OpenPowerlifting (CC0)
About this reference
Per-lifter competition results (sex, age, squat/bench/deadlift 1RM) published as public-domain bulk CSV. FitnessNorms derives the upper/lower strength ratio (bench 1RM / squat 1RM) per meet-performance (de-duplicating entries repeated across divisions of the same meet), restricted to raw drug-tested results, then takes percentiles by age bracket and sex.
Known limitations
- Competitive powerlifting population only: trained raw, drug-tested competitors, not the general population.
- Per meet-performance, not per-lifter: a lifter's result is counted once per meet (entries duplicated across divisions of the same meet are de-duplicated), but lifters who compete at several meets contribute one observation each. This mirrors how the squat, bench press, and deadlift norm pages are built.
- Equipped lifting (single-ply, multi-ply, wraps) and untested entries are excluded; the ratio is sensitive to supportive equipment.
- Approximate ages (OpenPowerlifting records some ages as 'N.5', meaning between two consecutive ages) are kept when both candidate ages fall in the same bracket and dropped only when the half-year straddles a bracket boundary.
- Derived from the 14 June 2026 bulk snapshot (md5 recorded in scripts/upper_lower_ratio_pooled.json); OpenPowerlifting refreshes nightly, so re-deriving against a newer snapshot gives close but not identical figures.
- The 80+ age group was omitted; it had too few qualifying entries (a fixed minimum of 400 per cell plus a bootstrap 5th/95th-percentile stability check), and is not published rather than shown as a noisy distribution.