How Strong Should You Be to Win Your First Powerlifting Meet as a Female?

With data from 10 of the most recent “open” powerlifting competitions (based on meet results from openpowerlifting.com), I filtered the information down to make sure that it included a few key criteria for female powerlifters:

• Lifters must be 24-39 years old (in the “Open” Age Category)
• Lifters must be participating in the drug tested division
• Lifters must be competing in a full power category (performing the squat, bench press and deadlift on the same day). Participation in single or 2-lift events (ex. bench only, deadlift only or push-pull divisions) was not included in the data set.
• Lifters must be competing in the raw category, meaning knee sleeves, wrist wraps and a lifting belt are permissible, but no supportive equipment such as knee wraps, squat suits, bench shirts or deadlift suits are allowed. Not all federations allow for the use of knee sleeves, but with sleeves offering such a small advantage over sleeveless, this was not a big enough difference to cause exclusion.

This article will show you both how strong female powerlifters might need to be to win as well as the “lowest” total you could still achieve a podium position with at an upcoming powerlifting meet in the female open division.

For a full breakdown of both men’s and women’s results, see “Your First Powerlifting Meet: Strength Standards and Locations“. It details strength standards across weight classes and shows you where to find local powerlifting meets.

After analyzing the data, it was split into 2 sets

1. The highest total (sum of the heaviest squat, bench press and deadlift) from all of the meets, per weight class
2. The lowest total that still put the lifter in at least 3rd place in their respective competitions and weight class.

The women’s 57 kg (~125lbs) and 110kg (~242 lbs) were by far the most competitive to take 1st place but the 57kg class was harder to get on the podium. With the given data set, the 57kg class only had one elite lifter as the entire data set, leading to this outlier result.

Looking at weight classes with >4 lifters, the 63kg and 100kg classes had the toughest competition across the board (ie. were the “most competitive”), meaning there were the fewest default medals awarded due to often having >3 lifters per meet per weight class.

What you should know about “Open” Powerlifting Meets

With the high degrees of variance in how *competitive* open competitions are, you are much better served using open competitions to reach the needed qualifying total to compete at higher level meets like provincial/state or regional level championships. You can see the spread is wide on these open meets, but at qualified meets, there is a minimum level of experience needed.

For example: in 2025, I coached two lifters (Emily Wiggins and Zoey Farago) at the BC Powerlifting Provincial Championship. It was a pretty competitive meet with only a 12% spread from 1st to 3rd place. At this meet, Zoey secured her national qualifying total and Emily set a new national bench record and won the best lifter award for the fifth time in her lifting career.

Looking into higher level competitions, the spread gets even tighter at the regional level. In the same year, Zoey competed at CanPL Westerns and two things occurred:

1. The spread that was the difference from 1st to 3rd place was more akin to 4th or 5th place at this higher level competition.
2. 2nd and 3rd place were identical (and both higher than 3rd place at provincials). I had to get creative with attempt selection on the day to get zoey to secure silver as she had beat out Elizabeth Irvine on bodyweight (this is why you should always weigh in with minimal clothing, even if you’re not cutting weight).

Here’s a video of Zoey pulling her first ever 400+ deadlift to secure the silver medal and beat out Elizabeth.

I want to be competitive in powerlifting

Equating for Bodyweight

With the above in mind, we can look at DOTS score which allows us to compare relative strength of all lifters across all weight classes. While in the short term, we might see spikes in certain classes, at a high level in the long term, the higher the weight class, the higher the totals are. Use of the DOTS formula to equate for bodyweight/relative strength in order to see which weight class is the most competitive with everything else held equal led to the following findings in women’s powerlifting in the USA.

When looking at DOTS data, it is clear that the 63 through 84 kg weight classes were the most competitive which is in line with typical findings due to the bell curve of competitors in those more “average” weight classes.

Additional info you need to know about this data:

1. The “highest” 1st place number is essentially the number you’d need to hit to give yourself the statistically highest odds of winning, regardless of who else shows up to the meet but often this number is quite a bit higher than the winning total at most meets. The bigger the gap is between the 1st value and min. to podium value, the higher the odds of this being an outlier result are.
2. This is a relatively small data set with only ~ 80 lifters, so there are some notable outliers present that skew the data. I am working on putting together a data set of ~1200 lifters which should get a more valuable data set. This will be posted on my free Platform-Ready Community as a full, in-depth resource. I invite you to join me there if you’re interested to see the full data when it’s published in January 2025.