The aim is fourfold:

Be a source of support for women who are ‘out there’ strength training, usually in a male-dominated environment.

Lots of us are or have been the ‘only woman in the weights room’ and while most of the time we just get on with it and enjoy it, sometimes it is nice to have other women to chat to about strength, or simply to know that there are other women doing what we are doing. It’s hard not to feel like a freak sometimes – but there are more of us than we think! The group will demonstrate this clearly.

Highlight inspirational feats of strength by women and positive role models for female strength – not necessarily elite athletes either!

No matter how internally driven you are, it is always good to see inspirational people doing amazing things. From elite athletes pushing the boundaries to ‘ordinary’ people overcoming obstacles to achieve their goals.

Something I hear about from men in particular is the difficulty of finding postive role models to show their partners or female friends, and to combat the many myths about strength training for women that abound. Guys, this group is your answer!

Raise aspirations and standards in women’s strength training.

Women have the potential to be very strong but most women – and men who train them – have little idea what they should be aiming for. Someone once said to me that the biggest problem with female athletes is male coaches – and he was talking about the low expectations that some coaches have for female strength. So without getting too gung-ho, let’s explore what some objective strength standards are (I’ve done this elsewhere on this site but let’s expand that discussion) and back it up with experience and evidence.

Get more women into strength training

This group is primarily for women who have already decided that they want to get stronger. I’m sceptical about attempts to proselytize to so-called cardio bunnies; I don’t want to force anyone to lift weights who doesn’t want to.

That said, there are messages about the benefits of strength training that are being lost. If more women knew that strength training would strengthen their bones and joints, help them lose fat, make them fitter and more mobile and generally improve their quality of life for decades to come, maybe they’d give it a go. There are many people out there pounding the pavements who don’t particularly enjoy it but think it is the path to good health. Maybe they’d prefer weight training…

Discuss!

In the next few days and weeks I’ll start some discussions on these and similar topics in the group and I do hope you’ll join in – and start some of your own.

I’ve disabled comments on this post because I hope that if you have thoughts to share you will post them on the group site.

More food for thought:

• The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to free weights
• Why do most women still avoid the free weights room?
• Strength standards for women

What do we mean by one rep max?

Your one rep max is the heaviest weight you can lift for a single rep in the chosen exercise. So for example you might want to find your one rep max in the squat or maybe the clean and jerk.

There are several reasons why you might want to do a one rep max session:

Curiosity – just what is the maximum amount of weight you can lift?

Programming – if you are following or constructing a programme based on percentage of one rep max, you need to know what your one rep max is. Online calculators that work this out from your 5 or 10 rep max are not particularly accurate – it’s better to do a proper test yourself

Training effect – going really heavy, up to your max, has a useful training effect. Max singles require the maximum amount of neurological and muscular coordination, effort and force you can possibly muster. Your max lift should be the lift where you recruit the most muscle you possibly can; getting to this point will make you stronger.

But your max is a different animal (and a different number) depending on factors such as whether you have worked up to it over a period of weeks or months and what type of environment you are in.

Powerlifters or olympic weightlifters for example talk about their ‘training max’ and their ‘competition max’. The training max is the maximum amount they have lifted in the gym – which usually means a safe, familiar environment with no pressure and no judges. The competition max is the maximum amount they have achieved at a meet – in an adrenalin-fuelled competitive environment.

Some lifters do their best lifts in competition; some do better in the gym.

Non-competitive trainees who have tested their max usually mean the most weight they managed to lift on a particular day. They may or may not have prepared for that max day.

Dan John offers some amusing but insightful definitions of max here.

For the purposes of this article, I’m talking about testing your max on a given day in the gym. This is not something you need to prepare for specifically.

I do a session like this when I need to know my training max for a new programme. I’ve just done one recently because I’ve had a few months off and I therefore don’t really know where my strength is at the moment.

It should be noted that I did not walk back into the gym after three months and immediately perform a max test. I spent about a month easing back in first!

When are you ready for a max test?

Going to your one rep max is not something that most people should be doing every week. If you are an advanced trainee, this could break you quickly, and if you are a complete beginner, there are better ways to use the time.

I’d say you need to have a good few months training (at least) under your belt before it is worth doing max singles. I didn’t bother doing them for several years.

There are two simple reasons for this:

1. If you have not been lifting for very long, your single won’t represent your best effort. It takes time and practise to develop the necessary neuromuscular coordination to make your best lift your first and only lift. I explain more about why this is the case in the article What is Strength? Beginners tend to do their best lift a few reps into the set. For beginners, a 5 rep max is a more helpful indication of strength.
2. You need to be solid in your technique in order to do a good single in the first place. If your technique is not good, you won’t be getting an accurate reading of your strength. Many people need to spend months working on mobility and flexibility in order to achieve a decent squat.

However if you have been training for a while and you are confident with your technique, it could be fun to try your one rep max.

How to test your one rep max

If you’ve never done it before, it’s not as scary as you think! It is also not a standard process, it very much depends on how you best operate. The objective after all is to get your max, not to do a particular number of reps at a particular weight or ‘work your heart and lungs’ or whatever.

The process is simple. Here’s a summary.

• Do a thorough warm up: first a general warm up for the body, then some warm up sets in the lift you are testing.
• When you are warmed up, start doing single reps.
• Take as much rest as you need fully to recover between efforts.
• Increment the weight in whatever amounts you feel appropriate for you.
• Keep going until you cannot complete a rep with good form.
• You’ve got your training max. Go forth and conquer!

Warm up

It is helpful to get your muscles warm and your heart rate up a bit. You’ll want to do some mobility work to loosen up and work out any kinks. Keep it all very light.

Once you’ve got everything going, it’s time to do your warm up sets in the target lift. This is the area people are most unsure about. You need to prepare sufficiently for a very heavy effort. But you don’t want to expend too much energy on the warm up as you want to put it all into your max effort.

The way I work it out is using number of reps. Other people might use percentage of target max or some other method. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you get an effective warm up.

My method works as follows. I start with a weight I can lift with good form very comfortably for 10 reps. This is an opportunity for me to get the heart rate up, blood flowing and practise the key bits of technique I will need to focus on in the singles. An example of this would be keeping my chest up in the squat. I use the set of ten to really focus on keeping the chest up and driving hard. You want to give your body a chance to practise what it will need to be doing under great stress later.

I then have a rest, maybe 2 or 3 minutes and then do a set of 5, again at a weight where I can get 5 reps reasonably comfortably. Once more I focus on elements of technique that I really want to get right.

From there, I move onto doubles, that is, 2-rep sets. At this point what I’m doing is getting my body ready to feel a really heavy weight. If I went from a set of 5 to a single, the difference in weight would be a bit of a shock. Mentally I might feel that the weight was too heavy. So you get your body used to heavy weights but without wasting energy by doing lots of reps.

I’ll do maybe 2 sets of doubles, again with 2-3 minutes rest in between. Then I’ll start my singles. I start my singles with a weight that is very challenging but that I expect to be able to complete. Psychologically it’s not very encouraging to fail your first single!

I generally take at least 4 minutes rest between single efforts.

If you are testing an olympic lift, the process should be slightly different. Olympic weightlifters generally would not bother doing sets of 5 and 10 to warm up, but will warm up with partial lifts and lower rep ranges. This is because form deteriorates in the olympic lifts much quicker than in the power lifts and it can be counter productive to do high rep sets.

There are specific olympic lifting warm up sequences such as the Burgener warm up which you can utilise to get your technique practise in before moving onto doubles and singles.

Incrementing the weight

Your max effort will be affected by how you increase the weight from single to single. If you make too big a jump up in weight, and fail the lift, you’ve wasted energy on that attempt. However if you increment in amounts that are too small you are wasting energy doing too many lifts before reaching your max.

Don’t get hung up about it – just be sensible. On a lift like squat or deadlift you should be able to increment by at least 5kg until perhaps right at the very end when you might increment by 2.5kg. My own rule of thumb is to increment by 5kg until I get to the point where I really don’t know whether I will make the next lift or not, based on how the last one felt. When that is the case, I switch to 2.5kg increments.

On the bench press, your increments may be smaller, especially if you are female. I tend to increment by 2.5kg for bench press singles. You can get hold of even smaller plates if necessary (that is, smaller than 1.25kg).

Failing a lift

If you fail at a particular weight, usually that is your max. Sometimes though you might feel that the lift was nearly there, in which case you can often rest for a few minutes, come back and try again.

This is your own judgement call. Sometimes you fail and you know that’s it for the day. Sometimes you want to have another go. It’s entirely up to you.

One rule that I have for myself when testing a training max is that I stop when my form starts to deteriorate. If my back starts rounding on deadlift for example, then that is my max lift for the day – even if I still feel ‘strong’.

There’s no point getting yourself injured just for a training max. Where’s the glory in having to take six weeks off for injury?

Of course you should also stop if you are no longer getting your desired range of motion in the lift. If you are testing your max bench press, for example, and you don’t manage to touch your chest with the bar, you should not count this as a max.

General principles

Recover as much as you need to between each lift – you are not trying to get a ‘cardio’ effect from shorter rest periods, you are trying to lift as much as you possibly can. 4 minutes works for me. In my opinion your rest should not be shorter than 3 minutes and can be 5 or over for very advanced lifters.

Don’t expend all your energy on the warm up. It is just the warm up, not the purpose of the session. Everything in the session needs to be geared towards getting that max single.

Have your head on straight. Try not to psyche yourself out but you do need to take it seriously, concentrate, focus and be present in the lift.

Get some help – spotters, or even just friends to encourage you and make you feel better. Doing a max session on your own can be tough and lonely.

Your favourite workout music often helps. If you work out better to music, put some on. Again, the purpose of the session is to get a max, not to make life harder unnecessarily.

Prepare for the day

Exercise some common sense and prepare for the session in advance, in order to maximise your chances of hitting a good number. Have a couple of rest days or light training days before the one rep max session. Get a good night’s sleep the night before and make sure you are well fed and watered on the day.

More suggestions

• How to prepare for a one rep max strength test
• How to warm up for a one rep max

Got any tips for a one rep max session?

There’s not much general knowledge about what is “good” for women’s strength training. In many cases, a woman simply lifting weights at all is considered amazing. But this – even if kindly meant – is patronising. If we are to take women’s strength training seriously, women need to know what to aim for as they progress. As reader Bonnie comments:

“It’s essential for women to know what feasible long term goals are. I envy the guys who learn weightlifting lore just by growing up. They learn as teenagers that if they work they can achieve a 200lb bench press, a 1.5 body weight squat, etc. Women who come to weightlifting often have no idea what is feasible.”

Using bodyweight as a measure

It may surprise you but if you use comparison with bodyweight as a measure, women’s strength standards are not greatly different from those of men. Using bodyweight therefore levels the playing field and makes it much easier to compare people of different sexes and weights. After all, “men” can vary greatly in size so saying that xxx kg is good for a man is not particularly fair either. And as reader Darren points out,

“Lighter people will always find bodyweight goals easier to achieve.”

You can use bodyweight either as a percentage or as a multiplier. For example if you weigh 60kg and squat 60kg, you can say that you squat 100% bodyweight or that you can squat 1 x bodyweight. Reader Ross comments:

“my girlfriend and I both just keep adding the weights until it we can’t lift it, then practise until we can. To keep it competitive between us we go on % of BW, so even if she’s lifting half of what I am, she might still be kicking my butt!”

There are also “bodyweight” exercises such as press ups, pull ups and so on which are generally done with no extra weight and therefore often used as a strength standard. Again the gap between what men and women can achieve is narrower than you think. Because much of the emphasis is on the upper body in these exercises, it can take longer for women to build up to the same standard but this does not mean it is not possible to get to the same level. (In a recent episode of TV show Superstars, Kelly Holmes kicked Jason Gardener’s ass on dips!) There are also bodyweight exercises that women generally find easier than men, such as the single leg squat. Reader Dingletec says,

“My father used to say you are considered strong when you can lift your own bodyweight. I don’t think it matters how much you lift beyond that, but that everyone should have that goal in the big lifts. And obviously should be able to pull their own weight in pullups/chinups for multiple reps.”

Boris of SquatRX concurs:

“Squatting with anything close to bodyweight on the bar with good form for reps is probably a … realistic goal for most general gym-goers (men or women)”

Standards

The first point to make is that there is no “standard” standard. The second point is that it depends on whom we want to compare ourselves to. Do we want to know how good we are compared to all lifters, from beginner to elite? Or do we want to know how good we are compared to others in the gym?

I looked at a bunch of strength standards from different people or organisations. Some go from ‘untrained’ through to ‘elite’, covering every possible stage. Others go for the simpler ‘decent, good, great’ classification, comparing regular gym goers. My sources were:

1. Lon Kilgore, Weightlifting Performance Standards on exrx.net (these are also available in the book Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore, which I highly recommend)
2. Crossfit North Athletic Skill Standards
3. Are You Strong? Find out right now with these strength standards! by Tim Henriques (from T-Nation)

I put together a side-by-side comparison of these standards based on a female of bodyweight 60kg (132 lbs) which you can see in PDF format in Strength Standards comparison. But what I really wanted was an overall figure applicable to anyone, a single standard to refer to. So I came up with a ‘middle of the pack’ figure from this comparison table. I also took into account the figures suggested by readers of this website and my own experience.

These standards should be relevant for adult women who are strength training on a regular basis so I chose three levels of Good, Very Good and Excellent. It’s important to say that Good is good compared to other gym goers, not compared to untrained people. So Good is certainly a level to be proud of. Good is a level of strength that it is possible to gain after six months of regular training but is likely to be a couple of years or more for many trainees.

Very Good can take another couple of years on top of that and requires commitment and consistency. Reaching this level would put you above the majority of gym goers, even those who do regular strength training.

Excellent is a very advanced level, where you are probably starting to compete at national or international level. At this point you want to be comparing yourself to the other athletes in your federation and weight class rather than your fellow gym goers. Here are the standards, expressed as percentage of bodyweight:

Table of strength standards for women

You can see from these figures that Good is pretty impressive compared to the average gym goer but it is a level I believe anyone can aim for if they are serious about their strength training.

Commentary on the standards

From what I have seen and read, there is not much controversy over the standards for the power lifts. The trickiest area I found is deciding where Very Good ends and Excellent begins; here is where your own predilections will make a difference. For example a woman with a particularly good squat but slightly weak bench might think that 175% bodyweight was a tad low to be Excellent, whereas a 100% bodyweight bench was about right.

The bodyweight exercises are more difficult to determine, partly because this is an area where many women are too weak to begin with. Often women shy away from upper body or bodyweight exercises altogether because they feel so weak in this area and think that they will remain so. This is not the case; women can get very strong in the main bodyweight exercises.

The bodyweight exercises standards from the T-Nation chart in particular were quite low – reinforcing the idea that women are rubbish at these exercises (I don’t exactly blame the T-Nation author; he is probably reflecting what he sees in the gym). Conversely the standards from Crossfit North are very high and while I admire their ambition (and it should be noted that the numbers are for men as well as women), many women might look at those numbers and think them impossible.

So the aim was to strike a balance and reflect women’s true potential without going completely out of range.

Setting goals

Don’t be disheartened if you feel that Good is a long way away – it is attainable!

Setting small, achievable goals is often more motivating than one far-off overarching goal unless you are the rare type of person who is not intimidated by that. So use these standards as background information but set goals that are relevant to you, your training history and your own ambitions. As reader Zoey observes:

“I really don’t know what the baseline is for women, but I do think it’s often set by what we see at the gym. For better or for worse. This time last year I was benching 25lb dumbells, thinking I was doing great. No other women were benching dumbells at all that I could see. Then this ripped young female trainer worked out one day and I saw her bench 35lbs, then 40lbs for about 8 reps each. I was astonished, and got right to work, and in a few weeks, there I was.”

Most people are naturally better at some lifts than others. It is a rare person who is consistently good across all exercises. So while it is good to work on your weaknesses (and essential if you are aiming for the top), don’t panic if one or two exercises seem to be falling behind. Over the long term you can work to even out these imbalances.

Further information

Women of Power – profiles of top female powerlifters

Powerlifting records

Lon Kilgore, Weightlifting Performance Standards on exrx.net

Crossfit North Athletic Skill Standards

Are You Strong? Find out right now with these strength standards! by Tim Henriques

Because relatively few women lift free weights and of those who do, many are new to lifting, it is deemed appropriate to be encouraging about any lifting stats – the mere fact that a woman is lifting being enough.

But if women don’t know the potential, the scope of the lifting talent, they might not push themselves as hard. It is all too easy to be satisfied with too little, to be the big fish in the small pond, the strongest woman at your gym. Without that competitive edge or knowledge of what other women – ordinary trainees, not elite lifters – are achieving, can you really strive to be as good as you possibly can?

It is also true that the mere knowledge that someone has achieved a certain feat makes it easier to imagine yourself achieving it too. It’s about setting your expectations at the right level. Imagine if a complete beginner walked into a gym to have her induction and the personal trainer said to her, “In six months time you’ll be squatting your own bodyweight.” Not knowing any different, she’d probably go on to do just that, or something pretty close.

It also seems that the majority of men have no idea what a good lift is for a woman. This is not surprising; so few women do proper strength training that men don’t have a benchmark to measure against. If you’ve never seen a woman do a pull up, how can you be sure whether 1 pull up, 10 or 20 is a decent number?

But what men think is, in this case, very important! Many women rely on men for information and advice on what is seen as a guy’s sphere of expertise. Many men want to encourage female friends, wives or girlfriends to get involved but don’t know what level to push them towards. Even personal trainers might not really understand the art of the possible where non-elite female weight training is concerned.

In my experience most people underestimate, but occasionally people overestimate too. For example since I am known for being into my lifting, people sometimes assume I have much better lifts than I actually have. Men often think I lift the same as they do – which is kinda sweet but not always true!

I’d like to know what you think. Do you have an idea of what women at different levels (novice, intermediate, advanced) are lifting? What would you say to a woman who asked you ‘how much should I be squatting?’ How much does it matter anyway?

Further reading

Strength standards for women