Mixing and Matching Categories in Strength Standards
Following up from my last two articles about strength standards for men and women, I wanted to bang out a quick one before New Years to clarify a frequently asked question about these things: What if your lifts are in different categories, i.e. you have a “recreational lifter” level deadlift but only a “regular person strong” bench, and a “really strong” squat. What are you?
The simple and straightforward answer is that you can, indeed, mix and match - and then you just go by the total: the sum of all 3 lifts. As all these categories are meant to be approximate and not exact, we’re looking at rough groupings, not hard lines in the sand.
Let’s take an example. Putting press to the side for the moment, the 3 lift powerlifting total is the sum of your best squat, bench, and deadlift. For the category “Recreational lifter,” that total is 1360.
This represents a big step up from the “Really strong” - for a regular person - category, which has a 3 lift total of 1230.
Now let’s say you’ve been training a few years, and you've dedicated yourself to the lifestyle more than just someone who trains 3 times a week for 75 mins. You train 4 times a week for 1.5 or even 2 hrs and really try to organize your life, your travel, your meals, around your gains. But you also have long arms and slightly longer than average femurs. So your lifts don’t categorize and stack up neatly in either category: You might have a bench of only 265, a squat of 465, but a deadlift of 600. Are you just really strong for a regular person, or are you a recreationally competitive lifter?
We can answer this question via your total. Your total here is 1330, which is a lot closer to recreational lifter than really strong, and you can use that as a determinant.
It’s not about the exact number, it’s not that if you get 1360 you’re in Category A and 1359 you’re in Category B. Instead we see that 1330 is both objectively close to 1360, and also a lot closer to 1360 than to 1230. So you can put yourself in the higher category without agonizing about it.
What About the Press?
Because all these categories are meant to be for fun, not for any official purpose, you can choose whether to include the Press in your total or not. I have always trained and treated the Press as a main lift right alongside bench, both in terms of analyzing the technique and in terms of how much I train it. A lot of powerlifters, however, barely ever press at all, and if/when they do, it’s as more of an afterthought and often with pretty atrocious technique.
I like the press a lot and think it’s important. I dedicated one of my longest and most widely read articles to date on it. But if you’d rather just use the traditional PL 3 lift total for this purpose, the Barbell Police aren’t going to come arrest you.