[goosinmouse]

Im going to begin with saying that nobody should go to the gym and test what you said. An untrained male that is 200lbs will absolutely get hurt if they try to attempt a 160lb bench press, 200lb squat, or 300lb deadlift. In fact i'd argue that they would be more likely than not to get a serious injury if they were untrained and actually attempted any of those. Untrained numbers are going to be half of what you said to test.

What is this supposed to be an approach for? Overall fitness level?

Although im going to add a disclaimer for anyone reading this that wants to give this a try.

According to StrengthLevel, which is community sourced stats, for an average male on their site which skews exclusively towards people who do strength training here are the bodyweight ratio's for beginners, who are usually classified as AT LEAST a month of training to 6 months

- Bench press .50x of weight - Squat .75x of weight - Deadlift 1.00x of weight

Moving up to novice which is 6 months to 2 years the numbers are in line with what you shared. So people who haven't lifted should definitely not try to test their strength by going straight to novice numbers on the bar. They WILL hurt themselves if they put anywhere close to that weight and have no spotter or spotter bars.

[drbig]

Thanks for discussing! I overall agree.

First lemme be explicit that I didn't imagine anyone sane who has not been to a gym ever - or even in a long time - to plop in ~100% of their weight for anything. Warm up and going there in increments was presumed by me as the standard procedure.

> - Bench press .50x of weight - Squat .75x of weight - Deadlift 1.00x of weight

Yeah, I wasn't sure about the percentages, just the general relation between them. My fault here most likely! I don't remember how many lives ago I heard about this "test". Your numbers sound reasonable too.

But it was clearly after I done my work (out, over 3 years) of getting from "nothing" to "something".

> What is this supposed to be an approach for? Overall fitness level?

I'd say more of the power (strength) level. There is a lot more to fitness.

[drbig]

Going this deep down I'll only add that "assumptions", i.e. "none will try 100% of their weight on anything if they have no idea what they are doing" are poor, and that it never ceases to amaze me that a squishy human body can lift 250+ kg and make stainless steel rods (that weigh 25 kg) _bow_.

Apologies for not putting in more details in my original post -> now I _bow_.

[confidantlake]

Definitely this. Also even if you can say bench press 160lbs you should be doing several warm up sets starting from an unweighted bar. Just throwing on 160lbs cold and going for it is madness.