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Benching Your Bodyweight: How Rare & How Good Is It?

For a 180 lb82 kg man, benching your bodyweight is

Intermediate

Men competing in our data who have benched it
91%
Rarity
most lifters
451010451010
45 lb bar + 45 + 10 + 10 + 2.5 per side = 180 lb
in kg: 20 kg bar + 25 + 5 + 1.25 per side = 82.5 kg (≈ 182 lb)

At your bodyweight

Where a bodyweight bench lands, by bodyweight

The bar moves with you here. A bodyweight bench is easier to reach at lighter bodyweights, in ratio terms, and the level it earns changes with the number.

180 lb
Sex
180 lb82 kg
Beginner
from the bar
Novice
from 12155
Intermediate
from 16575
Advanced
from 20995
Elite
from 265120
World Class
from 331150

At 180 lb82 kg, a 180 lb82 kg bench is Intermediate for a man. 95% of men competing in this bodyweight bracket in the data have benched their own bodyweight, which is most lifters. That is 1.00× bodyweight.

Percentile by bodyweight

Who benches their bodyweight, by bodyweight

Sex
Units
Men · bodyweight bench by bodyweight · percent of men competing in the data who have lifted it
BodyweightLevelHave lifted itRarityRatio to bodyweight
under 14365Intermediate88%most lifters1.00×
14365–16575Intermediate94%most lifters1.00×
16575–18785Intermediate95%most lifters1.00×
18785–20995Intermediate94%most lifters1.00×
20995–231105Intermediate93%most lifters1.00×
231105–254115Intermediate90%most lifters1.00×
254115–276125Advanced87%most lifters1.00×
276125+Advanced79%most lifters1.00×

Here the target is the row's bodyweight itself: a 132 lb60 kg man benching 132 lb60 kg, and so on.

Percentile by age

Who benches their bodyweight, by age

Sex
Units
Men · bodyweight bench by age · percent of men competing at that age in the data who have lifted it
AgeHave lifted itRarityMedian at this age
13 years old31%1 in 3121 lb55 kg
14 years old54%1 in 2154 lb70 kg
15 years old70%most lifters187 lb85 kg
16 years old81%most lifters209 lb95 kg
17 years old88%most lifters231 lb105 kg
18 years old92%most lifters248 lb112 kg
19 years old95%most lifters265 lb120 kg
20–2497%most lifters287 lb130 kg
25–2997%most lifters309 lb140 kg
30–3496%most lifters320 lb145 kg
35–3995%most lifters325 lb147 kg
40–4495%most lifters320 lb145 kg
45–4994%most lifters314 lb142 kg
50–5492%most lifters298 lb135 kg
55–5989%most lifters276 lb125 kg
60–6483%most lifters254 lb115 kg
65–6978%most lifters231 lb105 kg
70+59%1 in 2193 lb88 kg

What it takes

How long it takes to bench your bodyweight

Nobody has measured how long it typically takes to get here from a first session, so we would rather say nothing than guess. What has been measured is narrower, and it is below, labelled for what it is. Those are app logs that count from the day someone started logging, and coaches' opinions. These sources do not establish a reliable timeline for an individual lifter.

For women, a bodyweight bench is Advanced territory, reached by 30% of women competing in our data; nobody has measured a typical timeline for women either.

A bodyweight bench is Intermediate for a 180 lb82 kg man on Stronger's scale. Use the bodyweight table above to find the level for your size; a strength level does not predict how long reaching it will take.

For women

A bodyweight bench for women

For a 140 lb64 kg woman, benching bodyweight is Advanced. 30% of women competing in our data have lifted it, about 1 in 3. The women's standards are their own table for a reason. At the same bodyweight the women's Advanced line sits near the men's Novice line, and a lift that is ordinary for a man can be exceptional for a woman.

Bench press standards for women, by age and weight

How we calculate

Where these numbers come from

Percentiles are built from 1,668,369 verified bench press attempts by 556,880 lifters, updated September 2026. We show the method so you can judge it.

The distribution. Our percentiles come from competition results in the OpenPowerlifting open dataset: each lifter's best successful raw bench, with sex, bodyweight and age recorded at the meet. These numbers describe competitive powerlifters, people who entered a sanctioned meet and trained for it. They are stronger than the general gym population, and far stronger than the general public. We say so wherever a percentile appears. Drug-tested divisions bench less at the median than untested ones (men: 276 lb vs 305 lb); the headline numbers pool both.

The levels. Six bands, the same six Stronger uses to score every lift in the app, and read the same way. Each cutoff is the floor of its band for that bodyweight, and crossing it puts you in. We do not redraw the scale from the competition data; we put the competition percentile beside every floor so you can see how rare each level is among people who compete.

Testing a one-rep max. Warm up to it in jumps that get smaller as the bar gets heavier, take three to five minutes between the last attempts, and use a spotter or safeties. If you would rather not max out, take a set of two to six clean reps and let the calculator estimate it; the Epley formula we use is accurate to within a few percent under ten reps.

Beginner
Can perform the movement with the empty bar or light weight; strength is still mostly a skill and nervous-system story.
Novice
Ahead of most people who do not train. Typically a few months of consistent, progressive work.
Intermediate
Ahead of the majority of regular gym-goers. Usually one to two years of structured training.
Advanced
Rare in a commercial gym. Years of programming, technique and bodyweight management.
Elite
The second-highest band on Stronger’s scale. Competition rankings are shown separately.
World Class
The highest band on Stronger’s scale, not a claim of a federation record or qualification.

Sources

All 196 cited sources

How our scale compares

Our six levels are Stronger's own scale, and the percentages beside them come from competition results. The published tables below are the ones people actually copy; we keep them here word for word, and say whose numbers they are, so you can see how a “good” bench on this page compares to what other sources call good. None of them measures the general population either.

  • Strength Level Limited · 18 tables (lb, ratio, kg)Male and female Strength Level usersOriginally based on fixed Kilgore/ExRx tables in 2007. Publisher says July 2015 replaced that model with community-data regressions; May 2016 incorporated joint lift/bodyweight modelling. Current table belongs to the 2026 refresh. These are not independent probability estimates for all adults.
  • StrengthLog · 12 tables (kg, lb)Men and women who use StrengthLogStrengthLog says the standards are calculated from user training logs; no Kilgore derivation is claimed. Sample date, age distribution, lift-verification protocol and detailed statistical construction are not supplied on the inspected page.
  • Lon Kilgore / Kilgore Academy · 1 table (kg)Men and women, ages 15–89Author combines scientific literature, published drug-tested classic/raw lifting results and coaching observation. The author resource page explicitly says the 2023 revision supersedes prior tables. No cell-level dataset or reproducible estimation code is provided.
  • The Aasgaard Company · 2 tables (lb)Adult Men / Adult WomenSource specifies Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd edition techniques. Every bench numeric cell matches the inspected 2007 ExRx table, but level names differ. This is documented numerical identity, not proof of an unpublished licensing or authorship history.
  • ExRx.net · 1 table (lb)Adult men and womenExplanatory source credits Dr. Lon Kilgore, the training definitions in Practical Programming (Kilgore, Rippetoe, Pendlay), Starting Strength exercise technique and published lifting-performance standards. Numeric identity with the publisher-hosted 2012 Starting Strength sheet is directly established. Kilgore now says…
  • Gravitus, Inc. · 5 tables (lb)Male / Female Gravitus usersPublisher-owned app logs; best estimated 1RM per lifter, Brzycki formula, extreme outliers excluded. Asterisks designate weight points with fewer than 50 lifters, estimated by the publisher through allometric scaling. These estimated rows are retained as explicitly modelled published standards, not recomputed or repre…
  • Strength Origins · 2 tables (lb)Men / Women; raw, drug-tested, sanctioned full-power competitors, ages 16–65Publisher, not this inventory, processed OpenPowerlifting using Power Query; best-total performance per lifter-year, valid nonzero full SBD results, raw and drug-tested, weight classes rebinned to IPF style. No underlying data were downloaded or recomputed for this job.
  • BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation / Springer Nature · 2 tables (kg, ratio)47 male Australian elite police officersPrimary retrospective cohort measurements; barbell touches chest, full extension, bench contact maintained. Same lead coach across tests.
  • Quincy Police Department / Board of Fire and Police Commission · 2 tables (ratio)MALE / FEMALE police-officer applicantsOfficial agency publication attributes POWER minimums to national norms and an approximately equivalent percentile standard across age/sex groups; underlying normative dataset and edition are not named.
  • BrianMac Sports Coach · 1 table (ratio)men / womenAuthor-published coaching judgment; no cell-level dataset or derivation is given. A separate McArdle citation is used by the page’s assessment machinery, but the source does not prove these two good thresholds are that table.
  • Topend Sports / Robert Wood · 1 table (ratio)adults; both sexes as stated by the publisherThe author explicitly attributes the scores to personal experience, not a federation, research sample or ACSM norm.
  • Healthline · 1 table (lb)Men / Women, ages 18–59; page explains sex as assigned at birthThe page links ExRx for these standards. Unlike the fixed numerical 2007 ExRx/2012 Starting Strength cells, this page prints ranges. No inspected evidence establishes how those range endpoints were constructed.
  • 100% RAW Powerlifting Federation · 1 table (lb)Women competing in 100% RAW; ranking-informed performance classes, not population normsFAQ identifies PowerliftingWatch rankings, primarily 2008–2010, as the backbone of Elite standards, with formulas, federation input and judgment. Other classes are related to Elite. The female FAQ explicitly discusses limited participation and hypothetical stronger fields. No uniform male×factor derivation is stated.
  • TriageMethod · 1 table (ratio)Women using the publisher’s health-targets assessment; no sampled population disclosedPublisher explicitly sets female standards at approximately 60–75% of male standards, varying by movement. This is a stated coaching method; no fixed 0.6 factor is applied or inferred here.

What apps publish about their own users

  • Strength Level: average bench of 212 lb among male Strength Level cohort; no fixed bodyweightMethod: Self-submitted lifts feed fitted strength/bodyweight distributions. Rep sets can be converted to estimated 1RM. FAQ describes removal of implausible, duplicate, bot-like and unusually frequent entrie…. Not a general-population figure.
  • Strength Level: average bench of 112 lb among female Strength Level cohort; no fixed bodyweightMethod: Self-submitted lifts feed fitted strength/bodyweight distributions. Rep sets can be converted to estimated 1RM. FAQ describes removal of implausible, duplicate, bot-like and unusually frequent entrie…. Not a general-population figure.
  • StrengthLog / Styrkelabbet: median bench of 100 kg among male users in the 24,408-user bench standards cohortMethod: Public standards cite users’ training logs, but do not fully disclose selection, deduplication or fitting. The separate 2019 Swedish report analyzes logged single repetitions, not a stated rep-max co…. Not a general-population figure.
  • StrengthLog / Styrkelabbet: median bench of 47 kg among female users in the 24,408-user bench standards cohortMethod: Public standards cite users’ training logs, but do not fully disclose selection, deduplication or fitting. The separate 2019 Swedish report analyzes logged single repetitions, not a stated rep-max co…. Not a general-population figure.

Our own figure, for comparison: the median competitor in the data benches 281 lb127 kg (men) and 127 lb58 kg (women).

Questions people ask

Benching your bodyweight, answered

How many people can bench their bodyweight?

91% of men competing in our data have benched your bodyweight. Among women competing it is 30%. These are people who train and test the lift; in the general population the share is much smaller, and nobody has measured it.

Is benching your bodyweight good?

For a 180 lb82 kg man, your bodyweight is Intermediate. Whether that is “good” depends on your bodyweight: at 132 lb60 kg it is Intermediate; at 292 lb132 kg it is Advanced. These are Stronger app levels, not measured ranks among all gym-goers.

How long does it take to bench your bodyweight?

We do not have enough data to give an honest estimate yet. Heavier lifters get there sooner; lighter lifters and anyone training the bench once a week take longer.

Is a bodyweight bench good for a woman?

For a 140 lb64 kg woman, a bodyweight bench is Advanced; 30% of women competing in our data have lifted it. The women's standards

How many reps of 145 equals a 180 bench?

By the Epley formula, 7 reps. Rep-max estimates are least reliable past ten reps, so treat it as a target, not a certificate.

Does a touch-and-go bodyweight bench count the same as a paused one?

In a training log, most people count it; on a platform it does not. The IPF's technical rules require the bar to be held motionless on the chest until the referee's press command, and our percentiles come from meets judged to a pause, so a paused bodyweight bench is what the 91% figure describes. A touch-and-go rep is somewhat easier, by an amount that varies lifter to lifter, and Stronger's scale does not distinguish the two. Log which one you did and compare like with like.

Sources: IPF Technical Rules Book 2026, effective 01 March 2026, v3 (International Powerlifting Federation, 2026)

Stronger · Strength Score

Track your strength level as you work toward bodyweight.

Stronger scores every bench set you log against these standards, adjusted for your bodyweight and sex, and tells you which of chest, shoulders and triceps is the one holding the number back. That is the Strength Score.

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Bodyweight bench press: Intermediate for a 180 lb man. 91% of men competing in our data have lifted it.