Where could your lifts be in 12 months?

How it works

Your squat, bench press and deadlift are added up and converted to a DOTS score, which adjusts your total for bodyweight. The planner then searches one-year comparisons from raw full-power meets: lifters who competed in one calendar year and again 9 to 15 months later. For each lifter and year it uses their best DOTS result.

It picks the 100 lifters of the same gender who were most like you when they started. "Like you" means a similar age, bodyweight, DOTS score, and a similar split of the total between squat, bench and deadlift. Each of those is scaled by how spread out it is across all lifters, so a 5-year age gap and a 5 kg bodyweight gap are weighed fairly. Each person counts once, using their closest result. The targets are the percentiles of how much those 100 lifters changed.

How accurate is it?

We tested it on 2,000 drug-tested lifters who started in 2024 or later and whose results a year on are already known. For each one, the planner could only use comparisons that had finished before that lifter's first meet, and never their own history.

The ranges behave as they should: the realistic-to-ambitious band (the middle half) caught about half of real outcomes and the 1-in-10 range about four in five.

Things to keep in mind

• These are competitors who came back to compete a year later. People who stopped, or got injured, may have progressed differently.
• Meet results don't show training history, programming, consistency or injuries. Newer lifters usually progress faster than the data for their strength level suggests.
• Competition lifts are judged strictly (squat depth, a paused bench, no straps), so gym numbers often run a little higher.
• "Drug tested" means the lifter entered a tested division. It doesn't mean every lifter was personally tested.
• The checkpoints assume an even pace. Real progress is lumpier, and usually faster in the first few months.

Sources and credit

The nearest-lifter approach was inspired by Gym Log's powerlifting progress calculator and its published methodology. This planner was built independently with its own data processing, testing and design.