What does PocketAthlete actually do?

You log each morning: sleep, soreness and fatigue. It scores your readiness, adjusts that day's session, and builds four-week training blocks around your sport, your position and the equipment you have.

Is it only for footballers?

No. It covers football, rugby, basketball, running, weightlifting and general gym training, with position-specific work for the team sports.

No. Tell it what you have and it programs around it. Many of the technical drills need nothing but a ball and a wall.

Can it work around an injury?

It works around soreness you log and avoids body parts you tell it to leave alone. It is general training information, not medical advice — see a physiotherapist for a diagnosis.

What is a good bench press for an 80kg man?

About 67.5kg is intermediate and 100kg is advanced. Below 40kg is novice territory.

Is a 100kg bench press good?

At 80kg bodyweight that is 1.25× bodyweight, which is intermediate. At 65kg the same bar is a far higher tier, and heavier it is a lower one — the bodyweight is the whole point.

Do these standards apply to women?

The multiples differ. A women's intermediate bench is 0.75× bodyweight against 1.25× for men, and the app uses the right set once you have set your profile.

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Bench press standards: is your bench actually good?

3 September 2026

"Is my bench good?" has no answer without your bodyweight, which is why bench press standards are written as multiples of it rather than as absolute numbers. A 100kg bench is advanced at 80kg bodyweight and something else entirely at 65kg or 100kg.

These are the same standards PocketAthlete uses to rank an athlete's own lifts, so the table below is not a separate opinion written for an article — it is the numbers the app itself works from.

The tiers, and what each one actually means

Untrained — everyone starts here. Novice — a few months of honest training. Intermediate — a year or two in, and it shows. Advanced — stronger than most people in any gym. Exceptional — competitive-level strength. Master — very few people lift this. World Class — the top of the sport.

The labels are ordinary words on purpose. An athlete who reads "Advanced" next to their bench can look that word up and find other people using it the same way, which a made-up rank name does not allow.

What the numbers are at 80kg bodyweight

A novice bench is about 40kg, intermediate is 67.5kg, and advanced is 100kg. Above that, exceptional is 132.5kg and master is 160kg.

Scale those by bodyweight rather than adding a fixed number: the multiples are 0.5×, 0.85×, 1.25×, 1.65×, 2×, 2.4× bodyweight, so a 65kg lifter's advanced bench is 82.5kg and a 100kg lifter's is 125kg.

Every kilogram in the table is rounded to the nearest 2.5, because that is the smallest increment a barbell actually offers.

How the bench compares to the squat and deadlift

The bench is the lift where bodyweight multiples run lowest. An advanced squat is 1.75× bodyweight against the bench's 1.25×, which is why a lifter whose squat and bench feel equally hard-won will still rank differently on each.

That is not a flaw in the standards. It is the reason ranking against a single "strength score" is misleading, and why the app ranks each lift separately.

Why estimating from a rep set is usually enough

You do not need a one-rep max to place yourself. A set of five taken close to failure estimates a max closely enough for a tier, and the estimate carries none of the risk of a genuine single — which is the wrong thing to attempt on a lift you are still learning.

Estimates get less reliable the further the set is from a single, so a set of twelve tells you far less than a set of three. Somewhere between three and six reps is where the arithmetic and the safety agree, and it is what the app uses when it ranks a lift from your training log rather than from a tested max.

Where a tested max exists it wins, because a number you actually lifted beats a number derived from one you did. The two used to live on separate screens here and disagree; they do not now.

What moves a bench, and what does not

Tiers move on training age more than on anything else. The multiples above span 0.5× to 2.4× bodyweight, and crossing that range is years of work rather than a programme change — which is worth knowing before you swap one for another because a lift stalled for a fortnight.

Bodyweight is the other lever, and it cuts both ways: adding weight raises the bar you have to clear as fast as it raises what you can lift. That is the arithmetic behind a lifter feeling stronger and ranking the same.

What a standard is not

A standard is a description of what other lifters at your bodyweight tend to lift. It is not a target you have to reach, not a schedule, and it says nothing about whether you are training well — someone novice on a lift they started last month is progressing faster than someone advanced who has not added a kilogram in two years.

Its actual use is comparison over time. Test the same lift again in three months and the tier tells you whether the training moved anything, which is a better question than how you felt.

Common questions

What is a good bench press for an 80kg man?: About 67.5kg is intermediate and 100kg is advanced. Below 40kg is novice territory.
Is a 100kg bench press good?: At 80kg bodyweight that is 1.25× bodyweight, which is intermediate. At 65kg the same bar is a far higher tier, and heavier it is a lower one — the bodyweight is the whole point.
Do these standards apply to women?: The multiples differ. A women's intermediate bench is 0.75× bodyweight against 1.25× for men, and the app uses the right set once you have set your profile.

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