The Natural Strength and Muscular Limit Calculator

This calculator will give you a glimpse into your training future. It will estimate both your natural muscle mass limit, and your maximum strength potential. This tool is based off of data for hundreds of strength, and bodybuilding athletes. By the end of this article, you will have a solid idea just how much potential you have as an athlete. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this calculator, we first need to discuss how best to use it.

Strength and Muscle Mass Calculator Goals

I am often asked, by newer athletes, how much muscle they can gain, or some variation of how much progress they can make. The real answer is no one knows, including myself. However, after coaching athletes of all skill levels, for many years, I can generally give a person a good guess as to where they might end up. Personally, I’ve always thought that wasn’t really good enough. So I did some research.

As it turns out Dr. Casey Butt has done a ton of research on top natural bodybuilders, and strength athletes. He has developed very sophisticated equations that predict, quite accurately, how much muscle mass a person can carry, as well as their strength limits.

This was quite exciting to me, as we’ve previously discussed that there are a lot of similarities between natural bodybuilders, and functional fitness athletes. I took it upon myself to create a tool, based on Dr. Butt’s research, that would predict the amount of muscle mass and strength, a functional fitness athlete could obtain with enough training.

What This Tool Will Not Do

There are some key limitations to this tool, which we need to discuss before I get a ton of angry emails. First, this tool is going to give you the limits for elite athletes. Genetically speaking, this is going to be something like the top 1% of all functional fitness athletes. To put it bluntly, the chances that you or I are in this vanishingly small group is slim.

Understand that this tool will take a variety of your physiological factors such as: height, weight, body fat, as well as wrist and ankle measurements, and predict where you might end up. Don’t be disappointed if you’ve been training hard for years and still haven’t achieved your goals. I have been working out for decades, and I’ve still got progress to make!

The other big caveat is for the ladies. To be blunt, Dr. Butt has a ton of data from male bodybuilders, but none that was publicly available for female athletes. As a result, I’ve tweaked his equations, using other research, and my own experiences as a coach. All female calculations are extrapolations from male athletes figures.

Researchers have determined that female athletes cannot carry more than 77% of the amount of muscle mass that a male athlete can. They can carry close to the same amount of lower body muscle mass per unit of height, but they generally carry much less upper body mass.

Lastly, this data is from self reported, and sometimes drug tested “natural athletes.” This means they are somewhat likely to be steroid free, but I think we would be naive to think that none of them ever took any anabolic compounds. With those caveats out of the way, we can get into the tool itself.

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DOWNLOAD THE MUSCLE MASS AND STRENGTH CALCULATOR HERE!

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The Natural Strength and Muscular Limit Calculator: Males

In this section we will discuss how to use this tool, and what each section means. First and foremost, you need to know that you fill out the red sections. The screenshot below is the male tab.

You can see there are two main sections on this tab. You will need to know your height, weight, body fat, wrist, and ankle measurements. I would recommend you measure your ankle and wrist with something like this Myo Body Tape (Amazon Affiliate link).

You can measure your body fat with this separate tool I’ve created, using your body tape, or any other flexible measuring tape. Once you enter this required data in the red section of the box, the rest of the tab will auto populate with your results.

As you can see, the tool will auto calculate your natural lean muscle mass limit, at your current body fat. You can play with this figure, and add or subtract body fat to see what you might weigh when leaner or heavier. You will also see your predicted measurements for various body parts. These predictions should be within a few percentage points of your natural muscular limits.

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In the box directly underneath where you entered the data, you will see your squat, deadlift, and bench press predictions. The left side is going to predict your strength limit as a pure lifter. However, common sense tells us that functional fitness athletes will never be as strong as pure lifters because they have so many other demands on their training time.

The right column predicts how strong a very gifted functional fitness athlete might be given these training constraints. If you want to see how these big three lifts compare to other lifts then check out this article where I provide strength training ratios to shoot for.

The last section on the right will predict your yearly rate of muscle mass gain. You can see that beginners do, in fact, make the quickest progress. After five years of dedicated training, male athletes will most likely be very close to their natural muscular limits.

As a side note, this will only predict muscle gain for dedicated strength and bodybuilding style training. You don’t get to count your years spent as a jazzercise junkie as hard training years. This pattern of muscle gain also holds true for older athletes who start training hard later in life. The first years are always the most fruitful regardless of age.

Very few of you might notice that your predicted weight is lower than your current weight, at the same body fat. This means you’ve actually exceeding your predicted muscular limits. Congratulations, and where do you get your supplements?

If you want to learn how to actually gain muscle mass and strength, then check out my ebook!

The Natural Strength and Muscular Limit Calculator: Females

As I mentioned above, this section is a pure extrapolation from the male results. I used all of my math and Excel knowledge (not much) to adjust the equations to better predict how much progress female athletes can make.

The instruction are the same. You must fill in the red sections, and you will need all the same info as the males. Make sure you download the other calculator so you can use a measuring tape to figure your body fat.

Strictly speaking, it isn’t absolutely necessary as you can manually enter whatever body fat you want, but if you actually measure yourself, you can get a very good prediction.

My favorite part of the females tab is the strength predictions. It is very rare to see a female with these strength numbers, but these were derived from actual world record performances from functional fitness athletes, and pure power lifters. They are very accurate, and you can see that ladies can be quite strong with enough hard training.

Final Thoughts

Remember, this tool is designed to give you a glimpse into your training future. It should not limit you. There are enough readers of this website that many of you will actually exceed these predictions. This should also give those athletes with significant training age a kick in the ass. There is always progress to be made! If you liked this article, then send it to a friend, and as always get out there and start training!

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