So back to the original question, is a 350 lb bench press possible for everyone. I would say no. Surely not everyone. What percentage? Who knows. There’s no way to tell.
The PL meets with a significant cash prize are few and far in between, and there has never been anything close to a million yet. The people making a living off PL are coaching or selling equipment. You don’t lift weights to get rich.
I think that most normal, healthy men could get to a 350 bench if they trained consistently for long enough and gained sufficient weight. But the fact that so many guys who compete in PL can’t even bench 350 does make it look like some sort of achievement. I benched 360 in my 2nd meet after training consistently for about 3 years, but it took me more than 3 years to get to 400. The way I was making progress back when I benched 360 I thought I would have 400 by the end of that year, but not even close.
I think part of the difficulty is that gains get real slow at a certain point so a lot of people give up. There is a guy in Ottawa who has some IPF bench records, he used to have the 105kg open record at over 50 years old. He was benching 400 back in high school, it took him over 30 years to get to 500.
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I know a couple that are built for deadlift that are sub 275 benchers. I am built more for pressing and have done 365 on bench and 565 on deadlift. I got 6 plates to lockout and dropped it due to my terrible grip strength. I know an individual who has done a 600 touch and go bench that deadlifts just above 700. Build plays a lot into the lifts IMO.
My coach is a 700lbs deadlifter and only recently broke over 315, so there def exceptions. But if you look at the guys on open powerlifting over 181 who are deadlifting 600, a lot of them are benching 350, and vice versa.
No doubt, I’d definitely go into sprinting ahead of powerlifting if I was trying to make money. But he isn’t pulling in the $450M that Messi and Ronaldo are and then the gap in earning power in the pay bracket down is even bigger again.
Maybe he’s no good at soccer though. Soccer is one of the main sports in Jamaica, if he was any good he might have gone a different direction.
Exactly… I think he went and played soccer down in Australia ahead of doing a sprinting season a while back.
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If I could choose between being the fastest man who ever lived, as far as we know, having more money than I would ever need, and only having to run a few 100 meter races a year, or being a really good soccer player, having more money than 10 people would ever need, and having to play lots and lots of soccer games, I would be the sprinter. Neither is an option for me, but just maybe I could bench 350 some day, although that too is unlikely. Unlikely, but maybe possible.
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My experience matches yours – I achieved a raw 350 bench pretty quickly but the pace from 350 to 400+ was absolutely glacial. Had I been willing to go up another weight class to the 275s, I suspect it would have been a lot quicker.
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Now I’m wondering how long will it take to get to 500. At this rate, it could be another 10 years.
I’m going to push back on this a bit. Actually, I’m going to push back on it more than a bit. To be sure, there are some very strong guys in the NFL and in FBS college football, but there are relatively few who would be elite in powerlifting in their weight classes. Now, if you mean to say that if these strong football players devoted themselves entirely to powerlifting, their genetics would enable them to become elite, I would say that’s a reasonable inference, but that’s not the same thing as saying they are the strongest. Moreover, being strong and being a good football player are just not the same thing. It’s not uncommon to see football team strength records broken by guys who mostly sit on the bench, and some great football players have squat/bench numbers that are surprisingly modest for professional athletes. So, while I’m amazed by the strength levels of elite football players, I really doubt that they are stronger as a group than elite powerlifters, and certainly not on a pound-for-pound basis.
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What about strongman though? The elite guys make pretty god scratch doing strongman. It would seem top 5 in strongman make substantially more than the top 5 powerlifters. And are every bit as strong if not stronger.
They’re way stronger, just in a different sport, with a lot more variables than 3 exercises.
There can also be more to being strong than one’s performance in 3 exercises.
Here’s Mekhi Becton, this year, running a 5.11 40.
At 364 pounds, haha. No god-given genetic anomalies with half a brain are going to have anything to do with powerlifting OR strongman until they’ve exhausted every opportunity to go for a sport that actually pays you something.
Again, we could argue that “strong” means nothing more than what you squat, bench, and deadlift, but if that’s genuinely how you feel, there’s probably not much more to discuss.
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Ray Williams played college football, tried out for the NFL and didn’t make it.
Nobody competes in powerlifting as their primary source of income. But while some of the top strongmen do have the potential to dominate powerlifting, none of them is doing it. They would have to actually specialize in the squat, bench, and deadlift to PL standards, a lot of strongmen don’t bench, they squat way above parallel (seem to suit their purposes) and they deadift with straps and hitch. Thor did one PL meet, he was saying he would break the world record but fell short, but he won WSM.
If there was more money in PL then that would change things, but if you can make a living as a strongman competitor then there isn’t much sense in dedicating months or years to training for PL.
Football requires speed and agility while PL does not. Only certain positions really require a lot of strength.
How do you define strength then? Strength is specific to the task that is being used to measure it, which is why no strongmen don’t just instantly dominate PL.
We’re talking past each other. Without doubt, a 16-year-old who is both strong and who shows some talent for football will focus on football; obviously, the kid isn’t going to say “to heck with something that could get me a free college education and lots of girls and just maybe a multimillion dollar contract; I’m going to devote myself to a sport that actually costs me money and that girls don’t even know exists.” I never suggested otherwise.
But that’s not even the issue. My point is that, on a pound-per-pound basis, elite powerlifters are going to be stronger as a group, and I think that is true however you choose to measure it. Take Mr. Becton. Do you seriously think there is any chance he is stronger that Ray Williams or Julius Maddox? Don’t come back at me with “Ray and Julius would be playing in the NFL if they had a choice,” because that’s not at all the point. And at the end of the day, no one really cares how strong Mr. Becton is as long as he does his job at the line. He benched 225 for 23 reps at the combine, which is strong but hardly world-class, and no one cares as long as he keeps linebackers away from the quarterback.
Thor jumped in for a top 10 total, I’d say no top strongmen waste their time doing PL, not that they don’t just instantly dominate it. Look at all the things strongman have to do, and that’s how THEY’RE judged in terms of strength.
I would argue that strength has many definitions, and that if we are discussing the strongest people in the world, it would be funny to choose powerlifting as the be-all, end-all of who is strong, when we overwhelmingly funnel our most genetically gifted people pretty much anywhere BUT powerlifting.
Speed isn’t all that’s required for a 364 man to be fast. Gotta have a heckuva powerful engine to move that weight. The sport of powerlifting has the people who perform the sport of powerlifting the best. That doesn’t make them the strongest people in the world.
Yes, I seriously think Mekhi Becton could run through them.
Holy shit dude, I don’t mean to be a dick, but this is a mind-blowingly ignorant statement. You have just narrowed your already laughably narrow “what-makes-you-strong” standard to “most reps with 225”, and SIMULTANEOUSLY implied that nobody cares how strong a fucking NFL OFFENSIVE TACKLE is. Because, once again, your 225 rep bench press max has basically fuck all to do with how strong you are at the line.
An NFL lineman would TOSS Ray and Julius.
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Thought that was the initial argument though. Money lures the guys that could dominate PL away to do more lucrative things with their strength. Wish there was more money in it.
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Surely you know what I mean. There is a hell of a lot to being a great offensive lineman besides strength. Yes, a lineman needs a certain level of strength to do the job, but if he is strong as hell but lacking in technical abilities and misses blocks he should get, no one will care about his superior strength. He’ll be sitting on the bench or be out of a job.
As far as Becton “running through” Williams and Maddox, I would guess he could, because again that’s part of the skill set he needs to do his job. I’m not sure that equates to being stronger than Williams and Maddox in an absolute sense.
So in other words he did not dominate it despite how strong he is.
It’s the be-all end-all of who can squat, bench, and deadlift the most within certain parameters. No powerlifter is going to dominate the log press or strongman-style hitched deadlift with straps without dedicating a considerable amount of time to those lifts, because strength is specific to particular movement. Max Aita had a 700 front squat and couldn’t pull 600 when he first started PL.
But someone stronger than him might not run very fast, but could still be stronger.
It’s pretty stupid test, more endurance than anything, no correlation to anything that happens on a footbal field. If it was 405 for reps that might mean something.
There are different types of strength. Absolute strength (what matters for PL), speed strength, endurance strength, and so on. This is why it doesn’t make sense to compare athletes in different sports like this. One guy can deadlift 900 but can’t do reps for shit, the other can pull 700x10 but his max is in the low 800s. Another guy can clean and jerk 600. Who is stronger?
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I feel like you’re agreeing with me a lot here.
Yes. Powerlifting requires technique too, I’ve heard. The question here is, are the people who could learn to move the most weight within the parameters of the sport of powerlifting overwhelmingly ending up in the sport of powerlifting? I would say no.