What does the average guy lift? HOW MANY PEOPLE EVEN LIFT ANYWAY?

This data gives absolute numbers for bench press percentiles, -- i.e. the average man under 30 has a bench press of 146lb.

Note: they are not saying "average gymgoer" but average man. Only fifteen percent of Americans have gym memberships but this does not say how many actually go. This says that "50% of all new health club members quit within the first six months of signing up and 90% of those who join health and fitness clubs will stop going regularly within the first 90 days." Meanwhile this data states that 67% of people who have gym memberships never use them.

So, we can reasonably conclude that of the 15% with gym memberships, maybe 5% of the population has a gym membership and actually uses it.

Now here's where some guesswork comes in, but think about what counts as a gym: planet fitness counts as a gym. Bally Fitness counts as a gym. Lifetime fitness counts as a gym. That one gym 'curves' counts as a gym. YMCA counts as a gym. For every gym like Gold's or Metroflex, there is an equal and opposite Planet Fitness full of people who bench 100lb or less on a smith machine.

I go to Gold's gym. I can even give you a google link to see inside my gym. If you click a bit further you can see the weightroom. Notice that no one is there -- most people are doing cardio and machines. I know that at about 6pm they have these ridiculous aerobics classes where something like 40 women follow an instructor who helps them spend an hour burning maybe 200 or 300 calories to cheesy music. They do this several times a day.

So of *my* gym, where benching 315lb isn't an uncommon thing, how many people actually lift? I'd say 1/3.

But let's be generous and say 1/2 of gymgoers lift period, because I know that at Planet Fitness a lot of people lift with really light dumbbells. Bad lifting is still lifting. So of the people with gym memberships who actually go, half of them lift. That means only 2.5% of america actually lifts. Let's round this to 3% for talking point purposes.

Keep this in perspective when you think the average man benching something like 145lb is way too low to be accurate. By going to a gym and lifting weights, you are the 3%. You're part of at most 3% of the population who has the motivation to go and do that. The top 5% of that lifting charts starts at around 205lb, and only 3% of America actually lifts. So even though we know this isn't true, the 3% of America who actually lifts could still be in the top 3% of bench press stats and that would still leave a mystery 2% to fill out considering the 95th percentile starts at 203lb.

If you're curious, 99th percentile is also obtainable from this data since they list the SD; it's a little over 235lb.

On body weight as a bench press metric

When I tell experienced lifters that a 235lb bench is 99th percentile relative to the general population, they refuse to believe me. Usually this is for anecdotal reasons like "I know tons of guys who bench way more than that", which can be safely discarded as garbage responses. But a couple will use bench press percentiles determined by bodyweight to dispute these numbers. This is because most bench press percentiles use your bench relative to your bodyweight to determine bench press strength.

This is a horrible metric, and here's why.

Bodyweight relative to bench press is not distributed equally. In other words, being taller means you weigh more, but height is not proportional to bench press strength. Your bench press will not increase at a linear rate as you get taller.

To see this effect in action, look at some bench presses of famous powerlifters:

Jesse Norris, world record 198 class: 400lb bench at 198lb, or 2x BW.
Dan Green, world record 220 class: 500lb -- he benched 518lb at 242, so I'm carrying this number over somewhat. Anyway, at that weight it's 2.27x BW.

If you looked at bodyweight bench percentiles you might think that 2x BW is just really really good -- 99th percentile would be about 1.79x, and 2x BW would be about 99.9th percentile, if you go by the standard deviation determined from this table. So this would put Jesse Norris in the top 0.1% and Dan Green in the top 0.01%. But this is ridiculous -- Jesse Norris and especially Dan Green don't just bench a lot, they bench more than pretty much everybody ever. If you went by percentiles alone, this would mean out of men in the US who are aged 20 to 34 (about 31 million) there are 31,000 men who can rival Jesse Norris's bench, and 3100 men who can rival Dan Green's bench. We know this simply isn't true, especially in the case of Dan Green; the number of men who can rival Dan Green's bench, in the United States alone, is several hundred at best. this article's proposed rarity of a 500lb bench is 1/500,000 which assuming a pool of 100 million men would still only give us 200 men who have done it. And the total of those who have benched 600 is known: it's about 80.

This is worth repeating: Jesse Norris and Dan Green are not just exceptional, they are world record holders in their weight class. So if anything, their percentile ranking should be a lot higher than just 99.9th percentile. Also, if someone in the 242 class *did* bench 1.79x BW, they'd be benching slightly under 400lb. Considering the T-Nation author poses a rarity level for this of somewhere between 1-in-1000 and 1-in-500,000, I'm going to say in absolute numbers this would be far greater than 99th percentile, or 1-in-100.

So bodyweight doesn't really put the bench presses by world-record totals in perspective to their actual rarity.

But how off are xBW measurements?

You can determine this yourself by looking at the Men's Raw powerlifting records

Now, I don't know the weights of all these dudes to precision. But I know they're under the weight required for their weight class, so we can use their weight class weight (e.g. treating someone in the 123 class as 123lb) and get the same effect, since in practice most lifters are not dramatically below the weight class weight as this would affect strength.

I am using the "all bench press" numbers because they are more recent.

123 392 Mike Booker 3.18x BW
132 410 Rick Couch 3.10x BW
148 480 Romeo Eremaschvili 3.24x BW
165 508 Romeo Eremaschvili 3.07x BW
181 556 Rick Weil 3.07x BW
198 565 Larry Danaher 2.85x BW
220 586 Vadim Kahuta 2.66x BW
242 661 Jeremy Hoornstra 2.73x BW
275 675 Jeremy Hoornstra 2.45x BW
308 701 Scot Mendelson 2.27x BW

701lb is one of the strongest benches ever recorded, but it's 'only' 2.27x bodyweight.

As you go from 123lb to 220lb, you've lost .52x relative to your bodyweight. 220 is the class many men enter when they hit their genetic peak. These are world-record lifts aided by steroids, by the way, for people who are biomechanically gifted and who train these lifts specifically.

So if this .52x division actually held for all levels of training, someone who is 123lb would have a .52x advantage over someone who is 220lb.

This means, in other words, that someone who is 123lb could be benching 1.63x BW (95th percentile), while you are benching 1.10x BW (55th percentile) and this difference is entirely due to biomechanical differences in stature. Your stature can account for you going from being average to literally at the top of the ranking.

And this is absurd. When people talk about bench press, they don't say "yeah I bench 1.3x BW" they say "yeah I bench 200lb" or whatever. Bench press is almost always thought of in terms of absolute weight, yet for some reason percentiles are usually measured relative to bodyweight.

Also, the average US man is 5'9" and weighs 195lb. Going by this information, the average man (who is 36) would bench about 185lb. This is unlikely, considering the bench press for an untrained 198lb lifter is 135lb and, more importantly, they give the bench press for an intermediate 198lb lifter (a lifter who has "trained regularly for up to a couple years") -- this means we can infer what they expect a 198lb lifter to get after a certain amount of time training. Novice is up to 9 months so let's be conservative and assume a model intermediate has been training for about 15 months; more than two years, and you're not intermediate. With these standards you'd be expected to bench 215lb by that time. So if the middle of novice is 6 months and the middle of intermediate is 15 months, then a 198 class lifter should have benched 185 at, generously, 8 months of training.

But even 8 months of training is unlikely because the average American man does not train, period. Not just "the average man" but a disproportionately large amount of American men. Remember: 67% of people who have gym memberships don't use them, only 15% of America even has a gym membership (reducing the gym-regular population to 5%) and of the 5% who actually use their memberships, not all lift; perhaps half (3% rounded up) do. So if you need any sort of training to get beyond Novice, 97% of people aren't doing that.

These standards start to look a lot more accurate. The expected bench of an untrained 198lb class lifter is 135lb. The average bench for men under 30 is about 146lb. The median male age in the US is 36. Assuming a linear decline with age, this should put the average 36 year old male's bench at about 142, which is only 7lb more than the estimate for an untrained lifter in the 198 class.

142 at 196lb, by the way, is 0.72x BW, which is just above the 10th percentile for men in the 30-39 age group. But that's probably more accurate, given how many people actually lift.