Average Deadlift by Age: 13 to 70+ (Chart)

13 to 18. This is the steepest part of the curve and the least predictable. Two 15-year-olds can be years apart in growth, so the teen pages give standards by bodyweight, which tracks maturity far better than a birthday does. Among competitors in our data, the median deadlift climbs more pounds between 13 and 18 than the median squat or bench press. The years before the number matters are the years to make the set-up automatic.

20s and 30s. Peak territory. Bodyweight, training age and technique explain almost everything; the calendar explains almost nothing. The adult standards on the main page are built for this range.

40 and up. Among people who compete in our data, the median man deadlifts 502 lb at 40–44 and 405 lb at 60–64, about 19% less; for women it is 292 lb and 243 lb, about 17% less. Each age band is a different group of lifters, not the same lifters measured twice. Recovery takes longer, the hips and low back want a longer warm-up, and the heavy pulls get fewer and further apart.

Women, at every age. The shape of the curve is the same, the numbers are lower, and the women's standards are their own table for that reason. The deadlift is the lift where women sit closest to men. Among women who compete in our data, 98% have deadlifted their own bodyweight; among those aged 40 to 44 it is 98%.

The distribution. Our percentiles come from competition results in the OpenPowerlifting open dataset: each lifter's best successful raw deadlift, 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 deadlift less at the median than untested ones (men: 474 lb vs 496 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. The app divides your best estimated one-rep max by your bodyweight and compares it with a set of multipliers for each lift, so each cutoff is the floor of its band for that bodyweight, and crossing it puts you in. World Class starts at 1.2 times the Elite floor. 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.

The lift. The competition percentiles come from barbell deadlifts from the floor on a standard bar, conventional or sumo, no straps, pulled in one movement, locked out and held, because that is the lift a meet judges. The six levels are the app's scale for the conventional deadlift; the app scores sumo on its own scale. Trap-bar pulls, rack pulls and strapped maxes are different lifts.

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 keep the back set and put the bar down the moment the position goes; a deadlift needs no spotter. 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.