DOTS Calculator: Compare Your Powerlifting Total Across Body Weights

How this calculator works

Bigger lifters lift more. But not in a straight line. Doubling body weight does not double strength, so simple “total divided by body weight” unfairly favours light lifters. DOTS tries to correct for that.

The formula:

DOTS = total × 500 ÷ (a + b·W + c·W² + d·W³ + e·W⁴)

W is your body weight in kg. The five coefficients differ by sex:

	a	b	c	d	e
Men	-307.75076	24.0900756	-0.1918759221	0.0007391293	-0.000001093
Women	-57.96288	13.6175032	-0.1126655495	0.0005158568	-0.0000010706

Body weight is capped at 40-210 kg for men and 40-150 kg for women before it goes into the curve. Outside those ranges, the polynomial starts doing strange things.

Some examples from the calculator:

• Man, 75 kg, 400 kg total: about 287
• Man, 100 kg, 500 kg total: about 308
• Man, 60 kg, 400 kg total: about 338
• Woman, 60 kg, 250 kg total: about 277

Notice the 60 kg man. Same 400 kg total as the 75 kg lifter, but a much higher score.

You also get total ÷ body weight as a second number. It is easy to understand, but it flatters lighter lifters, so lean on DOTS for comparisons.

How to read your result

The level label (Beginner through World class) is a rough coaching band we set, not an official ranking. Use it as a loose guide. The more useful habit is tracking your own DOTS every training block. If it climbs, you are getting stronger relative to your size, whether you are cutting, bulking or holding steady.

If you are building towards a meet, our guides on powerlifting strength science and peaking for meet day cover how to push that number up. No recent true max? Get a number from the 1RM calculator or read up on testing versus estimating your 1RM first.

Limitations and who this is not for

Any body-weight formula is a compromise. When the older Wilks formula was checked against world-class lifters, it was fair for the bench press and total but biased against heavier men and women in the deadlift (Vanderburgh and Batterham, 1999). That was a small sample of 30 men and 27 women.

DOTS has now been checked on a much bigger scale. A 2026 analysis drew on raw, drug-tested meet results from 282,164 lifters. In the 84,651 lifters held back for validation, adult DOTS totals were only weakly linked to body mass (mean correlation 0.064), close to the Goodlift formula (0.066) and a little better than Wilks (0.105). Plain total ÷ body weight was far more tied to body mass (0.473) (Fahey, 2026). The same study found every scoring method held up less well for equipped lifting, across federations, and in some older women and youth lifters.

Newer research questions whether polynomial curves like these are the right tool at all. A 2026 analysis of 457,471 drug-tested powerlifters found that strength scaled with body mass differently at the elite end, and argued that polynomial formulas such as Wilks and IPF GL look overfitted. DOTS was not tested directly, but it is built the same way (Montenegro et al., 2026). Another 2026 study of 393 people, from beginners to elite powerlifters, found age and height also shape maximal strength, and that sorting people into fixed strength categories hid a lot of variation inside each category (Isenmann et al., 2026). All three of these 2026 papers are new single studies, so hold the conclusions loosely.

So DOTS ignores age, height and limb length. It does not separate raw from equipped lifting. And it says nothing about health or physique.

It is also not meant for under-18s or anyone told to avoid maximal lifting. Testing true maxes is not for anyone recovering from injury, either. If you have a heart condition, high blood pressure, or pain that changes how you move, check with a doctor or physiotherapist before chasing a one-rep max.