Absolute strength vs relative strength explained

The distinction is simple once you name it clearly, and everything else follows from it.

Absolute strength is the raw amount of force you can produce or the total weight you can move, regardless of how big you are. If you deadlift 400 pounds, that is your absolute strength on the deadlift. It does not care what you weigh.

Relative strength is your strength divided by your bodyweight. It answers a different question: how strong are you for your size? If you weigh 150 pounds and deadlift 300, you are lifting twice your bodyweight, and your relative strength is high even though your absolute number is smaller than someone twice your size.

It is no accident that the heaviest lifts in the world are set by very large athletes. More muscle means more potential to produce force, so at the top of absolute strength you almost always find big, heavy people. If your only question is who can move the most weight, size is a genuine advantage.

But here is the twist that makes relative strength interesting. Strength does not increase in direct proportion to bodyweight. When someone gets larger, their absolute strength goes up, but not by the same percentage as their weight. A person who is twice as heavy as another is generally not twice as strong. This pattern, where strength scales with size but lags behind it, is well documented in strength sports and is the reason the comparison is not as simple as biggest wins.

Because bigger athletes have an absolute-strength advantage, strength sports would be dull and unfair if everyone competed together. A 150-pound lifter could train perfectly for years and never out-total a 300-pound lifter of similar dedication. So the sports split competitors into weight classes, letting people compete against others of similar size.

But there is still the question of who is the best lifter across all the classes, the person with the best strength for their size. To answer that, powerlifting uses scoring formulas that adjust a lifter's total based on their bodyweight, so a small lifter's total and a large lifter's total can be compared fairly. Two well-known examples are the Wilks formula and the newer IPF GL points system, both of which are essentially structured ways of measuring relative strength across body sizes.

• Weight classes keep competition fair by grouping similar-sized athletes, an acknowledgement that absolute strength favours the big.
• Scoring formulas like Wilks and IPF GL points convert raw totals into a size-adjusted score, effectively ranking relative strength.
• The best pound-for-pound lifters are frequently found in the lighter classes, which fits the fact that strength lags behind bodyweight.

Neither kind of strength is better in the abstract. The right target depends entirely on what you want to do with your body. Pick the goal, and the answer becomes obvious.

1. Want to move the heaviest possible weight? Chase absolute strength. This usually means being willing to add bodyweight, since more muscle raises your force ceiling. Open-class strength athletes live here.
2. Want to be great at bodyweight skills? Chase relative strength. Pull-ups, muscle-ups, and gymnastic movements reward being strong for your size, so staying lean while getting stronger is the goal.
3. Compete in a weight-class sport? Relative strength within your class is everything. You want the most strength possible at a bodyweight that keeps you in your division.
4. Just want to be capable and healthy? Build a solid base of both. General strength training raises your absolute numbers while a reasonable bodyweight keeps your relative strength high. You do not have to choose.

For most people who are not competing, the good news is that the same core training improves both kinds of strength at once, at least until you reach a fairly advanced level.

Getting stronger on the main lifts raises your absolute numbers. Keeping your bodyweight in a healthy range, mostly through your diet, protects your relative strength. Because early and intermediate gains lean heavily on your nervous system and on building your first slabs of muscle, you can often improve your total lifts and your strength-to-weight ratio in the same phase of training. The trade-offs only become sharp when you are advanced enough that the only remaining way to add a lot of absolute strength is to add a lot of bodyweight.