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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2078 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 25, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I remember someone posting a "how strong should you be" website where it showed lots of various physical exercises and how good you should be at them for you body weight, age and fitness level.

I cannot find it. I can find other similar websites, but they are much more basic.

You don't mean strengthlevel.com?

For some reason, I remember it looking more like logicalincrements.com, but for exercises.

There are a number floating around, exrx.net, strength standards, symmetric strength and so on. More broadly, I would just go by bodyweight - an advanced level of strength being 1x, 1,5x, 2x, and 2.5x bodyweight in the press, bench, squat and deadlift. Cut 0.5 off all of those for a woman and do the opposite for an elite level of strength.

That seems totally arbitrary and nonsensical (as these standards inevitably are). Why should your bench be 0.5bw more than your press? Hitting a 1.5xbw bench was way easier for me than a bw press.

If you really care about something like this, you're better off using something like this for the power lifts.

Sure, it's pretty arbitrary and nonsensical, but then most standards are. So long as you're pulling numbers out of your ass, why not make them easy to remember? Personally I feel about as close to BW press as I am to 1.5BW bench.

That Greg Nuckols article is not actually correct that those tables are not based on actual data. ExRx and the derived symmetric strength standards have the note (emphasis mine): "Tables for the basic barbell exercises are based on nearly 70 years of accumulated performance data and are not predicted or regression derived." So the standards are arbitrary, but in my experience they are pretty accurate if you look around a normal commercial gym.

Using body weight ratios is nonsensical because strength potential scales allometicly, just like is says in the Nuckols article. This is why Wilks and Sinclair coefficients exist.

I also highly doubt 1.5xBW bench is as hard as 1xBW press for the average person. Walk into any commercial gym and you'll find 200ish pound dudes reping a 315# bench. I think I've seen an in-person 200# OHP in a normal gym maybe once.

People who have never hit a body-weight press are typically astonishingly poorly calibrated on how difficult it is to improve an already advanced press. Even advanced lifters can likely put 5-10#s on their bench with a dedicated cycle of Smolov JR. An additional 10# on an advanced level press can literally take years or never happen.

You're probably right about the pressing part, for myself even though my pressing is okay relative to my other lifts, it does feel strangely resistant to improvement.

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