Relative strength formulas

Scholars make distinctions between intelligence and memory. Just because someone has a photographic memory and can retrace routes eerily well doesn't necessarily mean that person is super-smart, for example. Similarly, weights bested do not necessarily make for accurate indicators of strength. When someone wants to challenge who's stronger, you or him, or her, rather than pick up a barbell, pick up a calculator instead.

Kristoffer Lingqvist, founder of Virtual Meets and Under the Bar, has written a great article on what powerlifting relative strength formulas are, how they work the different ones that exist, and their histories. He also created an ingenius calculator engine to figure out one's stats across the board. It's online, free and straightforward. Enter in lift data, watch it go. Once more, passion is the mother of quality creation.

From Kristoffer's article

"Maximal strength is dramatically affected by such variables as the bodyweight, age and gender of a lifter. If you want to be picky, you could add anything from muscle fiber proportion and individual leverages to mental factors, such as whether you are wearing your lucky Mickey Mouse underwear or not, but since blaming a poor total on your leverages is not generally acceptable and since the formulas we are about to discuss only concern themselves with the major differences of bodyweight, age and gender, we need not concern ourselves with minutiae. Let's just say that an 80 kg/177 lbs bench press would be a mediocre lift for a 100 kg/220 lbs 28 year-old male lifter, but an awesome lift for a 50 kg/110 lbs grandmother aged 78. We could say that the masters lifter is very strong relative to her strength potential whereas the man isn't anywhere near his. That's relative strength in a nutshell."

I've always said I'd love to be as strong as an ant. Ants can move 5x their bodyweight!

"If a human had strength "equivalent" to that of an ant, he could lift 2000 (maybe even 10,000) pounds over his head. Or, to put it another way, if an ant were as big as a human it could lift 2000 or more pounds over its head." (flying turtle exploring website - source of graphic as well)