Average Shoulder Press Weight By Age + Bodyweight: Standards + What The Number Actually Tells You

The average shoulder press weight varies by age, sex, and training level — most beginner males can press around 65 lbs on the barbell, while intermediate lifters hit 100+ lbs. In this guide, we cover shoulder press standards and averages with full charts to help you see how you stack up.

As such, most athletes want to know: “How much should I be able to shoulder press?” In other words, what are the barbell shoulder press standards by age and weight? 

What is a good shoulder press weight for men and women? 

In this guide to the average shoulder press weight, we will look at the average barbell shoulder press weight by sex, age, body weight, and training level, helping answer the question: “How much should I be able to shoulder press?”

Let’s get started!

The Honest Truth About A “Good” Shoulder Press (And Why The Seated-Machine Number You Quote Is Almost Never Comparable To Anyone Else’s)

Shoulder-press standards tables look clean until you realise that the lift itself is one of the most variant movements in strength training. What people call “shoulder press” — seated machine, standing barbell strict press, push press with leg drive, seated dumbbell, Arnold press — can vary by 30-50% in the same load for the same lifter. Before you decide whether your number is good, figure out which lift is actually being compared.

Standing strict press is typically only 80-85% of seated press — because you are spending capacity on stability

The biomechanics of overhead pressing were mapped in detail by Kraemer & Ratamess in the NSCA Position Stand on resistance training (MSSE, 2004) and in Schoenfeld’s follow-up reviews on exercise-selection specificity. The same lifter who seated-presses 60 kg often tops out at roughly 50 kg on a standing strict barbell press — a consistent 15-20% drop — because the standing version spends significant motor-unit capacity on trunk bracing, hip stabilisation, and balance rather than shoulder prime-mover output. Machine shoulder press is higher still (machines remove stabiliser demand), often 10-15% above a seated dumbbell press. If a standards table doesn’t specify which shoulder press it is referring to, the number is essentially uninterpretable — and very few of them do.

Relative to bench, overhead press is the lift most lifters under-train — a healthy ratio is around 0.65x bench

The canonical “big-three plus press” framework tracked in datasets like ExRx and StrongLifts benchmarks places a healthy overhead-press-to-bench-press ratio at roughly 0.60-0.70:1 for intermediate lifters — i.e. a 100 kg bencher should be strict-pressing around 60-70 kg. Ratios far below that (sub-0.55) are a classic sign of a training program that has over-indexed on horizontal pressing and neglected vertical work, which Cook’s Functional Movement Screen literature (Strength & Conditioning Journal, 2006) flags as a predictor of shoulder-impingement risk. So a more useful question than “is my shoulder press average?” is “is my shoulder press in the right ratio to my bench?” The answer is usually no — and bringing the ratio up is typically the single most shoulder-protective thing you can do.

For distance runners, overhead press is a postural insurance policy — not a strength number to chase

There is essentially zero peer-reviewed evidence that overhead-press 1RM correlates with running economy or race performance. What there is good evidence for — Blagrove, Howatson & Hayes (Sports Medicine, 2018) in their systematic review of strength training for distance runners, and Lauersen, Bertelsen & Andersen (BJSM, 2014) in their meta-analysis on injury prevention — is that general resistance training roughly halves overuse-injury incidence, and that trunk + shoulder strength training specifically helps runners hold posture in the final kilometres of a marathon when form tends to collapse. For runners, two sets of 6-10 reps at a weight you could do 12-15 with, twice a week, is the target — not a 1RM number on a standards table. The shoulder press is insurance against late-race form breakdown, not a lift you are optimising.

When the raw standards table IS the right answer

If you are training specifically for hypertrophy or for a strength sport that includes overhead pressing — Olympic lifting carryover, strongman, CrossFit — then raw shoulder-press standards by bodyweight are a meaningful yardstick, and the charts on this page give you a reasonable place to start. The standards also work fine as a consistency check over time: comparing your own number to itself six months ago is always informative, even when comparing across lifters or across machine types is not.

For related strength standards with the same caveats, see our average bench press by age guide, and for how strength work fits into a distance-running schedule, our marathon training plans.

How Much Should I Be Able to Shoulder Press?

Unlike the barbell bench press, deadlift, or back squat, there are fewer available barbell shoulder press standards, but we can find the average shoulder press weight by age, sex, body weight, and training level by looking at various sources.

Strength Level reports average 1RM shoulder press weight for women and men by age and body weight based on fitness level by aggregating data from their community members through 4,087,637 lifts.

Based on this data, here are the average shoulder press 1RM weights for men by age:

Average Shoulder Press: Men

We also created a table that shows the barbell shoulder press standards for men are based on body weight in pounds and kilograms for each training level.

Find your body weight in pounds or kilograms on the left, and then you can see what is considered a good shoulder press weight for men of your same body weight and strength level in the columns to the right of your body weight.

So, how do you interpret this data? If you ask the question, “How much should I be able to lift for the overhead press?” you should look at your training level and then see the average overhead shoulder press weight by age and the average barbell press weight by body weight for those in your same training level to see how your barbell shoulder press 1RM compares.

A “good shoulder press weight“ would be pressing a weight that is at or above the barbell shoulder press max norm for your age or body weight and training level.

According to the training levels given on Strength Level for overhead pressing standards:

• Beginners have just started weightlifting 
• Novice weightlifters usually have less than six months of training
• Intermediate lifters have been training for six months to 1-2 years
• Advanced lifters have been lifting weights for more than two years

The other way to look at these shoulder press weight standards is to look at how much you can lift right now based on your training level and then see if it is above or below age-matched peers or those who weigh the same as you.

One important thing to bear in mind when looking at these average max shoulder press weights is that the data is self-reported by users on a website. 

That said, with over 4 million logged lifts, the average overhead press weights here are certainly crowdsourced from a very large pool of data.

How Much Should Men Be Able to Shoulder Press?

The following chart shows the average male shoulder press weights in pounds, kilograms, and percentage of body weight using the Strength Level data:

Based on these barbell shoulder press standards from Strength Level, when all of the barbell press averages data is aggregated, the average overhead press 1RM weight for males just starting out is 66 pounds or 30 kg. 

If we are trying to look at the average shoulder press weight for men overall, we can look at the male overhead press standards and the average body weight.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average body weight for an adult male in the United States is 199.8 pounds, so a good shoulder press for an intermediate man would be 160 pounds.

How Much Should Women Be Able to Shoulder Press?

The table below shows the average shoulder press weight for women by age, presented in pounds and kilograms based on training level using data from Strength Level:

Average Shoulder Press: Women

The table below shows the average barbell press for women by body weight in pounds and kilograms based on training level:

Finally, you can see the overall averages for women’s shoulder press weights:

According to the CDC, the average body weight for an adult female in the United States is 170.8 pounds.

Therefore, a good beginner shoulder press weight for women who are just starting out is 36 pounds.

Again, keep in mind that these norms are based on the average American woman in terms of body weight. 

You can find out how much weight you should be able to press overhead based on your actual body weight using the tables provided earlier.

For the best exercises to strengthen your shoulders, check out our shoulder workout here.