Bench press standards
The competition bench press — paused on the chest, pressed to lockout with the hips on the bench.
Read this before you compare yourself
These percentiles describe competitive powerlifters — people who entered a drug-tested category at a meet and lifted in front of judges. They are not a sample of gym-goers, and they are not "the average person". This population skews strong.
Landing at the 10th percentile here does not mean you are weaker than 90% of people who lift. It means you are lifting less than 90% of people who compete. Most people who train have never entered a meet at all. Use this as a map of where competition sits, not as a verdict on you.
Bench press standards
of tested raw competitors in the 74–83 kg men's class (45,049 lifters). Not of the general population — see the note above.
Bench press cutoffs by bodyweight
| Bodyweight · KG | Beginner5% | Novice20% | Intermediate50% | Advanced80% | Elite95% | Lifters |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ≤59 | 41 | 63 | 83 | 103 | 123 | 5,217 |
| 59–66 | 61 | 80 | 100 | 118 | 135 | 10,929 |
| 66–74 | 73 | 90 | 110 | 128 | 148 | 26,808 |
| 74–83 | 83 | 100 | 120 | 140 | 160 | 45,049 |
| 83–93 | 90 | 110 | 130 | 150 | 170 | 45,517 |
| 93–105 | 93 | 115 | 138 | 160 | 183 | 36,090 |
| 105–120 | 95 | 120 | 148 | 170 | 195 | 20,818 |
| 120+ | 98 | 125 | 155 | 185 | 213 | 12,894 |
Each cell is the percentile cutoff among tested raw competitors in that bodyweight class — e.g. "Intermediate" is the 50th percentile, the median competitor. Bodyweight classes follow the IPF classes and are read as "over the previous class, up to and including this one".
- Beginner5th pct
- The 5th percentile — you out-lift 1 in 20 people who enter a tested meet.
- Novice20th pct
- The 20th percentile — you out-lift a fifth of the competitive field.
- Intermediate50th pct
- The 50th percentile — the median competitor. Half the platform lifts less than this.
- Advanced80th pct
- The 80th percentile — you out-lift four out of five people who compete tested and raw.
- Elite95th pct
- The 95th percentile — the top 1 in 20 of a field that already self-selected for strength. Still a long way below a world record.
The lift in this table is a competition lift.
A competition bench is paused motionless on the chest, then pressed to lockout with the head, shoulders and hips on the bench and both feet down. A touch-and-go gym bench uses the stretch out of the bottom, so it is heavier than the same lifter's paused single — sometimes considerably.
Benching is a skill lift: bar path, leg drive and a tight upper back move more weight than added chest volume. Press two or three times a week, vary the rep range, and pause your work sets so the meet lift is the lift you trained.
Whatever the plan, it only works if you can see it working. Write down every set, then beat the page. That is the entire secret, and it is the reason Bikkel exists.
Bench press questions
- What is the average bench press for a man?
- There is no single answer — it depends on bodyweight, and on who is being averaged. Among tested raw male competitors in the 74–83 kg class (45,049 lifters), the median competition bench press is 120 kg. That is the median of people who compete, which is a much stronger group than people who train.
- What is the average bench press for a woman?
- Among tested raw female competitors in the 57–63 kg class (17,866 lifters), the median competition bench press is 57.5 kg. Again: median among competitors, not among gym-goers.
- What is an elite bench press?
- On this page "Elite" is simply the 95th percentile of tested raw competitors in your bodyweight class — for a man at 83 kg bodyweight, a bench press of 160 kg. It means you out-lift 19 of every 20 people who compete. It is not a record: the top of the sport sits far beyond it.
- Does this bench press standard use competition rules?
- A competition bench is paused motionless on the chest, then pressed to lockout with the head, shoulders and hips on the bench and both feet down. A touch-and-go gym bench uses the stretch out of the bottom, so it is heavier than the same lifter's paused single — sometimes considerably.
- How do I get a bigger bench press?
- Benching is a skill lift: bar path, leg drive and a tight upper back move more weight than added chest volume. Press two or three times a week, vary the rep range, and pause your work sets so the meet lift is the lift you trained.
- Is this the average for regular gym-goers?
- No. The population is people who entered a drug-tested powerlifting meet and lifted raw, deduplicated to one row per lifter at their best total — 303,342 distinct people from the public-domain OpenPowerlifting dataset. It skews strong. A low percentile here says nothing about how you compare with the people around you in the gym.
Computed from the OpenPowerlifting bulk CSV export, snapshot 2026-07-04 (revision 9acfa1cf). OpenPowerlifting contributes its competition data to the public domain — "all CSV data is waived of all copyright and related or neighboring rights" (licence re-read 2026-07-10). You can download the same data at gitlab.com/openpowerlifting/opl-data and reproduce this table with scripts/build-strength-standards.ts in the Bikkel repo.
| Step | Rows remaining |
|---|---|
| all rows in export | 3,962,926 |
| Equipment = Raw | 1,878,723 |
| + Tested = Yes | 1,390,873 |
| + Event = SBD | 956,594 |
| + Place not in {DQ, DD, NS} | 919,311 |
| + Sex in {M, F} | 919,228 |
| + bodyweight & all 3 lifts & total present | 918,132 |
| + all lifts > 0 | 918,132 |
| + bodyweight in [40, 250] kg | 915,925 |
| + lifts under sanity caps | 915,925 |
| + not known to be under 18 | 810,111 |
| deduped to one row per lifter (best total) | 303,342 |
The final step deduplicates to 303,342 distinct lifters — one row per person, their best-ever total — so that frequent competitors do not dominate the distribution. Mx-category lifters are excluded (too few to form a percentile), as are lifters known to be under 18. Age is missing on roughly 15% of rows, so a small number of unlabelled juniors remain. Percentiles use linear interpolation between the two nearest ranks.
Two honest limits of the source columns: Tested records that a lifter entered a drug-tested category, not that they personally provided a sample — federations do not publish who was tested. Equipment likewise records the category entered, not what was worn on the day.