DOTS calculator
A 70 kg lifter benching 120 and a 100 kg lifter benching 150 — who is stronger? The weight on the bar will not tell you. This turns both into one number you can compare.
How the score is built
Your bodyweight goes through a fourth-degree polynomial, and the weight you lifted is divided by the result and scaled by 500. The curve is steep at light bodyweights and nearly flat at heavy ones, which is the whole point: the first twenty kilos of bodyweight buy you far more strength than the last twenty.
DOTS was built for the powerlifting total — squat, bench and deadlift added together. Putting a single lift through it still compares you fairly across bodyweights, but the number is not an official score and will not match what a federation prints next to your name.
Questions this raises
- What is a good DOTS score?
- The honest answer is that it depends who you are standing next to, and a page cannot know that. What the scale does tell you is its own shape: it was built so that a world-class total lands near 500, which makes it a yardstick for the top of the sport rather than for the room you train in. Compare your score with your own from six months ago before you compare it with anyone else's.
- DOTS or Wilks — which should I use?
- Whichever the people you are comparing yourself to are using, because a score only means something inside one scale. DOTS is the newer of the two and corrects a known complaint about Wilks, which treated the lightest and heaviest lifters less kindly than the middle. If you compete, use whatever your federation publishes — several use neither and have their own.
The rock won't move itself.
Log the set instead of retyping it. The app keeps the history and draws the curve.
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