Comment by eudamoniac

The average male 20-29 in USA is 85KG. A deadlift of barely over 2x bodyweight is not remarkable at all! The average young man does not train and when they do they train stupidly; this has no bearing on the fact that they could achieve a 400 deadlift within a few years of intelligent training.

Most gyms are not serious. You'll find no one lifting heavy at Planet Fitness, and you'll find that a 350 deadlift is one of the weakest in a dirty powerlifting gym. Among people who actually do the activity, it's not impressive. The thing is you just have to actually do the activity. My metrics are only "absurd" if you think I'm saying that the average man has the willpower and interest to achieve this; of course they don't; the average man is obese and lazy. My claim is that the average man has the physical capacity to achieve this.

Please don't misconstrue my claim of what is possible for what is likely. The average man can easily learn to cook well, read a few books per year, get their chess elo into the top 30%, run a 5k, learn to draw basic portraits, deadlift 400 pounds, and many other things that the average man will never do because they don't want to train for it.

If I said the average man could practice drawing for a few years and end up drawing basic portraits, or study chess or cooking for a few years and end up better than almost anyone they know, this is mostly uncontroversial. When I say the same for strength training, it seems to anger a lot of people for some reason. My experiences tell me that these are comparable levels of goals.

To the original point, seriously, my 102lb wife squats more than 1 plate and she's been training for 4 months.