I Don't Care How Much You Lift - If You Train For Strength, You're Strong
I hate to see those “strength standards” articles get passed around the internet, because they always miss the point. First of all, standards are almost always flawed and arbitrary. There’s just no reason to use them. Everyone’s body is different, and your limits might be completely different than someone else’s. If two people with vastly differing genetics put in the same amount of effort, surprise, they’re going to get different results.
Most of these standards don’t account for your own height, muscular potential, weight, history of injury, or anything else that could modify your numbers. Some strength standards focus on movements that you may not care about or include in your training. For women, these numbers are often even wackier because the coaches creating these arbitrary strength standards have less experience working with women and seeing their numbers. Even numbers based on your bodyweight are generally flawed, because lighter lifters are typically able to put up much bigger numbers relative to their bodyweight than heavier lifters, who are able to put up much more weight overall.
The best strength standards I have seen thus far are the ones generated by Greg’s calculators on Strengtheory. These calculators have the added benefit of being scaled based on height, weight, and other measurements, and compare you up against world record holders in your weight class to give you a rough idea of your actual limits. Further, these calculators come with outputs for how you should be structuring your training, giving you an idea of your weak areas based on your numbers. However, even these aren't perfect, because many of the variables that go into performance are still things that we just don't know about or can't measure.
Rather than tossing around these arbitrary standards of what do and don’t constitute good strength numbers, we should be appreciating the one variable that we know can be controlled: personal effort. We should be appreciating each and every person who comes into the gym for how hard they’ve trained and how much they’ve improved. While for one person, a 300lb deadlift might be a trivial feat, it might mean years of training for another.
It’s common to look at some guy who’s hella strong and be like “oh well he’s only strong because he’s so big, if I was as big as him I would be way stronger” or “oh man that guy is about my size, but he’s hella weak relative to me” or “well he’s got a great bench, but all I care about is the deadlift and he probably sucks at that”. We’ve lived in this community of lifting videos and unasked-for criticism for so long. If you look at any video of someone lifting a heavy weight on Youtube, chances are that a good number of people will jump out of the woodwork to critique their form or call them weak in the comments. But honestly, none of that is helpful or useful. We should just shut up and keep lifting, and celebrate anyone’s accomplishments. The truth is, accurate comparisons are extremely hard to make, so it's almost never accurate to try and judge someone on something as silly as their numbers alone.
I remember a big Youtuber a while back who trained for a combination of size and strength, but actually cropped many of his videos so that people couldn’t tell how much weight was on the bar - he admitted that he didn’t want to have to deal with the pressure of commenters judging him for how much weight he could put up. Honestly, that’s pretty messed up. That’s the opposite of what we should have.
To create a healthy and supportive strength community, it is absolutely crucial that we stop caring about our numbers and start caring about encouraging people to get into the gym. Having fun lifting, blasting old PR’s, and embracing change and improvement should always be our first concern. Everything else is just judgment.
