patsullivan6630 wrote:
Any body weight. I say 225 pounds is good 'nuff because most most men could do it without training but would hurt themselves or the soreness level after the lift would render them unable to do any other sports effectively for a few days. I would expect a novice dead-lifter to be able to hoist 235 pounds at a body weight of 148 pounds. You don't need to be any higher than novice unless you really want to be. It gets bloody addictive though so watch out.
For the bench press I would say between 135 and 205 pounds is good 'nuff for a man of any body weight. Many triathletes, because of the swim, will probably find themselves into this range fairly rapidly. Distance runners have trouble here because for many of them this will be the first time they are truly activating those muscles. As a personal aside, when I was 168 pounds I was bench-pressing in the 280 pound range when I thought that beach muscles were the most important thing in life.
For the hack squat and squat I would say between 225 to 250 pounds is good 'nuff for a man of any body weight. For many triathletes and runners this is probably not going to be seriously challenging, even if it does people tend to go from novice to intermediate quickly in squats, the body responds very well to them.
I did this analysis based on the idea that the athlete would be engaging in multi-sport activities between olympic distance and half-ironman distance races as the primary focus of the athlete. If it isn't then advanced dead-lifting for a man of 148 pounds is 380 pounds so you can see that unless you are extremely light then body weight in this discussion isn't quite that important.
This made me chuckle.
My DL started at 65 pounds and it hurt--adductors especially. My squat started at 65 and it hurt. I guarantee you that this still "untrained man" would have had a prolapse or shot a disc into the ceiling if he tried to pick 225 off of the floor even once. I still probably would. Undoing 20 years of desk work takes time.
But as the 5x5/add 5lbs every lift is working on a linear progression, those targets are within reach. The trick will be to maintain that strength or 90 percent of it on 2x per week once I get back on the bike/start running long. Either way, it's made an improvement in quality of life so I'm going to keep doing it.
owner: world's tightest psoas (TM)