Powerlifting

Powerlifting is a measured sport whose measurement is gated entirely by human judgement, which is a stranger combination than it sounds.

The weight on the bar is a fact. Whether the lift counts is decided by three referees — one in front, one at each side — pressing white or red, with the majority deciding. There is no appeal to a sensor anywhere in the sport.

Squat depth is the central call. The hip crease must pass below the top of the knee. Under a maximal load a squat's lowest position lasts a fraction of a second, the lifter is wearing a belt and possibly a suit, and three officials are judging a joint angle from three different lines of sight. Federations differ in strictness, and this is not a rumour about them — it is a documented reason their records cannot be pooled.

The bench press is judged on a motionless pause on the chest, on the lifter's buttocks staying in contact, on no downward movement of the bar during the press, and on obeying three separate commands. More elite bench attempts fail on commands and pauses than on strength.

The deadlift is judged on the bar not being hitched or ramped up the thighs and on the lifter finishing upright with shoulders back. It has no start command, only a "down".

What is notable by comparison with the rest of this site is what powerlifting has never adopted. Shooting instrumented its targets, fencing wired its weapons, taekwondo put sensors in the socks, and swimming has touchpads. A sport that could plausibly measure squat depth with a camera has, across every one of its federations, declined to.

Powerlifting's map is unusually flat, and the reason is that it needs almost nothing.

The United States, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Japan, Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Poland all field strong programmes, and the sport has real depth in places that have very little else on this site — a rack, a bench and a loaded barbell are available in ordinary commercial gyms almost everywhere, and a meet needs a platform and three referees.

Two things make its geography different from other strength sports. First, there is no facility requirement beyond a gym: no pool, no track, no hall, no snow. Second, the sport's growth since the 2010s has been driven by online culture rather than by clubs or schools, which spread it into countries with no federation history at all and produced a generation of competitors whose introduction was a video rather than a coach.

Because federations are separate rather than territorial, geography and institution cut across each other. A country may have several competing bodies running meets in the same city on the same weekend under different rules, which is a shape no other sport covered here has.

Women's participation has grown faster here than in most sports on this site over the last decade, from a very low base, and the raw division is where most of that growth is.

Powerlifting is what was left over.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, weightlifting competition included a shifting menu of lifts, and the international sport gradually narrowed to the ones that were most athletic and most spectacular — ending, by 1972, with the snatch and the clean and jerk alone. The lifts that were dropped did not stop being contested. In the United States and Britain especially, meets continued for the "odd lifts": the squat, the bench press, the deadlift, the curl, the press.

By the 1960s those meets had consolidated around three. The squat, bench press and deadlift are the movements that let a person express maximal strength with the least technical mediation, which is precisely why the Olympic sport had discarded them and precisely why a rival sport could be built on them.

The first American national championship was held in 1965 and the International Powerlifting Federation was formed in 1972 — the same year Olympic weightlifting finished narrowing itself. The IPF fixed the order, three attempts at each, and the total.

What followed is the part that defines the sport now. Drug testing arrived, and lifters and promoters who objected founded alternative federations. Supportive equipment arrived, and federations disagreed about how much to allow. Judging standards for squat depth diverged. Each split produced another body with another record book, and none of them ever merged.

So powerlifting was assembled from a larger sport's offcuts and then broke into pieces itself. It is on the World Games programme and has never been on the Olympic one.

Powerlifting's equipment history is the clearest case on this site of a support garment turning into a machine.

Belts and wraps came first and were uncontroversial: a belt increases intra-abdominal pressure, knee wraps and wrist wraps stabilise a joint. Then in the late 1970s and 1980s came the squat suit and the bench shirt, made of dense polyester and later canvas, cut deliberately smaller than the lifter.

These do not support the lift. They store elastic energy at the bottom of the movement and return it on the way up, which means an equipped lift is a different mechanical event from a raw one. A bench shirt's effect is large enough that a lifter's equipped bench can exceed their raw bench by a margin no other sport's equipment comes close to producing. Multi-ply gear — layers stitched together — pushed it further still.

Two things follow, and both are recorded on this site as rules.

First, federations disagreed about how much to allow, and the disagreement is one of the reasons their records are not comparable. Single-ply, multi-ply and raw are effectively three sports.

Second, the IPF eventually stopped trying to resolve it and split its own competition instead: a classic division from 2012 with its own championships and its own records. That is the same instrument cycling used for the hour record — separate the conditions and keep both books — and the opposite of what swimming did with the supersuits, which was to ban the equipment and let the marks stand.

Equipped lifters make an argument worth recording: using a bench shirt well takes years, and the division is a discipline rather than an asterisk. Nothing about the physics is in dispute; what the physics means is.

No sport covered here is as institutionally fractured as this one.

The IPF was formed in 1972 and introduced drug testing. Lifters and promoters who objected — to the cost, to the methods, or to the principle — founded alternatives, and the alternatives kept forming. The result is a sport with many international federations, some strictly tested, some explicitly untested, each with its own equipment rules, its own judging standards and its own world records.

The consequences run all the way down to what a number means. A world record total from a tested single-ply federation and one from an untested multi-ply federation are both real results, honestly recorded, and cannot be set against each other in any way that survives examination. There is no body with the standing to arbitrate, because standing is exactly what is in dispute.

The IPF is the federation inside the international system: recognised, on the World Games programme, and compliant with the world anti-doping framework. That gives it a claim the others do not have, and it does not give it control of the sport — a large fraction of competitive powerlifting happens outside it, and the online culture that has driven the sport's growth since the 2010s does not organise itself by federation at all.

There is one further institutional oddity. Para powerlifting is Paralympic, contested as a bench press alone, and governed by World Para Powerlifting rather than the IPF. The sport with the Paralympic place and the sport with the World Games place are different organisations doing different things under almost the same name.

Drug testing, and the schism it caused. The founding controversy and the one that shaped everything after it. Testing did not clean up one sport; it divided it, permanently, into tested and untested federations whose results are kept in separate books that nobody reconciles.

The bench shirt. Supportive equipment moved from garment to device, and federations answered differently — some allowing multi-ply, some single-ply, some none. The IPF's eventual answer in 2012 was to stop choosing and run raw as a separate division with its own records, which is a comparability break adopted deliberately rather than suffered.

Squat depth. The rule is that the hip crease passes below the top of the knee, judged by eye by three referees from three angles under a maximal load. It is the most argued call in the sport, standards differ measurably between federations, and it is a genuine reason their records are not comparable. No federation has instrumented it.

Redrawing the bodyweight categories. The IPF changed its classes in 2011, which annulled the records attached to the old ones. Weightlifting did the same thing in 1993 and again in 2018. It is the standard tool of a strength sport that wants a clean book, and it works by detaching the old numbers rather than disproving them.

The points coefficient. Comparing lifters across bodyweight categories requires a formula, the formula has been revised more than once, and each revision changes the historical answer to who the best lifter at a given meet was. A scoring coefficient is a rule, and this one has been rewritten with retroactive effect.

Recorded as unsettled.

Which federation's records are the records. Every federation asserts an answer and none can enforce it. This site takes no position and records that the disagreement is the reason no unified progression exists.

Whether raw and equipped should both continue. Raw has most of the growth, most of the new competitors and most of the visibility. Equipped lifters argue theirs is a distinct discipline with its own decades of technique. Whether a federation should maintain two full record books is a live question.

Squat depth. The standard is verbal, judged by eye, applied inconsistently between federations and sometimes within them, and could be instrumented. That it has not been is the sport's most conspicuous refusal.

Testing. The split that created the sport's structure has never healed and there is no mechanism by which it could. An untested federation is not a fringe concern here; it is a substantial part of the sport.

Olympic ambition. The IPF holds a World Games place and international recognition. Whether inclusion is realistic for a sport whose own record book is contested, and which the public routinely confuses with the weightlifting already on the programme, is doubted inside the sport as much as outside it.

The coefficient. How to compare a 59 kg lifter with a 120 kg one is a formula, the formula keeps changing, and each version rewrites who won awards that were handed out years ago.