I am also confused a bit. Maths isn’t my strong suit though. Your explanations are probably wasted on me but I think like it’d help everyone if you used like the right terminology and units.
Like total being the kg lifted in the meet and not confusing things with like wilks total and other terms. If you really need to use a made up term or something at least define it really well.
Good luck.
My bad everyone, I thought Wilks Total was the term for a total after being plugged into a Wilks Calculator
If this is accurate (and I assume it is, now that we have the terminology sorted out) then the main takeaway is that lifters under 75kg and over 225kg get extra Wilks just for their bodyweight. There are no lifters over 225kg that I know of, they probably couldn’t even get out of bed anyway, but there are plenty under 75kg.
This was my takeaway also
Before reading this, I thought that the heavier you are, the easier it is to get a better wilks. Right now I’m sitting right around 71kg, up from 56kg. (Yes I’m 16, and this weight was gained from when I was 14 without growing more than an inch) but I figured to be as competitive as possible, I should build up to 82.5/83kg weight class because I’m around 5”7 (according to various charts online including one by sheiko) this is making me think maybe I should stay in 74/75kg for wilks. More likley, I’ll just gain up to a Bodyweight where I’m relatively lean, and not bother trying to be as competitive as possible by wilks unless I go to some super high level meet which probably will never happen. Anyways, I find it crazy that a 550lbs person who lifts 1000 is considered more impressive than a 400lbs person lifting the same weight
If you are 250kg and can finish a meet without dying, you get bonus points.
I finished the second half of the assignment last night, which was to consider ‘Siff Values’, supposedly a calculation for ‘natural human potential’ in the three main lifts (raw), as per bodyweight. I compared the values to current IPF Classic records, and it’s actually pretty consistent. Furthermore, there seems to be minimal bias to bodyweights, as I can show in the next post.
It’s quite interesting, apparently Mel Siff determined these values from his knowledge of Exercise Physiology, rather than fitting records to regression models the way Schwartz, Wilks and Malone did.
Your choice mate, but even in my assignment I wrote that the maths wasn’t consistent with anecdotal evidence. Also, probably don’t let a 17 year-old’s maths assignment determine your lifting career in general 
Best of luck
I have 10 years left of being young to make decisions on this stuff😂 let me know what your mark is though, maybe you outsmarted common knowledge
New category: raw with defibrillator
Don’t try to bulk too fast and get fat, fat is no use. At your age it should be pretty easy to avoid, just thought it would be worth reminding you.
Of course. I started off pretty skinny with moderately visible abs, they’re less visible now, but that’s likley a result of me getting a little lazy on ab work
One thing to consider with Wilks score favoring very heavy or very light lifters is that there are simply more lifters that are middleweights. This means that we are more likely to find exceptional talent in those weightclasses. The exceptional talent in those weightclasses makes it harder for average lifters to get a good Wilks.
Very heavy or very light lifters might be just average for their weight, but we don’t have as good of an idea what an exceptional lifter in those classes would look like.
This was my thought as well.
It has nothing to do with exceptional talent, it is a mathematical formula.
But how was it created? I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it took into account world records in the lifter’s class. I might be confusing it with Sinclair.
This makes me not trust wilks very much. I know they got the formula by analyzing meet results, but give me a break! I do see that we are talking about the morbidly obese here, but a 250 kg lifter with the same total a a 200 kg lifter gets a higher wilks!
Basically I see no reason that this graph should ever curve up with increasing BW.
I guess the practical part of the graph I agree with (50 to ~200 kg). The formula gets messed up once lifters get around 450 lbs in weight (which most that size are unable to compete).
I don’t know the history of how it was created, you can try to find out about that. It makes sense that bodyweight and total don’t increase at a 1:1 ratio for the same wilks because it is still one man lifting the weight, but based on the graph it only gives a fair comparison between about 100 to 200kg. From 75-100 you have an advantage over heavier lifters solely because of bodyweight and that increases even more below 75kg, obviously we already discussed the morbidly obese lifters.
So regardless of how it was created it is a flawed formula and only useful to compare lifters at a similar weight, such as at the World Games last year where there were only 4 weight classes and winners were decided by wilks and not total. I have never really looked at any of the other similar coefficient formulas but I imagine that they have similar errors or they would have become more popular by now. Surely something better can be developed, but for now wilks is doing it’s job.
Why you’d want to compare lifters across weight divisions is beyond me anyway. Or I should say, why you’d have weight divisions and wilks is beyond me.
The point is to compare strength relative to bodyweight. Multiples of bodyweight don’t work because plenty of lightweight lifters can squat or deadlift 3x bodyweight while Ray Williams is squatting about 2.5x and deadlifting just over 2x and nobody can beat him. Maybe it’s an inherently flawed concept but that is the intention.
