Strength Score (DOTS)
Your squat, bench and deadlift added up and adjusted for bodyweight — one number that puts a 60 kg lifter and a 120 kg lifter on the same scale.
Strength Score is a DOTS score: your best squat, bench press and deadlift summed into a total, then divided by a curve fitted to bodyweight so lifters of different sizes land on the same scale. Our coefficients match the OpenPowerlifting reference implementation digit for digit. Two things we do to that number are disclosed here rather than buried — we clamp your bodyweight into the range the curve was actually fitted for, and we never show a partial score. And we never print a rank or a percentile beside it, because we have no population to place you in.
See it in the app
Open the Analytics tab
Strength Score sits at the top of the Progress section — the DOTS number, your total, and the squat / bench / deadlift it’s built from
Tap the ⓘ on the card for this same disclosure inside the app
If it can’t score you yet, it names exactly what’s missing — sex, a logged bodyweight, or one of the three lifts — and each line taps straight to where you add it
Even this is in Bronze — the whole tracker is $1/mo, and nothing here is locked behind a higher tier.
Why it matters
Adding three lifts together is easy. Comparing that total to anyone else’s — or to your own from before a bulk — is not, because a 60 kg lifter and a 120 kg lifter are not playing the same game. A bodyweight-relative score is what lets you ask the question you actually care about: am I strong for my size, and is that improving.
It’s also the number that travels. A total is what lifters quote to each other, and a bodyweight-adjusted total is what federations rank meets by. That’s precisely why we owe you every adjustment we make to it in writing — a headline number is the worst possible place to hide an asterisk.
How Powerhaus calculates it
The total is your best squat, bench press and deadlift added together — a barbell back squat, a barbell bench press, and a conventional or sumo deadlift (whichever is heavier). We use your heaviest tested single for each lift where you have one, and your Estimated 1RM where you don’t; a score built on an estimate carries the app’s ≈ marker so a projection can’t be mistaken for a tested competition total.
The adjustment is DOTS: your total is divided by a fourth-degree polynomial of your bodyweight and scaled by 500, with separate coefficients for male and female lifters. There is no unisex version of this or any other published strength formula, which is why the score needs a sex on file — and why “prefer not to say” is a perfectly valid answer that simply means no score. We never quietly default it to male to produce a number.
We clamp your bodyweight before scoring. The curve was only fitted between 40 kg (88 lb) and 210 kg (463 lb) for men, and between 40 kg (88 lb) and 150 kg (331 lb) for women. If your bodyweight sits outside your range we still show you a score — but we compute it as though you weighed exactly the nearest limit, not what you actually weigh.
We never show a partial score. It takes a sex, a logged bodyweight, and all three lifts. Missing any of them and the card shows a dash and names exactly what’s absent, each one tappable straight to where you fix it — because a total built from two lifts isn’t a total, and a coefficient applied to a guessed bodyweight isn’t a score.
The science
The coefficients are the reference ones, and we checked rather than assumed. Our polynomials match the OpenPowerlifting reference implementation digit for digit, and we ran our implementation against 2,753,858 scored competition entries from the OpenPowerlifting bulk dataset with no mismatches beyond their two-decimal rounding. A formula is easy to typo and impossible to eyeball; the only honest check is to score millions of real meet results and see whether you agree with them.
One honest caveat on provenance, and it’s a real one. DOTS was created by Tim Konertz for the German federation (BVDK) in 2019 and was never published as a formal paper (DOTS-Relativwertung). It’s a widely-adopted scoring convention with a documented reference implementation and a published validity range — not a peer-reviewed measurement instrument. We picked it because it is the current standard and the implementation is verifiable, and we’d rather tell you that than let the word “formula” imply a literature that isn’t there.
The clamp isn’t housekeeping — it’s the difference between a score and a fantasy. Outside the fitted band the polynomial turns over and starts handing out scores that climb when they should fall. The size of that: a 35.4 kg (78 lb) male lifter with a 190 kg (419 lb) total scores 241.5 clamped and 283.0 unclamped — a 41-point difference, handed to the lightest lifters, exactly the users least equipped to spot it. The clamped figure is the one that matches published results, so it’s the one we show.
Why there’s no percentile next to your score. DOTS is a bodyweight-normalised number, not a population ranking — and we have no population of Powerhaus lifters to place you in. We could scrape a meet database and tell you that you beat 63% of competitive powerlifters, but that is a different population from “people who train,” and dressing it up as your percentile would be inventing data. So the card shows the number and stops.