You're going to look more athletic, but you're not going to be unrecognizable, right? Now, going from a 100-pound squat to a 500-pound squat and then all the other things that come along with that, yeah, you're going to look fundamentally pretty different from how you looked when you first started, all right? So, that's another way to think about it. And then also, again, the time and effort that you're putting into achieving those outcomes are going to be significantly different, right? So, let's back up and start thinking about, from the beginning, milestones, standards that you should achieve, and then what your ultimate outcomes may be, all right? So, when you're first starting out training, keep it really simple. Things are going to vary between men and women pretty drastically, so I'll cover both here. But basically, when you're first starting out training, you're going to be able to, out, if you are starting below big plates, let's say, if you're starting below like 25s and 45s, that could be your first goal to hit, right? So for men who are starting to train, you should basically be racing to a 135 overhead press, a 225 bench, a 315 squat, and a 405 deadlift. Okay, so that, again, that's so far away from a strength specialization that. most healthy males are going to be able to get there with not a whole bunch of effort, right? I mean, obviously, you have to start training, you have to train productively, but that's really simple, right? It's just one plate, two plate, three plate, four plates, yeah, four plates on all the major lifts. If you're not an average size, you're not going to be able to get there. Meaning that you're either smaller, shorter, or you're taller, then you're going to. adjust those accordingly, right? So proportionally to whatever your height and your body weight is. Okay. So we're not even talking about necessarily even a body weight. Starting out, it kind of doesn't matter. But to give you sort of my idea of what an average guy is going to be. So who I'm thinking about, the demographic that I'm thinking about when I say average male, it's like a guy who's 5'8 and weighs like 180, 175 pounds, right? So 5'8, 175 pounds, you should be getting your. 135 press, your 225 bench, 315 squat, and 405 deadlift as quickly as possible. And that should be well within the first 12 weeks or so of your novice linear progression. It's not unreasonable. The bench press may be a little bit slower. It actually may be a lot slower, but it's not unreasonable. It's not unreasonable. It's not unreasonable. But definitely in terms of the lower body lifts, those are good, reasonable targets. for somebody who's training, uh, and really doing the program optimally as optimally as possible. Okay. So let me, let me add another caveat to that, which would be, um, if you're strength training and you're an average guy, so you're five, eight, one 75, one 80 or so, um, then you're also going to be gaining some weight along with that. Right. So, you know, you're going to hit those numbers. Let's say you started at one 75, you're going to hit those numbers at a body weight of, you know, one 90 or so one, one 85, one 90. So you've gained a little bit of weight and you're, uh, putting weight on the bar very, very rapidly. Okay. Once you hit those numbers, then the next target is going to be the standard 200, 300, 400, 500. Right. And then that's where things are going to slow down quite a bit for you. So it's, this depends on your body type and it depends on your, um, training history. You know, if you've done a lot of bench pressing before, you may get to the bench press before any of the numbers, but this is where things are going to slow down and start to spread out a little bit, which is perfectly fine. But again, the 200, 300, 400, 500 numbers, so that's a 200-pound press, a 300-pound bench. press, or 315, whatever you want it to be, 400-pound squat, and a 500-pound deadlift. The important thing to understand about those numbers or those standards are that they don't represent a strength specialization. So those are reasonable targets to hit within your first year of training, and they won't require much outside of consistent training, consistent nutrition habits, and then gaining. or losing weight depending on your... your body composition situation, okay? So the other thing to understand is that... those numbers, 200, 300, 400, 500, can be done within the context of other sports and other activities. The only thing that would probably exclude from those would be things like super long distance endurance activities. But pretty much everything else, you should be able to hit those numbers while still training productively for other activities. So I think that's a really. important thing to understand, especially when you're considering how much time and effort you should put into strength training versus everything else you're doing. And then also those numbers, the 2, 3, 4, 5, 200, 300, 400, 500, represent a level of strength that you could probably consider as a baseline for athletic activity. Now, if you're already an athletic person, you won't have any trouble getting to those numbers. And that's kind of understood. If you're not an athlete, naturally athletic person or you haven't spent much time developing strength, yeah, it's going to take some effort, but that strength level or that strength standard will also represent a significant level of improvement in your overall performance in everything you do, right? So it's not just about achieving these numbers for the sake of achieving these numbers. Again, it's kind of the inflection point when you get to the 200, 300, 400, 500, where the next level of that is going to start moving us towards a little bit of specialization, which is fine, but I wouldn't stop pushing until you at least achieve that inflection point, okay? So the specific circumstances are always going to matter, but I think it's important. For people to have a reference and a target for what's realistic. If you're taller and heavier than the average male, these numbers, again, shouldn't be a problem. And again, in my experience, it can take some time for people to get their 400 squat and their 500 deadlift. What I'm trying to get across, it's not a value judgment. What I'm trying to get across is that you should continue to pursue strength as the primary driver of performance and health improvements until you reach that inflection point. And that inflection point is going to be somewhere around, for the average male, a 200-pound press, a 300-pound bench, a 400-pound squat, and a 500-pound deadlift. Okay, so I've kind of said the same thing a bunch of different ways because I want to make it super clear. Okay, you are not a specialized strength athlete if you are deadlifting 500 pounds and you're squatting 400 pounds. Okay, again, for a healthy average guy doing other sports, doing whatever they want, that's okay. Almost kind of a baseline level of strength that you should be working towards achieving, all right? For women, the situation is quite a bit different for a lot of reasons. Hormones, body proportions vary more between women and men, and also just natural strength levels and lots of other things. So in my experience, just to make this useful and kind of stay within the same framework as what we've talked about with men, a 135 squat to begin is a great target, and then 185, depending on how quickly she gets to 135, and then a 200, 225 deadlift is a great initial target, again, based on where she started and then how rapidly she's acquiring strength. But a 135 deadlift. So a 135 to 185 squat to start, and then a 225 is roughly equivalent to that initial target for men. Basically, it's within three months you started training, you should be racing to get to that 135 to 185 squat and 200 to 225 deadlift. I didn't mention the upper body because the upper body is just... variable among amongst women and generally women haven't spent much time in the gym doing bench. presses and stuff like men have so the the press numbers are going to be pretty low bench press numbers are going to be pretty low and they're going to start uh they're going to move a lot slower so uh you know to to go to the next level in terms of what is reasonable for for most women who are training productively training consistently and looking for the performance health and longevity benefits of strength training and who are not yet going towards. a strength specialization so again what is a reasonable target before we hit the inflection point of going into specialization okay so again it's not as clear with women so the situation is not as clear with women so the situation is not as clear with women so the situation, will vary but it's reasonable for women who are strength training, to hit a 100-pound press at about the same rate as men go to the 200-pound press, all right? So about 100 pounds. It's reasonable for women to get a 135-pound bench press in about the time it takes for a male to get their 315 bench press or 300-pound bench press. It's reasonable for a female to squat 225 at about the same time it takes men to squat 405. And it's reasonable for women to deadlift around 315 at about the same rate as it takes men to get to 500 pounds. Okay, so again, it's squishy. It's not as clean with women. But those are realistic numbers that don't represent a strength specialization. So I want to reiterate again, those are numbers that don't represent a strength specialization. Going beyond those numbers will start to move you into a little bit of a deadlift. bit of a strength specialization. It's sort of the inflection point, and those are great targets. And by the way, at Starting Strength, we have stickers that represent those numbers for male versus female, and that's where those numbers kind of came from, right? It's where you can think of. yourself as having a good base of strength that you can build a lot of skill and a lot of other training off of. So to tie it all back together, these standards or these numbers that I've just outlined don't really represent a strength specialization, but they represent a baseline level of strength that'll allow you to build more strength or build other physical attributes or skill attributes on top of them. Then the next question then is, okay, so what do I do next? What's after that? And this is, at this point, is where it becomes useful to look at things like. competitive records and look at what's going on at people in your weight class. And even if you're not a competitor, you can look at what's reasonable, and then you can decide, what the... next level of strength is going to be, right? So if you're deadlifting 500 pounds, what's it going to take for you to get to 550? Maybe not much, depending on how good you are at deadlifting, what your body weight is, and so on. What's it going to take to go from 550 to 600? Okay, it's going to take quite a bit more work, maybe more specialization. And then the question is, how do I get there? And how quickly do I want to get there? So this is where your individual goals are going to dictate how you proceed. Just to kind of wrap this up and talk about it in just a slightly different way. In my opinion, for an average healthy guy who is pursuing strength for the purposes of performance improvement, health improvement, and then being able to do the things that you want to do for as long as possible, meeting this standard, so to speak, of a two. a 300-pound bench, a 400-pound squat, and a 500-pound deadlift should be your priority really before worrying about anything else from a training standpoint, okay? Now, if you're doing another sport, obviously, you're going to continue practicing that sport, but what I'm saying is that whatever you need to do in order to get to these numbers is valuable and probably worthwhile because it's not going to require you to leave or. do less of the things that you're already doing. It's not going to require crazy amounts of recovery resources in order to get to these numbers, and then the benefits of achieving these numbers is that you'll have achieved a baseline of strength from which you can build off of, okay? And again, I know it's not satisfying for you guys who don't fit within that average male, but you can tailor the numbers based on your situation, right? If you're super tall or you're super short, you're used to it. to going around the world, tailoring things to your situation anyway. So, uh, you'll be good. So, um, uh, what I want to do is set, set, help you set expectations for yourself that are realistic and that are prop that are probably higher than where you are currently thinking you can get. And that also don't represent like you having to become a power lifter, quote unquote. This is kind of the whole point here is that people will work up to the level that things start to get hard and tend to stop or tend to find reasons to not continue. So if you're pretty far away from, from achieving these numbers as an average male or as an average female, what I'm trying to tell you is that you need to keep going. It's going to be most beneficial in terms of what you're looking to get out of strength training. If you get to these sort of, uh, baseline strength levels. All right. So when you ask the question of how strong should I be or what number should I, what should I aim for? Or what's reasonable for my body weight? The first thing you need to do is consider where you fall in, right? Are we talking about as a competitor? Are we talking about it as someone who needs to meet a evaluation criteria based on strength? Or are you talking about yourself as a lifter who is looking to improve performance, health, or whatever with barbell training? Once you've done that, it'll help organize your thinking a little bit. If you're a competitor, the work's kind of already done for you, right? You have numbers. You know where to go depending on how well you want to perform. For everybody else, if you're looking for improvements in force production because of all of the benefits that come along with bigger muscles and increased force production capacity, then the main idea is to not shortchange yourself, right? So don't decide early that you have tapped out your strength gains or that you've tapped out your ability to continue adding weight to the bar. Usually, the... inflection point for going into specialized strength training is much further out than you think it is. I've worked with plenty of people who are seemingly just completely average individuals with not a lot of athletic genetic endowment who have gone on to do really, really impressive things without massive changes to their daily activity in terms of being able to strength train productively, but also with massive benefits that come along with being able to lift a whole bunch of weight. So orient your thinking around at least these numbers as a baseline. And literally, they are literally a baseline. They're almost the starting point for more serious and intentional strength training, you should be able to get to these numbers with fairly basic training, with fairly basic programming, as long as you do everything that you need to do outside of the gym. Thank you again for tuning in to the stronger is better podcast. If you have any questions or topic ideas, please send them to podcast.com. at ssgyms.com. I've got a new episode coming out every other week you can find us on YouTube and in all of the audio platforms for podcasts, thanks again and I'll see you soon