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Body Fat, Lean Mass, and Performance in Strength Sports: A Complete Guide for Powerlifting and Strongman
- JHEPCxTJH
- Nov 30, 2025
- 60 min read
Body Fat, Lean Mass, and Performance in Strength Sports: A Complete Guide for Powerlifting and Strongman
Strength Has a Shape, but Not the One People Think
Body composition sits at the centre of one of the longest running misunderstandings in strength sports. Many lifters assume that leaning out always leads to better performance, that visible muscle is a reliable indicator of power, or that success in strongman and powerlifting follows the same body ideals seen in fitness culture. None of this aligns with what athletes actually display on the platform or in competition. Strength does not follow aesthetic trends. It follows physics, physiology, event demands, and the relationship between lean body mass and force production.
Across both powerlifting and strongman, the strongest performers do not share a single visual template. In the same season you can see world class deadlifters carrying high levels of body fat alongside exceptionally lean competitors who excel in movement-dominant events. Open strongman shows often feature athletes ranging from mid-teens body fat percentages to athletes in the high twenties. Tested powerlifting can be filled with lifters who stay closer to the lower end of their class, while untested divisions frequently show the competitive benefit of staying heavier. These differences are not random. They are tied to the requirements of the sport, the structure of the events, and the way each athlete’s mass contributes to strength and resilience.
The evidence across the literature supports a simple principle. Lean body mass is the strongest predictor of maximal strength. It is the part of the body that produces force, tolerates training volume, absorbs physical stress, and adapts to progressive overload. It is also the part of the body most likely to diminish if athletes diet too aggressively or chase visual leanness without considering their competitive calendar. Studies on powerlifters show clear relationships between muscle mass and one rep max performance, regardless of specific body fat percentage. This relationship appears in both male and female athletes, across weight classes and across training backgrounds.
None of this means that fat mass is irrelevant. The challenge is understanding what it does and how much an athlete needs. A certain amount of fat mass supports recovery, hormonal stability, training consistency, and resilience under heavy loading. In strongman, where yoke walks, stone runs, and heavy carrying events reward a sturdy frame and the ability to tolerate repeated bouts of stress, a moderate level of fat mass can be an asset. In powerlifting, slightly higher body fat levels often support fuller glycogen stores, stronger leverages in the bench and squat, and increased total body mass that contributes to stability under maximal attempts. When taken too far, the extra mass slows movement, limits cardiovascular capacity, and does not meaningfully increase force production. When taken too low, recovery suffers, training output falls, and the athlete risks reducing the lean body mass that actually produces results.
This article begins with a simple aim. Strip away assumptions about appearance and replace them with principles that explain how body composition interacts with competitive performance. Understand why the strongest athletes in the world come in different shapes. Learn how event selection shapes optimal physique targets, why body composition changes must be aligned with the competitive calendar, and how to identify the amount of fat mass that supports performance without becoming a hindrance.
If athletes understand the relationship between lean body mass, fat mass, and the shifting demands of strongman and powerlifting, they can manage body composition with clarity instead of guesswork. The goal is a physique built for strength, not one shaped by aesthetic ideals that do not match the realities of the sport.
This article summarises current evidence and applied coaching experience. It is not medical advice, and individual health conditions always need individual assessment.
This article is not a moral judgement about how lifters should look, nor is it a health lecture. Strength sports reward a wide range of bodies, and many high-level athletes - myself included - often perform best when carrying a little more mass, especially in open classes and in-season. At the point we take a strength sport seriously, we all accept trade-offs that borrow from both short and long-term health, and the aim is simply to manage those trade-offs with harm reduction in mind. The goal here is to understand which aspects of body composition actually support strength and event performance, which ones do not, and how to shape your physique around the demands of the sport rather than around aesthetic expectations.
I don't get into a great deal of detail on things like hormone profile, insulin sensitivity or gut health & digestion etc. There will be time for that in the future.
How to Use This Article
This guide is written for strongman and powerlifting athletes across all categories: tested and untested, male and female, open and weight-class. It explains how body composition interacts with strength, how to decide whether to cut, gain, or hold, and what ranges tend to support the demands of different events. You can read it straight through, or skim the body fat ranges for your category and move directly to the practical sections on monitoring performance and planning physique changes across a season. The aim is to give you a clear framework you can apply immediately, without needing to sift through every detail unless you want the deeper context.
The body-image conversation sits beside this, not inside it. If you want to untangle how strength culture, social media, and body image interact, that belongs in its own discussion. I cover more of that in FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION and in the weight-neutral side of my work.
Lean Body Mass as the Primary Driver of Strength
At a glance: where most high performers sit
Male SHW and static bias: about 17–22 percent
Male open, mixed events: about 14–19 percent
Male weight-class: about 12–16 percent
Female weight-class: about 22–27 percent (DXA)
Female open and SHW: about 25–35 percent (DXA)
What Lean Body Mass Actually Is
Lean body mass is the foundation of strength. It is the collective term for the tissues of the body that contribute directly or indirectly to force production. This includes skeletal muscle, bone, organs, connective tissue, and the water contained within these structures. Lean body mass is not the same as fat free mass, although the two are often used interchangeably in general conversation. Fat free mass is a measurement category used in body composition testing that includes everything in the body that is not fat mass. Lean body mass is a practical concept used in performance science and strength coaching to describe the tissues that contribute to strength, movement capability, and training capacity.
Skeletal Muscle Mass
Skeletal muscle mass is the key contributor within lean body mass. It is the tissue that contracts, produces force, and transfers mechanical tension into movement. It is also the tissue that adapts and grows in response to training stress. Muscle contains contractile proteins, intracellular water, glycogen, minerals, and enzymes involved in power, speed, and repeatability. Every maximal lift, dynamic effort repetition, strongman event, or heavy carry depends on the force that muscle can generate and the total amount of muscle an athlete has available.
The majority of research investigating strength performance and body composition identifies skeletal muscle mass as the most important variable explaining differences in maximal force output. Powerlifters with higher levels of muscle mass lift more weight in the squat, bench, and deadlift. Strongman athletes with greater skeletal muscle mass perform better in static maxes, carries, loads, and pulling events. This pattern appears across genders, weight classes, and training ages.
Bone and Connective Tissue
Bone contributes to strength through structure, lever length, and mineral density. Stronger bones allow athletes to tolerate higher compressive and shear forces under heavy loading. Connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and fascia store and transfer force. Although they do not contract like muscle, they form the architecture that supports movement and power. These tissues are part of lean body mass and adapt to training through increases in stiffness, cross-sectional area, and collagen turnover.
Athletes with more robust connective tissue structures tolerate greater training volumes and peak intensities. This is particularly important for strongman, where implements are awkward, loads shift unpredictably, and events involve rapid transitions between movement patterns. A higher level of connective tissue strength improves resilience, repeatability, and the ability to apply force through odd-object tasks.
Intracellular Water and Glycogen
Lean body mass includes intracellular fluid. Muscle tissue contains significant water content, and this water supports cellular function, strength, and power. Glycogen stored within muscle also contributes to intracellular volume. Higher glycogen storage improves repeated bouts of strength training and supports strongman events that require sustained effort, such as loading medleys or deadlift for reps. These factors explain why athletes often feel stronger, faster, and more stable when well-fed and hydrated.
Why Lean Body Mass Matters for Strength and Power
Strength is the ability to produce force. Force production requires contractile tissue. The more contractile tissue available, the greater the potential for maximal force output. Lean body mass is directly linked to the number of motor units available, the size of those motor units, the cross-sectional area of muscle fibres, and the body’s ability to stabilise and apply force efficiently through the skeleton.
Research consistently shows that lean body mass, particularly skeletal muscle mass, correlates strongly with maximal strength. In powerlifting this relationship appears across weight categories and between male and female competitors. In strongman, greater lean body mass predicts performance in deadlifts, yoke walks, log press, stones, and vehicle pulls. Strongman athletes who carry more lean mass consistently demonstrate higher absolute strength, better load tolerance, and greater resilience over a long season of training and competition.
Lean body mass also supports power output. The force velocity relationship dictates that greater muscle mass increases both force potential and the ability to generate force quickly when properly trained. This is vital for dynamic effort work, Olympic lift variations used in strongman programmes, and events that require acceleration, such as sandbag tosses and sled drags.
Lean body mass is also the tissue that supports high training workloads. Athletes with more muscle tissue recover faster between sessions, handle more weekly volume, and maintain strength deeper into a training block. This is why lean mass is the foundation around which all other performance variables orbit.
In summary, lean body mass is the infrastructure of strength. It is the tissue that produces force, tolerates stress, stabilises joints, and adapts most readily to training. Fat mass can support this system, but it cannot replace it. The strongest athletes across powerlifting and strongman share one trait more than any visual aesthetic. They carry a high amount of lean body mass, built steadily over years, aligned with the demands of their sport.
Evidence That Lean Mass Predicts Strength
The relationship between lean mass and strength is one of the most consistent findings in strength science. Across every dataset on trained athletes, the same pattern appears. When lean body mass increases, maximal strength rises. When lean body mass falls, strength potential decreases, even if body fat levels move closer to an aesthetic ideal. Muscle is what produces force, and research repeatedly shows that structural tissue, not leanness, is what moves the bar, the axle, the stone, the log, and every implement in strongman.
This pattern appears clearly in the work of Ferland and colleagues, who tracked body composition and performance in competitive powerlifters over time. Their findings show that increases in skeletal muscle mass are strongly associated with improvements in the squat, bench, and deadlift. These relationships remain stable across weight classes and between male and female athletes. Heavyweight lifters with large amounts of muscle mass lift more than their lighter counterparts not simply because of body weight, but because they carry a greater volume of functional tissue capable of producing force. Lighter lifters who build muscle while staying within a class also experience predictable increases in strength, reinforcing the importance of lean mass rather than total mass.
The same trend appears in wider strength research. Studies on body composition in strength athletes show that fat free mass has the highest correlation with maximal strength outcomes, followed by total body weight. Body fat percentage, in contrast, correlates poorly with strength when taken in isolation. Athletes with higher body fat are not automatically stronger, and athletes with lower body fat are not automatically weaker. What matters is the quantity and quality of lean tissue beneath that fat. Lean mass explains why certain athletes at higher body fat levels remain dominant in static strength events. It also explains why very lean athletes can sometimes struggle to maintain strength when training volume rises or competitive schedules tighten.
Across genders, the same relationships hold. Female powerlifters with more skeletal muscle mass relative to their body weight lift more in absolute and relative terms. Strongwoman competitors who carry more lean mass are consistently better equipped for loading events, static maxes, pressing events, deadlifts, and any task requiring sustained force production. This observation is supported by collegiate research in female strength and power athletes, which links increases in fat free mass to improvements in jump height, sprint times, pulling strength, and barbell speed.
These findings align with practical coaching experience. Athletes who focus on building lean mass, maintaining training volume, and recovering well develop greater long-term capacity. They tolerate heavier blocks, manage higher workloads, and hold strength deeper into a competitive season. Athletes who chase leanness without considering their lean mass often see the opposite. Their training quality falls, bar speed drops, joint stress increases, and strength levels flatten or regress despite looking “fitter.” This is especially clear in strongman, where events can punish any reduction in the structural tissue that stabilises the spine, hips, and shoulders under shifting loads.
In every setting, athletes with more functional tissue perform better. They lift more in the gym. They move better under load. They recover faster between sessions. They remain more resilient through repeated competitions. Lean mass is the engine of strength, and the evidence has shown it repeatedly.
Why Body Fat Percentage Alone Explains Little
Body fat percentage is one of the most commonly misunderstood metrics in strength sports. It is often treated as a standalone indicator of performance potential, yet it tells us very little on its own. Fat does not contract, produce force, or contribute directly to movement. The tissues that move the bar or the implement are muscle, bone, and connective structures. Fat can support these tissues in specific ways, but it cannot replace them and does not add to their force-producing capacity.
Fat becomes useful only in the context of what it allows an athlete to do. A moderate amount of fat mass can enhance recovery by supporting hormonal balance, maintaining energy availability, and making it easier to sustain higher training volumes. It can provide insulation in colder environments, cushion against heavy carries and contact with implements, and create mechanical stability in certain positions. This is why many heavyweight strongmen and strongwomen carry more body fat than athletes in other strength sports. They train with large loads, high weekly volumes, and unpredictable implement dynamics. A slightly higher level of fat mass can act as a buffer that helps them maintain tissue quality and training frequency across the season.
The challenge arises when fat mass increases without contributing to improvements in lean mass or training capacity. Excessive fat becomes non-functional when it adds total weight that does not contribute to strength, slows movement, impairs heat regulation, and reduces efficiency during longer events. In strongman this is most obvious in competitions that include medleys, carries, drag events, and loading races. Athletes who carry too much non-functional mass often fatigue faster, struggle with acceleration, and lose ground to more balanced competitors who have preserved both lean mass and conditioning.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, very low levels of body fat can create performance problems even when the athlete looks physically prepared. Excessive leanness increases the risk of relative energy deficiency, which affects recovery, hormonal health, and muscle retention. Research on RED-S shows that athletes who sit chronically at very low body fat levels experience reduced training tolerance, impaired adaptation, greater injury risk, and lower overall performance capacity (Mountjoy et al., 2018). For strength athletes, this often presents as stalled bar speed, reduced work output, poor sleep, stubborn fatigue, or a loss of top-end strength despite continued training.
These drawbacks become more severe in strongman and in powerlifting peaking cycles. When training demands increase, the body needs energy reserves and stable hormonal support. Low levels of body fat limit both. Athletes may appear leaner or more “in shape,” but their ability to move heavy loads repeatedly or maintain power in high-pressure environments declines. This is the point at which aesthetics and function diverge sharply.
This perspective explains why body fat percentage alone is such a limited metric in strength sports. It ignores the variable that matters most, which is lean body mass. When fat mass supports lean mass, training quality improves. When fat mass rises without improving lean mass, performance slows. When fat mass falls too low, recovery declines and long-term progress suffers. The strongest and most resilient athletes are not those who target a specific number on a body fat scale. They are those who manage their physique to support muscle mass, work capacity, and the demands of the competitive season.
How Body Fat Supports Strength Performance
Although body fat does not generate force, it can still play a meaningful role in strength performance when it supports the systems that allow an athlete to train, recover, and progress over time. Strength sports demand high levels of energy availability, stable hormonal function, and the capacity to tolerate repeated bouts of mechanical loading. Fat mass can contribute positively to all of these domains when managed within a productive range.
High-volume and high-frequency training creates a constant drain on the body’s energy resources. Strongman athletes often complete long event days, accessory-heavy gym sessions, and off-season blocks that emphasise conditioning. Powerlifters preparing for maximal lifts perform frequent heavy exposures alongside the supplemental work needed to build muscle and joint resilience. When total intake does not match these demands, strength, recovery, and adaptation begin to decline. Moderate levels of body fat provide a buffer against these issues by ensuring that the athlete remains in a state of consistent energy availability. This is especially important in phases where daily output is high and training stress accumulates across the week.
Fat mass also contributes to hormonal stability. Adequate fat stores support sex hormone production, thyroid function, and appetite regulation. These systems influence muscle protein synthesis, connective tissue turnover, and the ability to maintain consistent training quality. Athletes who remain overly lean for long periods often experience reductions in testosterone, alterations in thyroid hormones, and increased fatigue, even if outwardly they appear “in shape.” For natural athletes this can be a limiting factor. For enhanced athletes it still matters, because performance-enhancing drugs cannot fully counteract the consequences of chronic low energy availability. Insulin sensitivity, liver health, and general endocrine balance are still influenced by body composition, food intake, and recovery quality. A slightly higher level of body fat can therefore support both natural physiology and the safe, productive use of enhancement.
Body fat contributes to connective tissue health as well. Strongman implements load the joints in unpredictable ways. Logs roll, stones shift, yokes oscillate, and heavy sandbags collapse against the torso. A small amount of additional mass can improve tolerance to these pressures by creating mechanical cushioning and improving joint stability under load. This is one reason why open-weight strongmen and strongwomen often maintain higher body fat levels than competitive powerlifters. Their events demand repeated collisions, contact points, and awkward leverage positions that reward a more substantial frame.
Within this context emerges the idea of “productive mass.” Productive mass is the fat mass that actively contributes to the athlete’s performance by enhancing stability, energy availability, recovery, and the ability to withstand heavy loading. It supports training frequency, protects joint structures, and improves event performance in tasks that involve bracing, carrying, dragging, pulling, and resisting external forces. Strongman athletes who carry a useful level of productive mass often notice increased confidence under yokes, greater trunk stability in stones, and improved repeatability in deadlift events.
However, once fat mass rises beyond the point where it improves function, it becomes “non-functional mass.” This is the mass that slows movement, disrupts heat regulation, limits breathing during loaded carries, and reduces the athlete’s ability to accelerate. In strongman this becomes obvious during medleys, sandbag runs, loading races, farmer’s walks, and vehicle pushes. Excess non-functional mass increases the energy cost of movement without increasing strength. In powerlifting it can restrict bench setup, reduce hip mobility in the squat, and increase the difficulty of holding position in the deadlift.
The balance between productive and non-functional mass depends on the demands of the sport and the specific events an athlete prepares for. Static-dominant events such as max deadlift, heavy yoke for short distances, and max log press reward a slightly higher level of total mass and a stable base. Athletes in these environments benefit from additional cushioning and increased ability to brace against load. Movement-dominant competitions, especially in drug-tested federations, reward athletes who keep total mass under closer control to maximise speed, agility, and cardiovascular efficiency. Here, productive mass still matters, but the threshold for non-functional mass is lower because the athlete must move quickly and repeatedly, sometimes for prolonged periods.
Body fat therefore influences performance not through direct force production, but through the systems that support the athlete’s ability to produce force repeatedly. When managed strategically, it becomes an asset. When it rises beyond its useful range or falls below the level needed to maintain recovery, it becomes a limiting factor. The goal is always the same. Build and protect lean mass, maintain the level of fat mass that supports training and competition demands, and avoid drifting into extremes that reduce performance.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Male Strength Athletes: Super-heavyweight and Static-dominant Athletes
Athletes in the super-heavyweight categories occupy a unique position in strength sports. They do not have to manage a strict scale weight, yet they must balance total mass, lean mass, and fat mass in a way that supports the extreme loading requirements of their events. Observational data from strongman and powerlifting consistently place elite super-heavyweights within an approximate range of seventeen to twenty-two percent body fat. This range appears repeatedly across research on strongman competitors, longitudinal data from powerlifters, and population-level observations of athletes who specialise in static strength events.
This range supports two primary objectives. The first is maximising muscle retention. Super-heavyweight athletes carry the largest amount of skeletal muscle in strength sports. Their training volumes are high, the loads they handle are extreme, and the mechanical stress placed on their tissues is greater than in any other category. Maintaining sufficient fat mass ensures that energy availability remains high across demanding training blocks. It supports stable hormone profiles, joint health, and the ability to sustain multiple high-intensity exposures within the same week. These factors help protect lean mass and create an environment where maximal strength can continue to develop.
The second objective is supporting absolute strength. Athletes in this range can brace more effectively under heavy squats, deadlifts, continental cleans, max log presses, and heavy yoke carries. A slightly larger torso circumference can improve rigidity under axial load. A stable midsection improves the ability to resist collapse during stones or sandbag loads. A more substantial frame can also provide mechanical cushioning when implements make contact with the body. These advantages matter uniquely for strongman, where the load is often unstable, heavy, and applied through awkward leverage.
However, body fat above this functional range moves into territory that does not improve performance and begins to detract from it. Once fat mass rises beyond the point where it helps maintain energy availability, supports recovery, and enhances stability, it becomes non-functional. This additional weight slows movement, increases heat retention, raises the energy cost of even basic conditioning tasks, and can compromise performance during medleys, carries, loading races, and longer-duration events. It can also place additional stress on the cardiovascular system during phases of heavy training or multi-day competitions.
Super-heavyweight athletes who push far beyond the functional range may still excel in isolated static max events, but their performance in competitions that require strength across multiple tasks often declines. Modern strongman formats increasingly combine static maximal strength with movement-based work, dynamic events, and conditioning requirements. As a result, staying within a range that supports both absolute strength and movement capability has become more important for long-term success.
The seventeen to twenty-two percent bracket should not be treated as a fixed prescription, but as a reflection of what consistently appears among elite performers. It allows the super-heavyweight athlete to maintain their most important attribute, which is lean mass, while carrying enough additional mass to stabilise the body under heavy load. Beyond this point, the returns diminish rapidly, and the consequences for movement efficiency become clear. The strongest athletes in modern strongman and powerlifting are those who manage their body composition to preserve muscle, protect recovery, and support the movement demands of their sport without letting non-functional mass accumulate.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Male Strength Athletes: Open Athletes With Mixed Event Profiles
Open-weight strongman athletes who are not in the super-heavyweight category but still compete without a strict weight limit face a different set of demands. Their competitions blend static maximal strength with movement tasks that reward speed, repeatability, agility, and efficient energy use. Because of this, the body composition that works best for them differs from the heavier static specialists.
Across observational studies of strongman competitors, combined with real-world data from national and international competitions, athletes in this category typically sit within an approximate body fat range of fourteen to nineteen percent. This range appears repeatedly among top open-weight competitors who need to move quickly, maintain barbell and implement speed, and manage longer events without losing force production. It represents a balance between carrying enough total mass to express high absolute strength and staying lean enough to move efficiently.
Within this range, athletes tend to maintain a high proportion of lean body mass relative to total weight. This maximises their force potential while preserving mobility and cardiovascular capacity. Strongman events often combine tasks that test many qualities on the same day. A competition might include a heavy deadlift, a max log or axle press, a loading medley, a farmer’s walk, and a sandbag-to-shoulder event. Athletes who carry excess non-functional fat mass may be competitive in the heaviest events but struggle in the faster tasks. Conversely, athletes who sit too lean risk losing the energy reserves, joint stability, and structural support that contribute to heavy strength performance.
The fourteen to nineteen percent range supports the ability to repeat high-quality efforts under fatigue. This is essential for loading races, yoke runs, drag events, and strongman medleys. These tasks demand efficient movement patterns and rapid changes of direction or posture. Athletes carrying unnecessary mass expend more energy with every step, every lift, and every transition. As the event progresses, this accumulated energy cost becomes a limiting factor, especially in competitions where seconds decide placings.
Athletes within this range often notice improvements in acceleration, stride efficiency, and breathing under load. They are more capable of maintaining movement speed without sacrificing the strength needed for the heavier events. Many of the modern open-weight strongman winners who excel across mixed-event competitions demonstrate this blend. They have substantial frames capable of handling extreme loading, but they avoid drifting into higher body fat ranges that restrict movement or reduce conditioning.
The upper end of the range, closer to nineteen percent, typically suits athletes whose competition schedule includes heavier static events or shorter movement tasks where maximal strength plays a greater role. The lower end of the range, closer to fourteen percent, often suits athletes with more movement-biased competitions or those who rely on speed and athleticism within their event strategy. Even so, the difference in performance between the entire range is small because the priority remains the same. Maintain enough fat mass to support muscle retention, hormonal balance, and energy availability while preserving the mobility and conditioning needed for complex strongman tasks.
The open-weight athlete thrives when strength, mobility, and repeatability coexist. The observed fourteen to nineteen percent range reflects the body composition that supports all three. It allows an athlete to lift heavy, move with purpose, and finish full competitions without fading. The goal is not to match a target number, but to live within a zone where fat mass remains productive and lean body mass drives performance across every event.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Male Strength Athletes: Weight-Class Competitors (U105, U90, U82.5, and similar)
Weight-class strongman and powerlifting athletes face a very different set of constraints compared to open or super-heavyweight competitors. Their performance depends on how much functional tissue they can fit inside a fixed scale limit. For these athletes, the most successful competitors tend to fall within an approximate range of twelve to sixteen percent body fat during the competitive season. This range appears repeatedly in coaching practice, population data from powerlifting, and published research examining body composition in weight-restricted strength sports.
This range supports the primary objective of the weight-class athlete: maximising muscle mass while staying under a strict cap. Lean body mass is the determinant of maximal strength, so these athletes aim to reach the highest feasible ratio of muscle to total body weight. Carrying unnecessary fat limits how much muscle they can hold within the same class. The closer an athlete gets to the top of their class limit, the more important it becomes to manage fat mass so the last few kilograms are made of productive tissue rather than non-functional weight.
The twelve to sixteen percent range provides enough fat to maintain recovery, hormone balance, and training quality without sacrificing muscle potential. Athletes who remain comfortably within this zone usually experience stable energy availability, better sleep, higher training volumes, and improved ability to handle both maximal and repeated-load training. These factors translate directly into better performance in pressing, squatting, deadlifting, loading medleys, and all the movement tasks that appear in U105 and U90 strongman.
Dropping below this range introduces problems that are well documented in strength sports. Chronic low body fat reduces recovery, suppresses hormone production, and increases the likelihood of fatigue accumulation. Athletes might feel sharper or visually more defined, but their training quality declines. Heavy triples feel slower, bar speed drops on dynamic work, and accessory volume becomes harder to complete. Over time, this reduces lean mass and compromises peaking cycles. Even small reductions in lean tissue create noticeable performance losses when the entire class limit depends on maximising every kilogram of muscle.
Extremely low body fat also increases the risk of relative energy deficiency, which affects muscle retention, connective tissue resilience, and the ability to tolerate the varied loading demands of strongman. Weight-class strongman competitions often include events that combine strength, speed, and conditioning. Athletes who cut too lean frequently struggle to maintain pace during stone runs, sandbag carries, farmer’s walks, and drag events. The reduced energy availability limits repeatability. Their first run might look strong, but subsequent efforts decline rapidly.
On the other hand, moving much above the sixteen percent range reduces the amount of muscle an athlete can hold within the cap. They carry more non-functional mass, which does not contribute to strength, and they have less room to push muscle gains before they risk overshooting their class limit. This restricts off-season growth and limits long-term development. Several case studies from powerlifting show that athletes who reduce excess fat and replace it with lean mass within the same weight class experience significant strength increases without changing their competitive category.
The twelve to sixteen percent range therefore reflects the balance required to build maximum lean mass, sustain high training quality, and peak effectively inside a defined weight limit. Weight-class strength athletes who stay within this zone can carry the most productive tissue possible, recover from the training needed to reach elite levels, and retain the conditioning required for modern strongman event profiles. The goal is not to stay perfectly static at a number, but to operate in a zone where total mass works for the athlete rather than against them.
Why Body Fat Ranges Are Contextual Rather Than Prescriptive
Body fat ranges in strength sports are best understood as observations, not rules. They reflect what consistently appears among successful athletes, but no single number applies evenly to every lifter across every federation, season, or event list. Strength sports are too varied, and athletes respond too differently to the same nutritional and training inputs, for body fat targets to be treated as fixed prescriptions.
Different federations create different demands. Some federations have event lists built around heavy static lifts, short carries, and slower, grinding tasks that reward total mass and stability. Others prioritise medleys, conditioning challenges, repeated lifts for time, or implement variations that require acceleration and foot speed. Drug-tested federations often produce leaner competitive fields because the natural ceiling for muscle gain is lower, so athletes manage their body mass more tightly to preserve movement efficiency. In untested federations the upper limit on total mass is higher, and athletes can tolerate a wider range of body fat without experiencing the same drop in recovery or training quality. These differences influence the body composition that supports success.
Event lists shift from year to year, which changes what physique traits matter most. A strongman season with multiple competitions built around fast yoke runs, light to moderate loading medleys, and conditioning tasks demands a different level of total body mass than a season built around max deadlift, max log, super yoke, and heavy stones. Athletes often adjust their body composition in response to these shifts. A slightly lower body fat level might improve movement speed when a schedule is full of high-paced events. A slightly higher level might improve stability when the events are heavier and more static. The optimal range moves with the landscape.
Individual response to dietary changes also plays a major role. Some athletes tolerate lower body fat levels without losing training quality. Others experience immediate reductions in bar speed, recovery, or general resilience when they drop even a few percentage points. Some athletes gain muscle easily while staying relatively lean. Others need additional calories and slightly higher fat mass to maintain strength across long seasons. Genetics, training age, endocrine profiles, and digestive tolerance all influence how an athlete performs at different compositions. The best range is therefore the one that supports that athlete’s training, recovery, and competitive output, not a number they are expected to match.
Measurement tools add another layer of variation. DXA scans consistently record higher body fat percentages than methods such as Bod Pod, skinfolds, or impedance-based devices. Research comparing DXA and Bod Pod readings shows clear discrepancies, with the same athlete appearing several percentage points higher on DXA. This means that two athletes measured by different methods can appear to fall into different body fat categories despite having similar physiques. Even within the same tool, hydration, glycogen levels, time of day, and recent training affect readings. This makes absolute numbers less important than trends, training quality, and performance outcomes.
Taken together, these factors show why body fat ranges must be viewed as contextual. They point toward patterns that succeed across populations, but the ideal composition emerges only when an athlete’s federation demands, event profile, biological responses, and measurement method are understood. The purpose of identifying ranges is not to impose limits. It is to help athletes and coaches recognise the conditions that support strength, preserve training quality, and produce the best results for each individual.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Female Strength Athletes: The Wider Landscape of Female Body Composition in Strength Sports
Female strength athletes present a broader and more varied body composition landscape than male athletes, and this diversity is normal for the demands of the sport. One of the clearest population-level observations comes from DXA assessments of competitive female powerlifters, which report an average body fat percentage of just over thirty percent. This number often surprises athletes who assume elite performance requires low body fat, yet it is consistent across a wide range of lifters who perform at high levels.
This average, however, masks significant class-by-class variation. In the heavier weight categories, female athletes tend to carry higher body fat percentages alongside higher levels of lean mass. Their events reward absolute strength, joint stability, and the ability to tolerate large training volumes. Many of these athletes sit comfortably above the thirty percent mark, not because they are under-conditioned, but because they have built substantial muscle mass over many years while maintaining the fat mass required to support recovery, hormonal health, and training output.
In contrast, lighter and middleweight female competitors often present with lower body fat percentages than the overall average. These athletes work within strict weight limits, so they naturally gravitate toward a composition that maximises muscle relative to total body weight. Their competitive ranges frequently fall into the low or mid twenties, aligned with the need to fit as much functional tissue as possible inside their class cap. Even within this group, ranges vary due to event profiles, genetics, training style, and how each athlete responds to nutritional strategies.
Different measurement tools also contribute to the wide landscape of reported numbers. DXA consistently reads higher than Bod Pod, skinfolds, or impedance-based methods. Comparative research shows the same female athlete may register several percentage points higher on DXA than on other tools. This means that population averages reflect more about the measurement technology than any strict physiological standard. Female athletes using DXA may appear significantly higher than general fitness norms despite being highly competitive and carrying exceptional lean mass for their sport.
The wider landscape of female body composition shows that strength performance does not depend on adhering to a narrow aesthetic ideal. It depends on whether an athlete has enough lean mass to produce force, enough energy availability to recover and adapt, and enough total mass to remain stable under load. The ranges that support these qualities are shaped by weight class, event demands, training age, measurement method, and individual physiology. The purpose of identifying patterns is not to prescribe a target, but to understand the conditions under which female strength athletes perform at their best.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Female Strength Athletes: Weight-Class Competitors
Female strength athletes who compete inside defined weight classes must manage body composition with precision. Their goal is the same as male weight-class athletes: fit the highest possible amount of functional tissue inside a fixed number on the scale. For most competitive female lifters in these divisions, the body fat range that consistently supports high performance falls roughly between twenty-two and twenty-seven percent. This range appears across DXA datasets, observations from national and international competitors, and long-term coaching practice.
This band supports the primary objective of the weight-class athlete, which is maximising muscle mass without overshooting the class cap. Lean mass is the strongest predictor of performance in the squat, bench, deadlift, log press, loading medleys, and most strongwoman events. To build and retain this lean mass, athletes need enough total energy to train hard and recover consistently. The twenty-two to twenty-seven percent range provides a physiological buffer. It protects against under-fuelled training, supports consistent strength gains, and reduces the likelihood of lean tissue loss across long training cycles.
Athletes who operate inside this range usually maintain strong recovery between sessions. Their hormonal environment remains stable enough to support muscle protein synthesis, connective tissue resilience, and the training frequency required for modern strongwoman and powerlifting programming. They tolerate accessory volume, repeated heavy exposures, and conditioning tasks without the chronic fatigue seen in athletes who push too lean for their class. Female physiology in particular is sensitive to sustained caloric restriction and low body fat, which makes a stable range even more important for long-term progression.
From a strategic standpoint, this range also supports the class-cap approach used by successful weight-class athletes. A competitor who sits too lean reduces the amount of muscle she can carry at the limit. A competitor who carries too much fat reduces the headroom available for lean mass growth. Athletes who sit in the mid-twenties can push off-season muscle gain without immediate risk of overshooting the class cap. They can then trim small amounts of non-functional mass during meet preparation without compromising strength or running into the energy deficits associated with aggressive weight cuts.
This range is also compatible with the movement demands of strongwoman. Weight-class competitions often include sandbag runs, farmer’s walks, drag events, and conditioning-style medleys. Athletes in the twenty-two to twenty-seven percent range tend to maintain a good balance between strength and speed. They can move efficiently without losing the trunk stability and joint support that slightly higher fat levels provide during heavy loading tasks.
Measurement tools influence the interpretation of these numbers. DXA reads higher than Bod Pod or skinfold assessments, so an athlete sitting at twenty-seven percent on DXA may appear closer to the low twenties when tested by other methods. This is one reason why performance ranges should always be interpreted relative to the measurement tool, not as a universal number.
Taken as a whole, the twenty-two to twenty-seven percent range reflects the composition that supports muscular development, recovery, and strategic positioning inside class limits. Weight-class strongwoman and powerlifting athletes who operate within this zone can maintain the lean mass needed to compete at the highest level while preserving the physiological environment required for long-term progress.
Optimal Body Fat Ranges in Female Strength Athletes: Open and Super-heavyweight Competitors
Open-weight and super-heavyweight female strength athletes present one of the widest and most interesting body composition profiles in strength sports. Without a strict scale limit to manage, these athletes can allow their total mass to rise in ways that support greater lean mass, higher training volumes, and superior stability under very heavy or awkward loading. Observational data from strongwoman, combined with research on powerlifting and general strength and power athletes, places many of these competitors in a body fat range of roughly twenty-five to thirty-five percent when measured by DXA.
This range gives these athletes the structural support required for the extreme demands of their events. Strongwoman competitions for open and super-heavyweight classes regularly include heavy stones, max log press, axle clean and press, super yoke, frame carries, vehicle pulls, and loading medleys using varied and unpredictable implements. All of these tasks place significant stress on the trunk, hips, and shoulders. A higher total body mass helps the athlete stabilise against these forces, resist collapse under axial load, and maintain control of shifting or compressive implements. The combination of muscle and supportive fat mass creates a more robust platform from which to generate and transfer force.
Stone runs in particular demonstrate the advantage of greater total mass. The athlete must lift a spherical object that pulls them forward, compresses the chest, and requires rapid hip extension under compromised leverage. Additional mass improves bracing, increases contact stability between the stone and the body, and reduces energy leakage. Similarly, heavy loading events such as sandbag-to-shoulder or keg carries reward athletes who can absorb force on impact, resist lateral shifts, and maintain rigidity throughout transitions. Athletes at higher body fat percentages often report feeling more stable, less battered by implements, and more capable of repeating maximal efforts across a long competition day.
This does not mean all open or super-heavyweight athletes benefit equally from moving toward the upper end of the range. The ideal position is still context dependent. Competitions with more movement tasks, longer carries, or faster medleys place a greater emphasis on efficiency and speed. Athletes closer to the twenty-five percent mark might find they move with less energy cost and maintain breathing quality during longer events. Competitions built around max lifts, high stone platforms, and heavy yoke distances might reward athletes who sit closer to the mid or upper thirties, provided that the added mass remains productive.
Individual physiology plays a role as well. Some female athletes maintain strength and recovery at lower body fat levels, while others require slightly higher levels to sustain the training needed to compete at the open or super-heavyweight standard. Female endocrine systems are particularly sensitive to sustained caloric deficits and low body fat, which means many athletes in these classes perform better, feel more stable, and recover more reliably with a moderate to high fat reserve. This supports muscle retention, connective tissue health, and the ability to complete high-volume training blocks without breaking down.
Measurement methods add further variation. DXA readings are consistently higher than Bod Pod or skinfolds for female athletes. An athlete who reads thirty-four percent on DXA may sit closer to the high twenties when measured by other tools, which means that what appears to be a high number is often a reflection of the technology rather than an indicator of deconditioning.
The twenty-five to thirty-five percent range is therefore not a rule, but a reflection of what repeatedly shows up among successful female strongwoman and powerlifting competitors. It represents a zone where lean mass can be maximised, recovery remains strong, and the athlete retains the structural support needed for heavy and awkward loading. The best composition is always determined by event demands, personal physiology, and the balance of static and movement tasks within the season. Successful open-weight and super-heavyweight athletes recognise this and set their body composition strategy around performance, not appearance, while preserving the mass that allows them to dominate the implements placed in front of them.
Health Considerations for Female Strength Athletes: RED-S and Endocrine Function
Female physiology responds differently to sustained caloric restriction, low energy availability, and reductions in body fat than male physiology. This difference shapes the boundaries within which female strength athletes can safely and sustainably manage their body composition. While male athletes can often sit at relatively low body fat levels for long periods without significant endocrine disruption, female athletes face a much narrower margin before health and performance begin to deteriorate.
Chronic low body fat, particularly below roughly eighteen to twenty percent for most women, is strongly associated with disruptions in menstrual cycle regularity. These disruptions reflect deeper changes in endocrine function. When energy availability becomes insufficient to support both training and essential biological processes, the body adjusts by altering hormonal signalling. Levels of luteinising hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and oestrogen can fluctuate or decline, which affects everything from bone health to connective tissue resilience. These changes form part of the wider syndrome known as relative energy deficiency in sport.
RED-S is not simply about menstrual cycle disruption. It affects recovery, training quality, muscle retention, thermoregulation, sleep, immune function, and psychological stability. Female strength athletes who drift into prolonged states of low energy availability often notice reductions in bar speed, persistent fatigue, increased soreness, and a general inability to tolerate the loading patterns required for strongwoman or powerlifting. They may also experience a higher rate of soft-tissue injuries, slower recovery between sessions, and difficulty sustaining progress through heavier training blocks.
Performance inconsistency is another hallmark. Athletes may maintain strength in isolated lifts but struggle to repeat efforts across full sessions or multi-event competitions. This matters particularly in strongwoman, where performance depends on repeatability across stones, carries, presses, and deadlifts. A body that is under-fuelled or hormonally suppressed cannot sustain the volume or intensity required to compete effectively in these environments.
The presence of performance-enhancing drugs does not fully protect against these issues. While PEDs can influence muscle protein synthesis, strength gains, and recovery, they do not override the fundamental biological need for adequate energy availability. Female athletes using enhancement who push their body fat too low still face the consequences of RED-S. They may mask some symptoms temporarily, but connective tissue health, bone density, mood stability, and overall training durability remain vulnerable. PEDs do not replace the role of oestrogen in protecting bone tissue or supporting tendon health. They also create unique interactions with the menstrual cycle, making the effects of low energy availability even more complex.
These considerations explain why female athletes have different thresholds than male athletes. Men can sit at lower body fat levels with fewer hormonal consequences because their endocrine system does not rely on the same cyclical mechanisms. Women require a stable hormonal environment to support bone density, connective tissue resilience, and long-term health. They also experience stronger performance declines when energy availability drops below the level needed to fuel both training and biological function.
For female strength athletes, the goal is not to avoid leanness entirely. The goal is to avoid the chronic low-energy states that interfere with training quality, recovery, and long-term progression. This is why many high-performing female strongwoman competitors and powerlifters sit at body fat levels that are significantly higher than general fitness norms. They are not less conditioned. They are operating within the range that supports muscle retention, training frequency, and endocrine health in a sport that places extraordinary demands on the body.
Understanding these thresholds allows female athletes and coaches to make informed decisions about physique management. It ensures that performance is built on a foundation of physiological stability, not short-term sacrifice. It also protects the long-term development that strength sports require, where years of consistent progress matter far more than momentary visual changes that compromise the system that makes strength possible.
Individual Variation and Competitive Demands in Female Strength Athletes
Female strength athletes do not operate within one universal body composition model. Their optimal physique depends on the sport they compete in, the events they prepare for, their weight class, their training history, and the way their individual physiology responds to body composition changes. Although patterns exist across strength sports, the range that supports performance varies significantly between weightlifting, strongwoman, and powerlifting.
Olympic weightlifters tend to sit at lower body fat percentages than strongwoman competitors, especially in the lighter and middleweight classes. Their sport rewards acceleration, mobility, rapid force production, and technical precision under high bar speeds. A lower total mass improves speed under the bar and supports the deep positions required in the clean and snatch. Female weightlifters in the lighter categories often fall into the low or mid twenties, while those in the heavier classes may sit closer to the upper twenties or low thirties. These ranges reflect the balance between maintaining enough lean mass to generate power and keeping total mass low enough to move efficiently in highly technical lifts.
Powerlifters display a wider spread. In the lighter women’s classes, athletes tend to operate within the low to mid twenties because they must maximise muscle relative to their class limits. Middleweight and heavyweight classes show far more variation. Some top lifters competing without movement demands may sit comfortably in the low thirties or above, especially when they prioritise absolute strength over speed or aerobic efficiency. The three lifts reward stability and force transfer, and heavier lifters often find they perform better with slightly higher fat mass supporting the torso during the squat and bench. Even so, individual responses vary. Some athletes maintain peak strength at comparatively lower body fat levels. Others require additional mass to preserve bar speed and confidence under maximal loads.
Strongwoman presents the broadest landscape. The sport requires both maximal strength and movement capability. Events can include heavy deadlifts, max log press, super yoke, farmer’s walks, sandbag carries, vehicle pulls, stone runs, and extended loading medleys. The optimal physique for strongwoman is therefore heavily shaped by the yearly event profile. Athletes preparing for competitions with faster medleys, longer carries, or multiple rounds of conditioning often sit on the lower end of their natural range to improve movement efficiency. In contrast, athletes preparing for heavy stone platforms, max log, or yokes above bodyweight many times over often require higher total mass to maintain stability and repeatability under load.
Weight classes within strongwoman add further nuance. U52, U57, and U63 athletes often maintain body fat levels in the mid-to-high twenties because they must fit as much muscle as possible inside the class limit while preserving recovery and maintaining the durability required for multi-event competitions. U73 and U82.5 athletes display more variation, sometimes sitting in the low twenties if they rely on speed and movement, or closer to the low thirties if they specialise in static or heavy loading events. Open and super-heavyweight athletes span an even wider range, with many competitors performing best in the mid-to-high thirties due to the demands of extreme loading, awkward implements, and the need for structural resilience.
Competition format is one of the strongest determinants of the physique that supports peak performance. A strongwoman show built around heavy deadlifts, short yoke distances, and max pressing will reward athletes with higher total mass and strong bracing ability. A show built around fast carries, repeated loading events, and conditioning-style medleys rewards athletes who maintain a balance between strength and movement efficiency. Powerlifting meets with long rest periods and single maximal efforts demand a stable platform, not aerobic efficiency. Weightlifting meets require precision, mobility, and bar speed. The events dictate the shape that performs best.
Individual variation sits above all of this. Some female athletes naturally maintain strength, speed, and resilience at lower body fat percentages. Others need additional mass to preserve training quality, hormone balance, and joint health. Genetics, training age, muscularity, endocrine profiles, and psychological readiness all influence how an athlete performs at different compositions. The optimal physique is not a number, but a zone that supports the volume, intensity, and event profile required for the athlete’s sport. The most successful female strength athletes identify the zone that enhances their performance and build their training and nutrition around it, rather than around an external aesthetic.
Measurement Differences and Why They Matter
Body fat percentage sounds like a simple number, but the method used to measure it can shift that number by several percentage points in either direction. This is one of the main reasons optimal ranges for strength athletes cannot be treated as rigid cut-offs. The tools used to assess body composition operate on different principles, rely on different assumptions about tissue density, and respond differently to hydration, nutrition, and even clothing. Understanding these differences protects athletes from misinterpreting their data, comparing themselves to misleading standards, or making changes that do not actually support performance.
DXA is considered one of the most precise tools for assessing body composition, but it consistently produces higher body fat percentages than other methods. It measures bone, lean tissue, and fat tissue based on X-ray absorption. Because it accounts for bone density and internal tissue distribution, it gives a more complete picture of the body’s internal structure. This is useful for tracking lean mass in strength athletes, but it also means that DXA readings cannot be directly compared to Bod Pod or skinfold results. A female athlete who reads thirty-three percent body fat on DXA may read closer to twenty-seven percent via Bod Pod, and the difference does not indicate a change in conditioning. It reflects differences in the underlying assumptions of the technology.
Bod Pod uses air displacement to estimate body volume and density. It assumes fixed densities for fat mass and fat free mass. These assumptions do not always match the tissue densities of strength athletes, particularly those with high bone mineral content or greater tissue hydration. This is why Bod Pod readings often appear lower than DXA for the same athlete. Skinfold assessments rely on subcutaneous fat at specific sites and population equations. Although they are useful for tracking change, they often underestimate true body fat compared to DXA because they do not measure visceral or internal fat. They also depend heavily on the skill of the technician.
Impedance-based methods are the easiest to access and the most sensitive to hydration. These devices send a small electrical signal through the body and estimate body composition based on how the signal travels through tissue. Hydration, glycogen levels, sodium intake, time of day, menstrual cycle phase, and recent training dramatically shift readings. A strength athlete who weighs in after a high-carb meal, with elevated intracellular water, can appear significantly leaner than she actually is, while dehydration can create the appearance of higher body fat. Impedance readings can be helpful for trends, but the absolute values often have limited relevance to performance.
Hydration plays a major role across all methods. Athletes who are fully hydrated often register different lean mass values than those who measure in a depleted or dehydrated state. This has a direct impact on interpretation. A reduction in measured lean mass may reflect lower glycogen stores rather than an actual loss of contractile tissue. Similarly, an apparent increase in body fat may be driven by a temporary reduction in water retention, not a real shift in composition. These variables can distort the numbers if athletes interpret them without understanding the context.
Clothing, bone density, and machine algorithms also influence measurement. Clothing worn during Bod Pod assessments, the positioning of limbs during DXA scans, and algorithmic differences between impedance devices all create variation. Strength athletes with higher bone density often appear heavier on DXA due to mineral content. This can shift calculated lean mass and body fat percentages even when muscle tissue is unchanged.
Because of these variations, athletes should prioritise trends rather than single readings. Consistent measurements taken under the same conditions reveal whether lean body mass is rising, stable, or declining. The trend provides far more actionable information than the absolute number. A DXA result of twenty-nine percent or thirty-two percent is less important than whether lean mass has increased and whether the athlete’s training output has improved.
Measurement choice also influences how “optimal ranges” are interpreted. A range that appears high on DXA may fall well within the normal performance range once translated into Bod Pod or skinfold terms. This is why ranges are expressed broadly rather than with precision. It is not because the science is vague. It is because the tools report different numbers for the same physiology.
For practical coaching, visible physique standards provide an additional layer. Many strength athletes develop a sense of their own best performance zone based on how they look and feel at different levels of visible conditioning. This visual assessment cannot replace objective measurement, but it complements it. Athletes who perform well at a certain look often find that body composition measurements at that time fall within a stable, repeatable range consistent with their best training cycles.
The key is to understand body composition as a tool that guides long-term decision-making, not a target in itself. Measurement variation is normal. Ranges exist because accuracy is limited, physiology is individual, and the body responds differently depending on the season and the sport. The purpose of tracking composition is to support performance, not to chase numbers that shift with every tool and every scan.
Cyclical Trends in Strongman Competition and Their Impact on Physique Targets
Strongman has never been a fixed sport. The demands shift across eras, across federations, and sometimes even within the same season. This movement in event selection creates predictable cycles in the physiques that rise to the top. When events emphasise maximal strength and short bursts of high force, heavier athletes tend to dominate. When competitions shift toward movement, repeated efforts, and longer time domains, leaner and more mobile athletes gain the advantage. Understanding these cycles is essential because optimal body composition is not a single target but a moving one that follows the direction of the sport.
Why Strongman Event Demands Are Never Static
Historical competition records show clear patterns in how strongman evolves. Early eras of international strongman leaned heavily toward static lifts, maximal pulls, brief heavy carries, and slower movement. As equipment became more standardised and event design became more professional, organisers began adding higher-speed medleys, longer carries, and loading series that required both strength and conditioning. Federations also influence direction. Some prioritise classic maximal tests, while others lean toward mixed-fitness challenges. Coaches who work across federations observe these swings clearly. A season dominated by four-event medleys, lighter implements, and frequent transitions rewards different qualities from a season built around heavy yokes, max deadlifts, and static press ladders.
Equipment trends shape these cycles as well. Wider yokes, higher pick points, sandbag advances, faster-dumping loading platforms, and the rise of standardised bag throws have all shifted how athletes prepare. A change in equipment weight or ruleset alters the energy systems involved, which then alters the physique that performs best. Even something as small as a federation adopting more pick-and-run events over max-height or max-distance events transforms the ideal balance of muscle, fat, and total mass.
Because of this constant evolution, the idea of an optimal physique cannot be separated from the current event landscape. Athletes who cling to the physique targets of a previous competitive era often find themselves outpaced, even if their absolute strength remains high.
The Current Phase Favouring Movement, Conditioning, and Speed
The present competitive cycle across many strongman federations leans toward mixed events and movement-dominant tests. Medleys are longer. Implements are more standardised. Conditioning expectations have increased. This creates an environment where athletes carrying slightly lower body fat levels often perform better. They move faster, they transition quicker, they maintain pacing, and they fatigue more slowly across multi-event days.
This does not mean lighter is automatically better. What it means is that lean mass relative to total mass matters more than it did during static-heavy eras. Athletes with high lean mass but moderate fat levels tend to manage repeated tasks with greater efficiency. They cool better during outdoor competitions. They maintain form under fatigue. They manage cardiovascular stress with fewer drops in force output.
The rise of tested federations has also contributed to this shift. Without supraphysiological hormonal support, extreme mass gain is harder to maintain. This naturally leads to lower average body weights and slightly leaner physiques. As tested shows grow in popularity, movement-based programming becomes more common, and the physique that excels in these events becomes more widespread. The sport follows the athlete pool, and the athlete pool follows the events.
Across many national and regional circuits, the athletes collecting podiums right now tend to share a similar template: high lean mass, moderate body fat, improved movement quality, and strong conditioning. They are not shredded, but they are noticeably leaner than the super-heavyweights of static-focused eras. They carry enough mass to stabilise big implements, but not so much that it slows them across long-distance carries or accelerates fatigue in medleys.
This does not erase the cyclical nature of the sport. Strongman will eventually swing back toward heavier implements, shorter distances, and maximal strength. When it does, the competitive physique will shift again. Athletes who understand this pattern position themselves more effectively. They adjust body composition gradually across the season. They evaluate competition calendars before setting weight targets. They pursue mass when the sport rewards it and hold firmer when the events favour speed.
Physique targets, therefore, are not aesthetic goals. They are tactical decisions guided by the direction of the sport, the structure of the season, and the demands of the next competition. Athletes who adapt stay competitive. Athletes who chase a fixed “look” fall behind as the sport evolves around them.
The Expected Future Cycle
Strongman has never held a single identity for long, and the historical pattern is clear. Whenever the sport leans heavily toward fast, hybrid, or mixed-fitness events, it eventually rebounds toward heavier, slower, and more brutally loaded tests of absolute strength. This has repeated across multiple eras of international and national strongman competition. The period marked by lighter medleys and longer movement tasks in the mid-2010s eventually gave way to years dominated by huge deadlifts, massive yokes, heavier stones, and more static max attempts. When athlete physiques grow lighter and the field becomes more aerobic, organisers tend to reintroduce heavier implements to create separation and raise the spectacle. When the sport becomes too heavy and too slow, federations tend to reintroduce movement to create excitement and improve safety. The pendulum swings back and forth.
This cycle is not an accident. It reflects the core identity of strongman as a sport built on variety and unpredictability. It also reflects the practical reality that promoters want events that challenge the field in different ways each season. For athletes, this means physique planning cannot be tied to the present moment only. A strongman career spans years, and body composition choices need to accommodate shifts that unfold gradually. Athletes who only prepare for the current trend often end up behind the curve when the sport changes direction.
Looking at the present trajectory, many federations have been heavily movement-focused for several years. This suggests that a return to heavier, slower events is likely. Implement weights will rise. Timed events will narrow. Static strength will regain prominence. This does not mean athletes should begin chasing maximal mass immediately. It means they should anticipate the direction of the sport and consider gradual adjustments rather than reacting abruptly when the cycle shifts. Multi-year planning protects longevity and ensures that no season is wasted adapting to changes that could have been predicted.
Adjusting Body Composition in Response to Demands
Physique changes in strongman should follow the competition calendar rather than personal preference. The decision to add or reduce mass is not an aesthetic choice. It is a strategic one based on implement demands, distances, time domains, and expected loading patterns. This requires a structured approach to body composition management across the year.
Adding mass is most effective when events place a premium on stability, bracing strength, stone loading, short-distance carries, and maximal lifts. These are the scenarios where “productive mass” supports performance by improving leverage, tolerance to load, and the capacity to train at higher absolute intensities. This process should occur gradually across the off-season, allowing muscle gain to lead the increase rather than fat gain. Small increases in body fat can support recovery, but the goal is to produce tissue that contributes directly to force production and resilience. Athletes should add mass when the sport trends toward heavier implements or when their specific competition calendar leans toward static tasks.
Reducing mass becomes useful when competitions favour longer distances, faster transitions, repeated efforts, and events where moving the system quickly is the limiting factor. Lower body fat levels improve heat regulation, reduce cardiovascular stress, and support higher work rates. However, reductions must be timed carefully. Losing too much fat too close to competition risks a drop in lean mass, slower recovery, and reduced bar speed. The ideal time for reductions is during general preparation phases when training volume is high and the athlete can maintain muscle through balanced nutrition. Cutting should be avoided during periods of heavy strength development, as it blunts adaptation and limits training quality.
Timing matters more than the change itself. Body mass adjustments should align with the competitive season. The months immediately after the final show of the year are ideal for gradual increases. The months before the opening show of the next season are the best period for reductions, allowing performance to stabilise before peak preparation begins. Major changes should never occur during the final eight to twelve weeks before competition unless a weight class requirement makes it unavoidable.
The strongest and most consistent athletes are those who plan these changes years in advance. They grow into heavy cycles rather than rushing to meet them. They tighten body composition when speed and movement rise in importance. They understand that physique is a long-term strategy shaped by event demands, not an improvised response to short-term pressure.
Form Follows Function: Physique Should Serve Performance
Strength sports have always rewarded the athlete who can organise their body around the demands of the event. Over time, this simple truth has been overshadowed by the rise of a curated, media-driven image of what a strength athlete is supposed to look like. The idea of the lean strength athlete has become increasingly visible. It appears frequently because lean physiques are easier to market and easier to photograph. They stand out on platforms that favour aesthetics and aspirational visuals. This has created an illusion of universality, where leanness is presented as a performance marker rather than simply one of many possible outcomes. Some athletes do perform exceptionally well while lean. Their results are genuine. Their bodies reflect their event demands, their training environment, and their individual physiology. The problem occurs when this look is generalised and treated as a blueprint.
Many strongman athletes who appear leaner do well because their competitive calendar focuses on distance carries, medleys, repeated efforts, and transitional speed. They are successful in these formats because the events reward efficiency and pacing. It is not the leanness that makes them strong. It is the capacity to generate force repeatedly while moving quickly. Certain athletes like this have become highly visible on social platforms and through sponsorships, which reinforces the idea that a specific aesthetic is tied to strength. This visibility influences expectations, especially among developing athletes. They mimic the look rather than studying the process.
Copying an aesthetic has very little bearing on performance. Two athletes with identical conditioning can lift in completely different ways. Leverages differ. Limb lengths differ. Hip structure, muscle distribution, and tendon insertion all influence how mass should be arranged. Recovery capacity varies enormously depending on age, training history, and the amount of total muscle being supported. Hormonal profile, training volume tolerance, sleep quality, and nutritional consistency all influence whether an athlete performs well at a given level of body fat. Even environmental context matters. Some athletes train in high-heat facilities and handle leanness well. Others train in cold environments where slightly higher fat levels help maintain joint warmth and movement quality. None of these individual differences are visible in social media images. They are hidden underneath the highlighted aesthetic that gains attention.
The concept of productive mass explains this clearly. Productive mass is tissue that increases lifting potential. It contributes to stability, force transfer, leverage, and load tolerance. This includes muscle mass and the amount of supportive fat that protects joints and improves bracing. Productive mass helps a yoke stay stable under acceleration because the torso is thicker and more resistant to sway. It helps with atlas stones because the torso provides a stronger shelf and better compression. It helps with deadlift lockouts because the back musculature is supported by a stable midsection. Productive mass allows the athlete to train harder, tolerate more total volume, and maintain force output across consecutive events.
Cosmetic leanness does not offer these qualities. Leanness is not harmful by itself. It becomes harmful when it is pursued without regard for the job the body needs to perform. A lifter who removes mass that provided stability may lose accuracy under heavy load. A strongwoman athlete who drops fat around the hips and trunk may fatigue faster on stone runs or find that longer carries feel harsher on the joints. Movement athletes may gain little from leanness if the reduction leads to reduced muscle glycogen storage, slower recovery between sessions, or increased connective tissue irritation. Cosmetic leanness removes tissue that existed for a reason, and when that reason is ignored, performance suffers.
There are situations where leanness helps. Movement efficiency improves when an athlete carries a slightly lower amount of non-functional mass. In timed repetition events where speed and breathing patterns matter, leaner athletes often sustain rhythm more easily. Conditioning blocks feel smoother when heat dissipation improves and body temperature remains manageable across high-effort intervals. Athletes with endurance-heavy events benefit from reduced systemic stress. These advantages appear most clearly in events where travel distance matters more than absolute load.
There are also situations where leanness harms. Heavy yokes become unstable. Stones feel heavier relative to grip and compression. Heavier deadlifts lose the benefit of torso thickness. Car walks and frame carries lose the protective cushion that reduces banging and sway. Leanness may also reduce the buffer that protects against dehydration, travel stress, and multi-day competition fatigue. Endocrine health is another factor, especially for female athletes, who face greater risks of cycle irregularity and performance volatility when body fat drops too low for too long. PED use can mask some of these issues, but it does not remove them entirely.
The principle of form follows function only works when applied consistently across a season. Off-season training is often the best time to build mass. The volume is high. The pace of training supports muscle gain. Recovery is easier to manage. The stress of repeated competitions is absent. Athletes can increase calories gradually and allow lean mass to rise. Slight increases in body fat support this process and improve total work tolerance. The competitive season is the period where tightening body composition becomes useful. The training naturally becomes more specific, less volumised, and more event-focused. Athletes need to feel sharp, move quickly, and manage heat efficiently. Reducing non-functional tissue during this period helps improve movement without compromising strength.
Over multiple years, body composition evolves. Athletes grow into heavier cycles and refine their physique during lighter cycles. They learn what weight they perform best at, how quickly they can gain or reduce mass, and how their body responds to volume, intensity, and nutrition. This long-term approach allows athletes to prepare for different eras of strongman. They do not lock themselves into the current trend. They build a body that can handle whatever comes next.
Form follows function. Physique follows performance needs. The athlete who honours this principle creates a body that never stops being useful.
Monitoring the Metrics That Matter, Not Just the Mirror
Body composition only becomes useful when it is tied to performance data. The mirror can mislead, and so can single body fat readings. Strength athletes progress most effectively when they ground physique decisions in objective markers that reveal whether changes are providing functional benefits. This requires regular tracking of the variables that influence force production, fatigue tolerance, work capacity, and recovery. These markers show whether lean mass is improving the qualities that win events or whether the athlete is drifting toward aesthetic choices that reduce performance. The goal is not to micromanage every fluctuation. The goal is to build a clear picture of how the body responds to change.
Objective Markers to Track
DXA scans or skinfold assessments are useful when used consistently and interpreted within context. They should not be taken as absolute numbers that dictate decisions. Their purpose is to track trends in lean mass and fat mass over time while considering hydration status, scale weight, and the point in the training cycle. When paired with performance data, they give a clearer understanding of whether composition changes reflect muscle gain, muscle maintenance, or depleted energy stores.
Bar speed on primary lifts is one of the most reliable indicators of functional improvement. Velocities on dynamic effort sessions reveal whether the athlete is producing force efficiently. Speeds on the first and second attempts of heavy sessions show whether the body is tolerating training. When bar speed improves while body weight is stable or rising, lean mass is usually contributing to better output. When bar speed drops during a cut, this often reflects reduced glycogen, slower recovery, or unnecessary loss of productive mass.
Max effort performance should be monitored alongside dynamic effort performance. Max effort sessions show whether absolute strength is holding or increasing. Dynamic effort sessions show whether rate of force development is stable. The combination reveals the overall health of the strength system. Strongman athletes who maintain both during changes in body composition are generally managing their physiology well.
Grip strength is another valuable marker. It often declines early when energy availability is compromised. It also reflects neurological readiness. If grip drops during a fat loss phase, it is often the first sign that performance is being affected. Grip strength can be tested weekly with a dynamometer or through consistent warm-up protocols that allow comparison over time.
Strength density, meaning total load lifted relative to bodyweight, is especially useful for weight-class athletes. It shows whether the athlete is increasing the efficiency of their mass. Rising strength density indicates that reduced body fat has improved performance without sacrificing muscle. Falling strength density indicates that the athlete is losing tissue that contributes directly to output.
Event conditioning outputs provide another layer of information. Times on bag carries, sled runs, loading medleys, or farmers for distance show whether reduced mass improves movement quality. These sessions reveal whether the athlete is becoming faster, smoother, and more repeatable. When performance declines despite appearing leaner, the body composition change is probably not helping.
Heart rate variability and readiness markers help contextualise recovery. They provide a window into how well the athlete is handling training volume, nutrition, sleep, and external stress. HRV does not determine training choices alone, but it identifies whether the system is under pressure. Readiness markers paired with training logs show whether body composition changes are sustainable.
How to Assess Whether Body Composition Changes Are Working
Positive indicators of functional improvement include stable or rising bar speeds, increased strength density, more consistent max effort lifts, improved breathing patterns during conditioning, and better stability during heavy carries and loading tasks. If these markers remain stable or improve during a change in body composition, the adjustment is likely benefiting performance.
Another positive sign is improved tolerance to training volume. Athletes who can complete more work without excessive fatigue are usually managing energy availability well. This indicates that the body is coping with training and that changes in mass are aligning with the demands of the program.
Warning signs appear quickly when body composition changes are poorly timed or excessive. These include reduced bar speed, increased joint irritation, slower recovery between sessions, disrupted sleep, higher perceived effort during warm-ups, or dropping performance in grip tests. If conditioning sessions become harder despite reduced mass, or if strength density falls, these are signs that the athlete is losing productive tissue or reducing energy availability below optimal levels.
Event-specific performance provides the clearest warning signal. If a cut is intended to help movement events but the athlete slows down, loses stability on carries, or fatigues earlier in medleys, the change is not functional. Conversely, if a mass-gain phase is intended to support heavy loading but bracing becomes worse or the athlete feels sluggish, the mass is not contributing productively.
When a Drop in Body Fat Is Cosmetic Rather Than Functional
The body reveals the purpose of a fat loss phase through performance, not appearance. If strength does not rise, if bar speed does not improve, and if conditioning does not become smoother, the reduction in body fat is cosmetic. Athletes often mistake feeling lighter for being more capable. Lighter does not always mean more prepared. When leaner periods fail to produce measurable improvements, this indicates that the diet is not serving performance.
Aesthetic-driven cuts often remove tissue that was supporting training quality. They reduce glycogen storage, slow recovery, and limit the capacity to handle volume. Over time, this restricts long-term development. Cuts that are not tied to event outcomes or weight-class requirements tend to disrupt training cycles and interfere with phases designed to build muscle. They also increase the risk of inconsistent performance because the athlete becomes more sensitive to fluctuations in hydration, stress, and energy intake.
Functional body composition changes allow athletes to train more effectively. Cosmetic changes introduce volatility. The difference is always visible in the metrics. Athletes who track objective markers avoid the trap of chasing a look that cannot sustain high-level performance. They understand that the mirror reflects appearance, while the metrics reflect capability. They choose capability.
Practical Guidelines for Managing Body Composition Across a Season
Body composition management is most effective when it follows the rhythm of the competitive year. Strength athletes who plan their physique around the season rather than emotion, aesthetics, or social media expectations consistently outperform those who make reactive changes. The body adapts gradually. Strength builds gradually. Fatigue management stabilises gradually. Successful athletes take advantage of this long horizon and structure mass changes so they support the work being done at each point in the year. The goal is not to achieve a look. The goal is to create a stable internal environment that allows training quality to remain high while preparing for the demands of the next competition.
Off-season priorities
The off-season is the single most important period for building lean mass. Training volume is high, frequency is high, technical pressure is lower, and there is space for dedicated hypertrophy phases. Lean mass gained here becomes the foundation for the rest of the year. Athletes should adopt nutritional strategies that support muscle gain rather than trying to stay close to competition condition. Slight increases in body fat help with training tolerance, connective tissue resilience, and hormonal stability. The body is better able to handle high workloads when it has reliable energy availability.
This is also the best time to prepare for future weight categories. Athletes looking to move up a class can allow mass to rise steadily without compromising movement quality. Athletes who plan to remain within their current class can build lean mass while allowing a small and controlled increase in body fat that will later be refined before competition. The off-season is not about sharpness. It is about building the raw materials that will express themselves later.
Pre-season adjustments
As competitions approach, body composition decisions become more specific. Athletes should align their body mass with event lists rather than arbitrary targets. When events favour movement, distance, or repeated efforts, slight reductions in non-functional mass improve pacing and efficiency. When events favour static strength, heavy loads, and bracing, maintaining or slightly increasing mass may be beneficial.
Pre-season is the period where athletes evaluate movement demands and adjust accordingly. Athletes with distance carries or longer medleys can begin tightening nutritional intake, reduce unnecessary body fat, and focus on movement economy. Athletes preparing for heavier contests with shorter time domains may hold or even increase mass to support bracing and event stability. These adjustments should be modest and gradual. Large fluctuations disrupt training and reduce consistency.
In-season management
In-season is not the time for aggressive changes. Once event training intensifies, the focus should be on maintaining consistent body mass and keeping recovery reliable. Cutting aggressively reduces glycogen and interferes with the capacity to perform event repetitions at high quality. Gaining excessively interferes with movement and increases fatigue.
In-season management relies on steady nutritional habits, consistent hydration, regular monitoring of bar speed, and careful attention to readiness markers. The body should feel predictable across training weeks. Athletes who create sudden changes in body composition often see unpredictable changes in force output, stability, and fatigue. Strong performers hold steady and make only small adjustments calibrated to performance data.
Peaking periods
Peaking requires stability. Nutrition should support the specific work being done rather than impose additional stress. Body mass should remain stable, and athletes should avoid cutting or gaining rapidly during this period. Even small changes in hydration, muscle fullness, or body temperature regulation can alter bar speed, bracing mechanics, and event execution during a peak.
The purpose of peaking is to express strength and speed that have been developed across the entire season. Changing body composition during a peak disrupts that expression. Athletes should protect the performance qualities they have built by keeping nutrition predictable, maintaining energy availability, and avoiding decisions shaped by appearance rather than output.
Multi-year planning
Long-term success comes from identifying an athlete’s ideal competitive weight and gradually building a physique that supports it. This process unfolds across years, not months. Athletes learn how they feel at different bodyweights, how they move, how they recover, and which ranges provide the highest training quality. They learn the limits of their conditioning at various masses and how their lifts respond to incremental changes.
Multi-year planning allows athletes to build toward an optimal physique that provides functional advantages season after season. This involves observing performance trends, adjusting mass in the off-season, tightening before mixed events, and maintaining steady weight during peaks. The most successful strongman athletes do not bounce between extremes. They grow slowly, refine slowly, and bring their body composition into alignment with the demands of their sport over time.
A well-managed physique is not a look. It is a tool that supports training quality, protects recovery, stabilises performance, and prepares the athlete for whatever direction the sport moves next.
Ultimately
Strength sports reward athletes who build bodies that serve performance rather than appearance. Across all available evidence, lean body mass remains the strongest and most consistent predictor of maximal strength. Athletes who develop more functional tissue, protect it through adequate nutrition, and maintain the energy availability required for high-quality training outperform those who focus on looking a certain way. Muscle is the engine. Everything else works in support of it.
Body fat plays a meaningful role when it supports that engine. Within an appropriate range, it contributes to recovery, joint resilience, hormonal balance, and the ability to handle higher training loads. It helps with bracing, load tolerance, and the repeated efforts common in strongman. When body fat drops too low, strength declines, energy availability falls, and long-term development slows. When body fat rises too high, movement becomes inefficient, conditioning suffers, and the athlete loses the ability to excel in events that require speed or repeatability. Both extremes reduce the qualities that win competitions.
Strongman and powerlifting evolve constantly. Event lists change, federation priorities shift, and the balance between static and movement-focused demands moves over time. The physique that wins one cycle of contests may not be the physique that wins the next. Athletes who adapt to these changes and refine their body composition according to what the sport is asking of them remain competitive year after year. Those who stay attached to a single image or trend often fall behind.
Long-term success comes from aligning body composition with the demands of the sport, the season, and the athlete’s physiology. It requires planning, patience, and the willingness to make decisions based on performance rather than aesthetics. When athletes build their bodies for the work they need to do, everything else follows. This approach produces stable progress, deeper training quality, better competition output, and careers that last.
This entire discussion sits outside any moral lens. I am not asking anyone to be leaner, softer, heavier, or lighter. I am describing what tends to support strength performance, not what an athlete “should” look like. I also want to be clear that I am not standing apart from this. I have always leaned toward the bigger end of the spectrum myself, and as an open-class athlete I often prefer to carry a little more mass in-season whenever the events reward it. Some athletes simply function better with more weight on them, and I am one of them.
It also matters to separate performance discussion from general health discussion. When we take a strength sport seriously, we all make compromises. Pushing maximal strength, running high training volumes, manipulating bodyweight for classes or events, and cycling heavy blocks all come with trade-offs. The goal is not to pretend those trade-offs do not exist. The goal is to approach them with harm reduction in mind, to keep the athlete durable, and to extend their competitive lifespan as far as their physiology allows.
None of this is written as a judgement on how anyone chooses to look or feel. I have coached athletes across every shape and category. Strength sports thrive because they allow a huge range of bodies to excel. The only question that matters is whether your current composition helps you perform the way you want to perform. Everything else is personal preference, and that part deserves space of its own.
Best of the Rest
Once you understand how strength performance relates to lean mass, supportive levels of fat mass, and the shifting demands of your sport, it becomes useful to have a few practical checkpoints to gauge whether your own body composition is serving you.
A simple way to think about it is this: some lifters drift too lean for the work they are trying to do, and others drift too heavy for the events they need to perform well in. Both ends of that spectrum are easy to spot when you know what to look for.
Athletes who are too lean for their current training or competition block usually see a pattern emerge. Bar speed starts to dip, grip becomes inconsistent, sleep quality falls, and the nervous system feels flat. Nagging joint issues appear during sessions that would usually feel fine. Strength density slides even when training is otherwise on track. Female athletes often see RED-S style symptoms long before they feel “lean enough” to worry. All of these markers point toward a drop in energy availability that is beginning to cap progress.
On the other side, athletes who carry too much non-functional mass see a different pattern. Medleys slow down. Distances shrink. Heart rate stays high between events. Conditioning feels harder despite heavier bodyweight. PRs stop arriving even though the scale keeps climbing. Across a full session the pattern is obvious: it takes more effort to do the same work, and very little of the extra mass contributes to force production or event output.
Enhanced and tested athletes also sit at slightly different points along this spectrum. Athletes using PEDs often tolerate a little more total mass without losing the ability to produce high outputs, mainly because recovery pathways are supported in ways natural athletes cannot replicate. That does not give enhanced athletes a free pass to ignore energy balance or cardiac strain, but it explains why some can sit slightly heavier without losing their edge. Tested athletes tend to sit nearer the lean end of the performance ranges because their recovery and tissue-building capacity rely entirely on nutrition, training, and sleep. Their “productive” range is narrower, and chasing mass for the sake of it rarely pays off.
The wider sport-performance literature supports the same pattern across many disciplines. Whether you look at strength sports, explosive field sports, or mixed-demand events, athletes who carry more lean tissue and maintain supportive levels of body fat produce better strength, power, jump height, and sprint performance. The data around sustainable performance draws the same conclusion: physiologically healthy body composition sits inside the range that produces results, not outside it.
For lifters reading this, the practical application is straightforward. Re-assess your body composition at sensible intervals and match those assessments with performance markers rather than the mirror. If a cut is pulling down bar speed or recovery, adjust it before you lose training quality. If bodyweight climbs and movement events begin to suffer, return to the level where you felt sharp, explosive, and durable. Track strength density, track conditioning outputs, and keep a close eye on your readiness each week. Your best competitive physique will come from these signals more reliably than from any target number.
For coaches, this information sits at the centre of programming and check-ins. The goal is to monitor trends, not snapshots. When strength fades during a cut, increase available energy rather than forcing the diet harder. When conditioning falls apart during a mass phase, taper bodyweight slightly while protecting lean mass. Use DXA or skinfolds when available, track bar velocity, track conditioning work, and look for consistent patterns rather than single-week variations. Shape the athlete over months and years according to their competition calendar and event list, and keep their physique tied to the work they need to do.
This article sits alongside a wider ecosystem of resources on the site. Readers who want to explore the broader concept of physique built for purpose can continue with the “Form Follows Function” article, which expands on many of the ideas here. For athletes who want structured support, the strongman and powerlifting ebooks provide direct programming pathways built around the principles discussed above. Coaching is available for lifters who want this managed in real time across their season.
To close things out, a few quick answers to common questions that come up whenever body composition and strength performance are discussed:
Is lower body fat always better for strength? No. Lean body mass drives strength. Body fat helps when it supports training, recovery, and stability. When it drops too low, performance drops with it.
What body fat should a U105 strongman aim for? Most successful athletes fall somewhere around the mid-teens by typical assessment tools, but the real target is whatever level allows them to build the most lean mass while staying mobile and conditioned.
Can I gain strength while losing fat? Yes, particularly in early or intermediate phases of training, or when bodyweight is significantly above your best performing range.
Do women need higher body fat for strength? Female physiology requires higher baseline fat levels for health and performance. Many competitive women perform best in the low-to-mid twenty percent range, with heavier classes sitting comfortably above that.
How often should strength athletes measure body composition? Often enough to track trends, not so often that it distracts from training. Every six to twelve weeks is usually sufficient unless you are actively moving between classes.
This brings the full picture together: strength is built on lean mass, supported by appropriate body fat, shaped by the demands of the sport, and refined across seasons and years.
Final Discussion
Taken together, the research paints a clear and consistent picture. Across strongman, powerlifting, weightlifting and related strength disciplines, lean mass is the primary physical characteristic associated with high performance. The observational work on strongman and powerlifting athletes (Keogh et al., 2010; Winwood et al., 2011, 2015; Ferland et al., 2023; Flinner, 2018) all point toward the same conclusion. The lifters with the most lean mass relative to their class or category produce the highest totals and the most reliable event outputs. This reflects what is seen daily in coaching and what decades of athlete monitoring literature describe. Lean mass drives force production, improves stability, and gives athletes a deeper reservoir to recover from high workloads.
The role of body fat across these studies is supportive rather than directly performance enhancing. Higher levels can help some athletes retain or build lean mass across long training cycles, but the value comes from the impact on training tolerance rather than from fat mass itself. This aligns with the training texts from Haff and Triplett (2016), Kraemer and Fleck (2018), and the monitoring principles outlined by McGuigan (2017). Performance is determined by outputs. If changes in body composition do not help bar speed, strength density, or event proficiency, they do not help performance, regardless of whether body fat rises or falls.
The female datasets deserve their own note. Flinner’s thesis and the NCAA data show clear differences in where women sit on average. DXA produces higher readings than Bod Pod, which Antonio et al. (2018) confirm, and this explains the higher percentages often seen in female strength research. When framed correctly, these are not inflated or anomalous. They represent the physiology of women performing in high-strength, high-demand sports. The IOC RED-S statement (Mountjoy et al., 2018) adds the context the performance literature alone cannot provide. There are clear health risks when women push too far below their natural performance range, especially when heavy training loads are involved. In practice, this matches the patterns seen when strongwoman and female powerlifters cut aggressively. Strength stagnates, recovery falters, and symptoms of low energy availability begin to appear long before performance collapses.
The strongman-specific work by Keogh and Winwood highlights something the powerlifting literature does not have to wrestle with to the same degree. Event selection shifts across seasons, and the physical demands of the sport shift with it. A heavier, more static-leaning year suits athletes who carry more total mass and have more recovery reserves. A season built around runs, carries, medleys and distance events will reward leaner athletes with high strength density. These shifts match what athletes and coaches already know. Optimal physique is not fixed. It depends on the events in front of you.
When the findings from all sources are combined, three threads run through everything. First, lean mass is the central predictor of high performance across categories, genders and sports. Second, body fat supports performance only when it allows athletes to build and maintain lean mass and recover from training. Third, any target range must reflect the demands of the athlete’s category, the expected competition calendar, and the health constraints of their physiology.
This article gives you the operational summary. The full material, including the extended data commentary, deeper interpretation of the individual studies, coaching applications across an entire season, and the complete meta-analysis is inside Conjugate Cult VIP.
Selected References (Full List on VIP) -
Antonio, J., Peacock, C.A., Ellerbroek, A., Fromhoff, B. and Silver, T. (2018) ‘Comparison of dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) versus air displacement plethysmography (Bod Pod) for assessing body composition in collegiate female athletes’, Journal of Exercise and Nutrition, 1(1), pp. 1–7.
Ferland, P.M., Comtois, A.S. and Leone, M. (2023) ‘Body composition and maximal strength of powerlifters: A descriptive, quantitative, and longitudinal study’, Journal of Exercise and Nutrition, 6(3), pp. 1–10.
Flinner, R.L. (2018) Identifying ideal body composition of female powerlifters. Master’s thesis. Mississippi State University.
Haff, G.G. and Triplett, N.T. (2016) Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. 4th edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Keogh, J.W., Hume, P.A., Pearson, S.N. and Mellow, P. (2010) ‘Anthropometric and physical performance characteristics of junior elite and sub-elite strongman athletes’, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24(11), pp. 3112–3118.
Kraemer, W.J. and Fleck, S.J. (2018) Optimizing Strength Training: Designing Nonlinear Periodization Workouts. 2nd edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
McGuigan, M. (2017) Monitoring Training and Performance in Athletes. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Mountjoy, M., Sundgot-Borgen, J., Burke, L., Ackerman, K.E., Blauwet, C., Constantini, N., Lebrun, C., Lundy, B., Melin, A., Meyer, N., Sherman, R., Tenforde, A., Klungland Torstveit, M. and Budgett, R. (2018) ‘International Olympic Committee (IOC) consensus statement on relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S): 2018 update’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 52(11), pp. 687–697.
NCAA (2015) ‘Body composition: What are athletes made of?’, National Collegiate Athletic Association. Available at: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/5/21/body-composition-what-are-athletes-made-of.aspx (Accessed: 12 August 2025).
Siff, M.C. and Verkhoshansky, Y.V. (2009) Supertraining. 6th edn. Denver, CO: Supertraining International.
Storey, A. and Smith, H.K. (2012) ‘Unique aspects of competitive weightlifting: performance, training and physiology’, Sports Medicine, 42(9), pp. 769–790.
Winwood, P.W., Keogh, J.W.L. and Harris, N.K. (2011) ‘The strength and conditioning practices of strongman competitors’, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(11), pp. 3118–3128.
Winwood, P.W., Keogh, J.W.L. and Harris, N.K. (2015) ‘Anthropometric, physical performance, and strength characteristics of strongman athletes’, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 29(11), pp. 3112–3128.
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