Absolute Strength: Stronger Than You Think

If you are reading this article you are stronger than you think.  Most people do not have a realistic understanding of how strong they really are.  This occurs because we can see videos of extraordinary athletes moving mountains of weight as easily as typing “strong dude” into a youtube search bar.  This phenomena is known as the availability heuristic, which means that because of the many instances of seeing something, you assume that it is the norm.  Nothing could be further from the truth, especially when it comes to strength training.  This article will show you how strong you really are compared to novices and elite athletes, using actual data, not broscience.  

Strength Defined

There are many definitions of strength.   Simply put, it is your muscle’s ability to apply force to an external object in order to move it.  This definition is simple, but testing it is not, as we will find out.

Visit any strength training forum and you will see tons of gym bro’s arguing about who is the strongest man in the world.  Is it a power lifter, an olympic lifter, or a strongman competitor?  No one doubts that those at the top of any of these sports are strong, but for analysis we need to look at strength athletes that use easily measurable loads.  So we will confine our analysis to power lifters and olympic lifters.  No hard feelings strongmen.

For a quick overview of the rest of the article check out this infographic.

The Big Three

In powerlifting there are only three lifts that are tested, squat, bench press, and deadlift.  These lifts do a good job of demonstrating an athlete’s strength from head to toe.  The data that I will be using will be from top level functional fitness athletes.  When you see average athlete, that is a statistical average from a database of 1 rep maxes in each movement. Take a look at this chart.

As you can see even the average lifter is pretty strong, benching 224, squatting 295, and deadlifting 365.  A good athlete in the 90th percentile is  24% stronger than average, and a games athlete is 25% stronger than a 90th percentile athlete, but how does that compare to the average guy who’s favorite exercise is beer can curls?  Well take a look at this chart to find out.

Now this was quite surprising to me.  I would not have guessed that your average male was this weak, nor would I have guessed that they could bench press more than they squat, but as they say the data doesn’t lie.

So if we compare an untrained male with an average athlete we can see that they can roughly double, and in some cases almost triple the untrained males strength levels.  I bet you didn’t think you were twice or three times as strong as Randy, your lazy ass roomate.

Olympic Lifts

Now that we have a rough comparison lets look at some lifts that require a little more athleticism and skill to complete.  The chart below lists the data behind the olympic lifts.

As you can see I’ve also included power clean data as well, since it is such a common movement in a wide variety of strength training circles.  From this data we can see the 90th percentile guy is 26% stronger than the average guy.  Our games athlete is 25% stronger than 90th percentile man; however, the difference between an untrained male and an average athlete is a whopping 82%!

Now these numbers are interesting for a variety of reasons.  First the strength increase from power lifts and olympic lifts are very similar from an average athlete to a 90th percentile level, in both types of lifts.  This shows us that strength is the limiting factor for increasing your numbers when you are newer to functional fitness.

Now if we look at olympic lifting from the 90th percentile to the games athlete, we see the same kind of number, roughly 25% increase, but if we look at the power lifts it is only a 13% increase.  This shows us that for advanced to elite athletes efficiency in the lift, and technique account for the improvement in olympic lifting, not absolute strength.  Basically the difference between a games athlete and the top guy at the local gym isn’t his numbers in the strength movements, its his efficiency in them.

Outliers

So now that we know that we are doing better than we originally thought, why did we have such a low estimation of our lifting abilities?  As I stated in the intro it’s youtube’s fault.  Look at this video.

Now Dan Green is a super badass and these video’s are awesome to watch, but the very act of watching them leads us to overestimate the probability that these types of performances will occur.  The probability of anyone squatting 838lbs is approximately 1 in 20,000, and thats just for the squat.  When you combine probability that one person could complete all three  lifts the odds become astronomical, like a 0.000000000153% chance.  That’s about 1 in a billion, i.e there are 8 dudes on the planet that could do that.

This also aligns pretty well with my experiences in the gym.  I’ve only seen one person bench over 400 lbs in real life.  The heaviest squat I’ve witnessed is in the mid 500’s, and the heaviest deadlift is in the high 500’s, and that guy was a straight up power lifter.

So next time you start to feel bad about not hitting PR’s or squatting a certain number, remember you are much better off than you thought, and roughly twice as strong as Randy, your worthless ass room mate.

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