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Powerlifting Guides

Everything you need to understand the sport - from your first meet to federation rules, scoring formulas, weight class strategy, and competition day preparation.

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Powerlifting Scoring Explained: Wilks, DOTS, and IPF GL Points guide
Scoring 8 min read

Powerlifting Scoring Explained: Wilks, DOTS, and IPF GL Points

A clear explanation of how Wilks, DOTS, and IPF GL Points work, why they exist, and which formula is used where. Includes worked examples and a comparison of how they rank different lifters.

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Learn Powerlifting from the Ground Up

Powerlifting has a steeper learning curve than it looks from the outside. The sport has its own vocabulary, rulebook, and culture that can feel overwhelming to a newcomer. These guides exist to flatten that curve. Written for competitive lifters at every level, they cover the topics that matter most: understanding the sport's structure, navigating the federation landscape, preparing for your first (or fiftieth) meet, and making sense of scoring systems that can seem needlessly complex until you understand what problem they solve.

Every guide on this page is informed by the OpenPowerlifting dataset - over 3.84 million competition entries from 1,000,000+ lifters across 100+ federations. Where we reference standards, benchmarks, or typical performance levels, the numbers come from real competition data, not generalised estimates. Use the tools on this site alongside the guides to put theory into practice: calculate your Wilks or DOTS score, see your percentile rank, model your attempt strategy, or compare federations side by side.