How rare is that lift?
Any claimed squat, bench, deadlift or total, checked against recorded raw meet results.
Someone claims a number — a training partner, a stranger on the internet, your own ambition. Enter it here and this page stamps the claim against every recorded raw entry in the OpenPowerlifting dataset for that lift: the weighted share of meet results at or above the load, and the percentile it would hold in each bodyweight class. The verdict never says "impossible" — it says exactly how many recorded competition entries have ever matched it, which is usually answer enough. All-ages raw cells only; every class shown carries at least 200 meet results, and loads past a class's highest recorded breakpoint are reported as a bound, never an invented tail.
the claim
Denominator: raw, all ages, per bodyweight class — entries, not unique people.
the record says
Enter a load to check it against the record.
percentile by bodyweight class
| Class | Median | Percentile | Reads as |
|---|
how the check works
Each bodyweight class contributes the share of its recorded raw entries at or above the load, read from that class's percentile breakpoints; the headline weights those shares by each class's entry count, exactly the arithmetic behind the strength standards "what percent" pages. A load above a class's highest recorded breakpoint (p99) cannot be resolved finer than "beyond the top 1%", so the headline becomes a bound — "fewer than" — instead of a made-up decimal. The dataset counts meet-result entries, not unique people: a competitor who totals in ten meets appears ten times. That makes the check conservative in the claimant's favour — the recorded field is stronger than the general gym population, so a load that is rare here is rarer everywhere else.
frequently asked
- Does this tool say whether someone is lying?
- No. It reports how a claimed load ranks among recorded raw OpenPowerlifting meet results — the share of entries at or above it and its percentile per bodyweight class. Whether an unrecorded gym lift is true is not something a dataset can decide; what it can say is how many recorded competition entries have ever matched the claim.
- Why do you compare against competition entries instead of gym lifters?
- Because that is the only population with verified, recorded results. Meet entries are judged, weighed-in, and public via OpenPowerlifting (CC0). The comparison is conservative in the claimant's favour: the recorded competitive field is stronger than the general gym population, so a lift that is rare among meet entries is rarer in any gym.
- What does "fewer than 1%" mean here?
- The percentile cube records breakpoints up to p99 per cell. A load beyond a class's p99 cannot be placed more precisely than "beyond the top 1% of recorded entries", so the weighted headline reports a bound rather than inventing a smaller number. The per-class table flags these rows explicitly.