Every lifter asks it eventually: Is my bench normal? Should I be stronger by now?
The usual answers come from strength-standard charts built on people who log every lift and chase numbers. That describes almost no one. So we went to a different source, the actual working weights that millions of people record in Fitbod, beginners and veterans alike and asked two plain questions: where do real lifters land, and how much stronger do they actually get? The answers are more useful, and more honest, than some of the charts you’ve seen.
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Key Takeaways
- The lifts people actually train aren’t the barbell “big four.” More Fitbod users log the dumbbell bench press than the barbell version, and the barbell squat and deadlift rank far down the list.
- We mapped the weights real lifters handle on the major lifts by sex, and by how much they’ve practiced each one. Find your row; it’s a benchmark, not a target.
- Population averages oversell personal progress. Following the same lifters over time, the typical gain works out to about 30% on the bench real, but a lot humbler than the charts imply.
Table of Contents
- The Lifts People Actually Train Aren’t The “Big Four”
- What “Normal” Looks Like, Lift by Lift
- Why Progress Charts Oversell What You’ll Gain
- Final Thoughts
- How We Measured This
The Lifts People Actually Train Aren’t The “Big Four”
Open almost any program and you’ll meet the barbell big four: bench, squat, deadlift, overhead press. That’s not what most people reach for.
In Fitbod, more people log the dumbbell bench press than the barbell one. The barbell back squat ranks around 30th by number of lifters. The barbell deadlift, around 38th. The movements people log most are dumbbells, cables, and machines; dumbbell rows and curls, lat pulldowns, leg presses, dumbbell presses.
None of that is a knock on the barbell lifts. It’s just a more honest picture of how regular people train: less barbell heroics, more dumbbell-and-machine practicality. Keep it in mind the next time a program assumes a fully loaded power rack is the center of your training life.
What “Normal” Looks Like, Lift by Lift
Below is the heaviest weight a typical lifter handles for a working set, grouped by how many times they’ve logged that lift your 1st time, your 10th, your 50th, your 100th. The number is the median; the range in parentheses is the middle half of lifters (25th to 75th percentile).
- These are working weights; the heaviest you’d do for a real set of reps, not one-rep maxes. They’ll read lower than the figures on strength-standard sites, which report tested maxes from people who self-select into tracking every lift. Different measures, different crowds.
- We count experience as times logged, not calendar time, since people train at very different paces.
- We show men and women separately because absolute loads differ; this is a description of what people lift, not a comparison of effort or potential.
The Barbell Lifts
Barbell Bench Press
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 110 lb (88–135) | 45 lb (40–65) |
| 10th | 135 lb (110–165) | 65 lb (50–80) |
| 50th | 155 lb (132–185) | 79 lb (65–95) |
| 100th | 172 lb (140–205) | 85 lb (70–105) |
Back Squat
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 120 lb (95–150) | 65 lb (45–95) |
| 10th | 150 lb (115–190) | 88 lb (65–115) |
| 50th | 185 lb (140–225) | 110 lb (85–135) |
| 100th | 200 lb (155–245) | 120 lb (95–155) |
Deadlift
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 125 lb (95–155) | 65 lb (45–95) |
| 10th | 160 lb (121–209) | 95 lb (65–125) |
| 50th | 198 lb (148–250) | 115 lb (85–155) |
| 100th | 225 lb (165–275) | 132 lb (95–175) |
Barbell Overhead Press
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 65 lb (50–85) | 35 lb (25–45) |
| 10th | 75 lb (60–95) | 45 lb (33–55) |
| 50th | 90 lb (70–110) | 50 lb (42–60) |
| 100th | 95 lb (77–115) | ~55 lb |
The Dumbbell and Machine Lifts
Dumbbell numbers are per dumbbell the weight in each hand, not the pair.
Dumbbell Bench Press
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 30 lb (20–40) | 15 lb (10–20) |
| 10th | 40 lb (30–53) | 20 lb (15–25) |
| 50th | 50 lb (40–65) | 25 lb (20–30) |
| 100th | 55 lb (45–70) | 25 lb (20–35) |
Dumbbell Shoulder Press
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 25 lb (18–32) | 10 lb (9–15) |
| 10th | 30 lb (22–40) | 15 lb (10–20) |
| 50th | 40 lb (30–50) | 20 lb (15–25) |
| 100th | 44 lb (35–53) | 22 lb (17–30) |
Lat Pulldown
| Times Logged | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 88 lb (70–110) | 55 lb (40–70) |
| 10th | 110 lb (90–132) | 67 lb (55–80) |
| 50th | 130 lb (105–150) | 75 lb (60–90) |
| 100th | 140 lb (115–160) | 80 lb (65–100) |
Find your lift and your experience level, and you’ll see where you sit. If you land inside the range, you’re normal. If you’re under it, you’re simply earlier in the same curve everyone walks.
Why Progress Charts Oversell What You’ll Gain
Look at the bench table again and it’s tempting to read the rows as your future: men go from 110 lb to 172 lb, so surely you’ll add 60 lb too. That’s the trap, and it’s the most important thing on this page.
Those rows are different people, not one person tracked over time. The lifters who’ve logged a movement 100 times started out stronger than the average beginner, and the group looks different on the way up. By the 100th session it has shifted from roughly 8-in-10 men to more than 9-in-10. A snapshot of a crowd is not a personal trajectory. Read it that way and you’ll set yourself up to feel behind.
So we did the other analysis: we followed the same lifters from their first logged session to their hundredth. Here’s how much the typical person actually added:
| Lift | Typical gain, 1st → 100th session |
|---|---|
| Deadlift | +47% |
| Back Squat | +38% |
| Lat Pulldown | +37% |
| Barbell Bench Press | +30% |
| Barbell Overhead Press | +24% |
Real progress and meaningfully smaller than the population columns suggest. It also varies widely: on the bench, a quarter of lifters gained 5% or less over those sessions, while another quarter gained more than two-thirds. Strength doesn’t arrive on a fixed schedule. The lesson isn’t discouraging, it’s clarifying. If your numbers climb slower than some chart promised, the chart was probably comparing you to a stronger, different crowd not to your own past self.
So, is your lift normal?
“Normal” is a wide range, not a single number. On most lifts, the middle half of people spans 40 pounds or more at every experience level. There’s a lot of room to be perfectly ordinary. And the only comparison that really holds up is the one against your own last logged set. That’s the number you control, and the one worth beating.
Final Thoughts
Strength training is full of comparison traps; charts built on self-selected maximizers, programs written for idealized lifters, progress timelines that treat everyone’s body the same. What this data offers is something different: a realistic picture of where real people start, what they actually lift, and how much they genuinely gain. Your lift is probably normal. Your progress, even if slower than a chart once implied, is real. The only benchmark that truly holds up is the one you set the last time you walked in and that’s the only one worth trying to beat.
How We Measured This
We looked at working sets logged for the standard, non-custom exercises in Fitbod, across millions of users. For each person on each day, we took the heaviest weight they lifted for a working set (warm-ups excluded). We grouped lifters by how many times they’d logged a given movement, then reported the median and the middle-half range at each milestone.
The “where lifters land” tables pool different people at each experience level. The progress percentages follow the same lifters across their own sessions which is why they come out lower, and why they’re the honest answer to “how much will I gain.” Sex is self-reported; profiles that didn’t specify are left out of the men’s and women’s tables. We excluded the leg press, where machines differ so much sled versus selectorized, and whether the carriage weight counts that the numbers aren’t comparable from one gym to the next.
