How much do you bench?

Anyone that’s been around the gym for any period of time knows how common these types of questions are with any of your lifts.

However, when people ask this, they are asking for your absolute strength. That’s how much weight you can lift regardless of how much you weigh.

A 250 lb bench press isn’t very impressive if you weigh 250 lbs, but a 250 lb bench press is very impressive if you weigh 150 lbs.

When comparing how much you lift compared to your weight - this is looking at relative strength - how much you can lift divided by your bodyweight.

While that’s an extreme example, more people would benefit from tracking relative strength instead of absolute strength. This is one of the best ways you can measure true strength as well as know how your body composition is improving. If your weight is regularly changing, which is common, you’ll get far more valuable information from tracking relative strength. 

If you are on a bulking diet and trying to put muscle on, this will tell you if you’re putting on more muscle or fat. Adding 15 lbs to your squat while also gaining 15 lbs of weight (hint: that's not good) will tell you you’re probably gaining more fat than muscle. Adding 5 lbs to your squat without gaining any weight is a better indicator of gaining lean muscle mass and/or true strength. The same formula applies when people are trying to lose fat or get lean. For experienced lifters it’s hard to keep gaining strength as you get to a certain level of leanness. But even maintaining your strength can be a huge win if you’re down 10 lbs in overall weight. 

These are things I’ve been testing in my own fitness journey for years, and how we track strength improvements for our clients at Inside Out Strength. By moving from testing absolute strength to testing relative strength you’ll have a much better gauge for where you’re at as it relates to your strength and body composition without needing fancy equipment.

Here is a simple 4 step process to measure your relative strength and track your progress over time:

1: Select A Cadence To Test Your Strength

The first step is to determine when you will test your numbers. For most people, testing once every 3 months is the sweet spot for allowing enough time to see change while also providing you with some additional accountability on your diet and training. You’ll also want to choose which movements are important for you to track, and you’ll want to spread out these tests over several days. Set a reminder on your calendar and get to work.

2: Track Your Average Bodyweight For Testing Week

When it’s time to test, you’ll want to track your average weight for a week. This is an important step as weight can naturally fluctuate significantly day to day. Tracking your average weight over the course of a week will give a much better picture of what your real weight is. Track your weight for 7 days in a row, total up all the days, and divide by 7 to get your average bodyweight.

3: Calculate Your Relative Strength: (Weight x Reps)/BW

You can test whichever lifts are most important to you, but we test the major compound movements with our clients: deadlift, squat, bench press, overhead press, a row variation, and chin ups. We don’t test traditional 1 or 3 rep maxes for our clients because we want to minimize risk of injury due to sloppy reps under high load. For our programming, the actual testing is naturally mixed in through our reverse pyramid training workouts our clients are regularly performing. You’ll want to choose their heaviest set performed and calculate the weight lifted x number of repetitions and divide that number by your average bodyweight. 

4: Compare To Previous Numbers

The last step is to compare to previous testing you’ve calculated. If your relative strength numbers are improving, you’re on the right track and you should keep following with the plan. It’s essential to see that you are making progress, because discouragement or feeling like you’re not making progress is one of the things that will cause you to change things up prematurely before it’s necessary (or give up). And this is especially true when you are trying to lose fat - as you get lighter you will typically not be as strong across your lifts for several reasons. 

*Note that not every time testing will always lead to improvements. The key is to make sure there aren’t any major decreases in your relative strength numbers. If there are, you’ll want to re-evaluate your current diet and training program to see where changes are needed. This also serves as a great opportunity to reflect and be honest with yourself. Did life get in the way of your training or diet? Are there any habits you need to re-dedicate yourself to that will help with this process? Don’t beat yourself up, just make the adjustments and get right back to it.

Do you regularly track or test your strength? Do you have other methods you’ve used aside from testing a rep max?