State of Lifting The Gender Report
We joined a million logged workouts to 168,000 Boostcamp athletes with verified gender to find out how men and women actually train, not how they say they do.
Lifters argue about this online all the time. Whether women train differently than men. Whether they avoid heavy compounds. Whether they actually skip leg day less. Most of it is vibes and personal stories.
This report is the joined data. One million workouts sampled from the Boostcamp community, cross-referenced with self-reported gender from 168,000 verified athletes and experience level from over a million user profiles. Some of it confirmed what the lifting internet has always claimed. Some of it didn't. All of it is real.
The dataset
We started with a random sample of 1,000,000 workout records logged on Boostcamp. We joined these to a cohort of 168,190 athletes with self-identified gender in Amplitude (Male/Man and Female/Woman labels normalized together) and to 1.21 million Postgres user profiles for self-reported experience level. 901,452 of the 1M workouts (90.1%) matched a sex. 729,282 (72.9%) matched both a sex and an experience level.
Analysis
All analysis was performed locally with the assistance of AI tooling and human review of every finding. Aggregate statistics were computed across the full joined sample. No individual user data was examined or presented. The 'Novice' experience-level label was mapped into 'Beginner' (Boostcamp renamed the label during onboarding rework; the underlying users are semantically equivalent).
Definitions
Skip rate: a set was logged in a program but marked as skipped. Top 10 exercise: among the 10 most-common exercise names across a segment's workouts, by share of workouts each exercise appears in (a single exercise can appear in many workouts; shares do not sum to 100). Equipment mix: share of logged exercises whose equipment type is Machine, Dumbbell, Barbell, Cable, or Bodyweight (small Cardio/Kettlebell/Other tail omitted for chart clarity). Median working weight: the median weight value across non-skipped sets, in pounds (kg entries converted to lbs).
Privacy
All personally identifiable information was stripped from analysis. User IDs are the same anonymized identifiers used internally; no email, IP, or name data was loaded. Boostcamp does not share or sell user data.
Limitations
Boostcamp users are a self-selected, structured-program-following population and skew toward more committed lifters than the general gym-going public. Gender labels are user-reported in Amplitude and were normalized across versions of the onboarding flow (Male/Man and Female/Woman merged). Experience level is self-reported in onboarding and not externally validated. Working weights are absolute (in pounds, with kg converted) and are not normalized to bodyweight; bodyweight is not collected outside of optional progress-photo uploads and so was not joined here. Findings describe patterns, not causes; we do not speculate on why a pattern exists.
Across 901,000 sex-matched workouts, women skipped 16.2% of programmed sets. Men skipped 21.6%. That is a 5.4 percentage point gap, or about 25% fewer skipped sets relative to men.
It is not a beginner artifact. The gap holds at every self-reported experience level. Beginner women skip 16.7% to beginner men's 22.9%. Intermediate women skip 15.8% to intermediate men's 20.6%. Advanced women skip 14.5% to advanced men's 20.9%. The most consistent group in the dataset is advanced women. The least consistent is beginner men.
The single biggest behavioral difference between male and female Boostcamp lifters is not what they lift. It is how much of what they planned they actually complete.
The 10 most-logged exercises for advanced women and advanced men overlap on 8 of 10. For beginners, the overlap is only 6 of 10. Intermediate women sit in between at 7 of 10.
Beginner women's top 10 includes Hip Abductor (Machine) and Hip Thrust (Barbell), neither of which appears in beginner men's top 10. By the advanced level both lists are dominated by the same exercises: bench press, squat, lat pulldown, leg extension, deadlift, lateral raise, Romanian deadlift, and seated row.
Whatever shapes how women train when they start, it fades with experience. The longer women train, the more their exercise selection converges with men's.
Hip Abductor (Machine) appears in 9.5% of beginner women's workouts, ranking it #9 in their top 10. It is not in intermediate women's top 10. It is not in advanced women's top 10. It does not appear in any male top 10 at any experience level.
Hip Thrust (Barbell) is in 8.4% of beginner women's workouts (#10) and 8.2% of intermediate women's (#10). It disappears from advanced women's top 10 entirely.
The takeaway is not that these are bad exercises. It is that the popular framing of 'women-coded' lifts is really a beginner-women pattern. As women advance, they lift fewer abductor and hip thrust sessions and more deadlifts and overhead presses.
Beginner women log 14.7% of their work on bodyweight movements. Beginner men log 6.4%. That is roughly 2.3x more bodyweight work among women starting out.
By the advanced level, women's bodyweight share drops to 10.0% and their barbell share climbs from 18.0% to 23.3%. Men's mix barely moves across experience: bodyweight hovers at 6 to 7%, barbell at 24 to 28%.
Women's training composition migrates substantially across experience. Men's composition is essentially the same on day one as it is years in. Becoming an advanced female lifter means picking up the barbell. Becoming an advanced male lifter means doing the same things you started with, heavier.
On every barbell big lift, the median male lifter outweighs the median female lifter. The gaps are not the same size.
Bench Press: M 160 lbs, F 75 lbs (M:F 2.13x). Overhead Press: 1.77x. Romanian Deadlift: 1.68x. Squat: 1.89x. Deadlift: 1.80x. Hip Thrust: 1.26x.
The bench press has the widest sex gap of any lift in the dataset, and it widens slightly with experience (2.08x at beginner, 2.05x at advanced). The hip thrust has the smallest gap and narrows with experience: advanced women hip-thrust 154 lbs while advanced men hip-thrust 185 lbs, a 1.20x ratio. The shapes of these gaps are consistent with published research on sex-based strength distribution; we are not the first to find the bench gap is the largest.
Whenever a strength-standards site says the average woman benches 80 to 110 lbs, the source is typically a calculator inferring from a much smaller dataset. This is what 41,000 logged sets of barbell bench across actual Boostcamp users say:
Median female bench: 75 lbs (IQR 55 to 95). At beginner: 65. Intermediate: 85. Advanced: 95. Median male bench: 160 lbs (IQR 130 to 198). At beginner: 135. Intermediate: 171. Advanced: 195.
Squat (median, lbs): F 105 / M 198. Deadlift: F 135 / M 243. Overhead Press: F 53 / M 94. Romanian Deadlift: F 95 / M 160. Hip Thrust: F 115 / M 145. Use them as a sanity check, not a target. Bodyweight is not in this dataset, so the table is not normalized; it is what the median user actually lifted last time they pressed, squatted, pulled, or thrust.
| Lift | Men | Women | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beg | Int | Adv | Beg | Int | Adv | |
| Bench Press (Barbell) | 135 | 171 | 195 | 65 | 85 | 95 |
| Squat (Barbell) | 160 | 214 | 235 | 88 | 116 | 135 |
| Deadlift (Barbell) | 200 | 260 | 290 | 120 | 154 | 170 |
| Overhead Press (Barbell) | 80 | 95 | 110 | 45 | 55 | 55 |
| Romanian Deadlift (Barbell) | 135 | 176 | 185 | 88 | 99 | 110 |
| Hip Thrust (Barbell) | 135 | 150 | 185 | 95 | 121 | 154 |
Press & citation kit
Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite this report. Every finding here is from real behavioral data, not a survey. We are happy to provide additional cuts of the data (by country, training goal, or experience level) on request.
Quick facts
- Sample: 901,452 workouts joined to 168,190 athletes with verified gender; 729,282 workouts also matched to self-reported experience level.
- Source: Boostcamp app workout logs (anonymized) joined to verified gender via Amplitude and self-reported experience level via onboarding.
- Period: Workout records sampled across the platform's history.
- Skip-rate gap: Women skip 16.2% of programmed sets; men skip 21.6%. Holds at every experience level.
- Top-10 overlap: Advanced women and advanced men share 8 of 10 most-logged exercises; beginners share only 6 of 10.
- Largest strength gap: Bench Press (M:F median 2.13×). Smallest: Hip Thrust (1.26×).
Citation
Boostcamp App. (2026). State of Lifting: The Gender Report. Retrieved from https://www.boostcamp.app/state-of-lifting/gender.
Contact
For media requests, custom data cuts, or embargoed previews of upcoming reports, please reach out through the contact page.
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