Strength standards

How much should a 220 lb (100 kg) man deadlift?

Short answer: at 220 lb (100 kg), the intermediate standard in the deadlift is a 200 kg (440 lb) one-rep max. A beginner's first marker is 100 kg (220 lb); advanced starts at 250 kg (550 lb). The scale is mine, built on DOTS — the method is below.

Standards at 220 lb (100 kg)

Standard1RM, kg1RM, lb× bodyweight
Beginner100 kg220 lb1×
Novice150 kg330 lb1.5×
Intermediate200 kg440 lb2×
Advanced250 kg550 lb2.5×
Elite300 kg660 lb3×

Each row is the one-rep max where that standard starts. Kilograms are rounded to 2.5, pounds to 5.

What competitors lift

At raw USAPL meets in the up-to-105 kg class (1270 lifters in the sample), the median deadlift is 232.5 kg (515 lb); the top 10% lift 280 kg (615 lb) or more. These people spent years preparing to compete — compare yourself with them once you have a couple of years under the bar.

I'll work out your own percentile among them in the percentile calculator.

Where you are now

Lift
Sex
Units

How I build these standards

This is my scale, not someone else's table. It's built on DOTS: a formula that puts results on a common footing across bodyweight and sex (coefficients as used by OpenPowerlifting). The thresholds are a DOTS equivalent of a powerlifting total: Beginner 150 · Novice 225 · Intermediate 300 · Advanced 375 · Elite 450. 450 is roughly the top 5% of men in classic powerlifting meets, 300 is first-meet level.

DOTS is for a total, and this is a single lift. So I make an assumption: your result in one lift is its usual share of a total. The shares are medians from classic powerlifting results in OpenPowerlifting open data (USAPL, about 17 thousand entries): for men squat 35.5%, bench 23.5%, deadlift 41%; for women 36%, 20% and 44%.

Your proportions may differ — some people bench strong, others pull strong — and then a single-lift table shifts. Treat it as a guide to where to grow, not a verdict.

Log your sets in the diary — I'll show you how you climb from one standard to the next.

Other bodyweights

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