Vertical Pulling
Lat Pulldown Strength Standards
See how much you should be able to pull down for your size. Enter your bodyweight and this page gives your beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced and elite lat pulldown numbers, then tells you which level your current best actually lands in.
Find Your Lat Pulldown Level
Enter your bodyweight, pick your sex, and put in your best lift. Everything below updates as you type.
What the Lat Pulldown Really Measures
Vertical pulling strength, without the bodyweight problem.
The lat pulldown is a vertical pull done seated, with your thighs pinned under a pad so the stack has something to fight against. It loads the lats, the teres major, the lower and middle traps and the elbow flexors, and it is the one back exercise almost anybody can load properly from day one. A pull-up asks you to move your whole bodyweight before you have earned the strength to do it. A pulldown lets you pick 60 lb and go from there, which is why it carries most beginner back training.
That same convenience is why pulldown numbers travel badly between gyms. Machines differ in pulley ratio, in how the stack is labelled and in how much friction has built up in the guide rods, so a plate marked 150 on one machine is not the same load at your hands as a 150 on another. Read the numbers here as the selection you would make on a typical selectorised machine, and compare yourself against your own logbook first.
Where These Numbers Come From
Forty-eight percent of the deadlift standard, at every level.
There is no accepted independent scale for the pulldown the way there is for the three competition lifts, so we derived one rather than invent one. Every level on this page is 48 percent of the deadlift standard for the same bodyweight and sex, taken straight from our strength standards page. The deadlift is this site's reference for whole-chain pulling strength, and vertical pulling tracks it closely enough that a single proportion holds across the range.
For men that puts the intermediate lat pulldown at a shade under bodyweight, so the rule of thumb most lifters already use, pull down about what you weigh once you know what you are doing, falls out of the arithmetic instead of being bolted on afterwards. It also lines up with our weighted pull-up standards: a man sitting on the intermediate pulldown mark is usually in the region of adding a quarter of his bodyweight to a chin bar.
| Level | Share of the deadlift standard |
|---|---|
| Beginner | 48 percent |
| Novice | 48 percent |
| Intermediate | 48 percent |
| Advanced | 48 percent |
| Elite | 48 percent |
These standards are estimates derived from typical ratios to the main lifts, rounded to the nearest 5 lb. The bench, squat, deadlift and overhead press figures they are built on are the bodyweight-ratio approximations published on our strength standards page, which are aligned with widely used references in the strength and conditioning field including ExRx.net. Nothing here is measured lab data, and no table anywhere else has been copied. Treat every figure as a target to aim at, not a verdict on you.
Lat Pulldown Standards for Men
Estimated 1-rep max on the stack, by bodyweight.
| Bodyweight | Beginner | Novice | Intermediate | Advanced | Elite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 110 lb | 55 lb | 80 lb | 105 lb | 130 lb | 160 lb |
| 130 lb | 60 lb | 95 lb | 125 lb | 155 lb | 185 lb |
| 150 lb | 70 lb | 110 lb | 145 lb | 180 lb | 215 lb |
| 170 lb | 80 lb | 120 lb | 165 lb | 205 lb | 245 lb |
| 190 lb (your bodyweight) | 90 lb | 135 lb | 180 lb | 230 lb | 275 lb |
| 210 lb | 100 lb | 150 lb | 200 lb | 250 lb | 300 lb |
| 230 lb | 110 lb | 165 lb | 220 lb | 275 lb | 330 lb |
| 250 lb | 120 lb | 180 lb | 240 lb | 300 lb | 360 lb |
Lat Pulldown Standards for Women
Estimated 1-rep max on the stack, by bodyweight.
| Bodyweight | Beginner | Novice | Intermediate | Advanced | Elite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 110 lb | 30 lb | 55 lb | 70 lb | 100 lb | 125 lb |
| 130 lb | 35 lb | 60 lb | 80 lb | 120 lb | 150 lb |
| 150 lb | 45 lb | 70 lb | 95 lb | 135 lb | 175 lb |
| 170 lb | 50 lb | 80 lb | 105 lb | 155 lb | 195 lb |
| 190 lb | 55 lb | 90 lb | 120 lb | 175 lb | 220 lb |
| 210 lb | 60 lb | 100 lb | 130 lb | 190 lb | 240 lb |
| 230 lb | 65 lb | 110 lb | 145 lb | 210 lb | 265 lb |
| 250 lb | 70 lb | 120 lb | 155 lb | 230 lb | 290 lb |
A Worked Example
One lifter, one honest set, one number to chase.
Take a 190 lb man. His intermediate lat pulldown is 180 lb and his advanced mark is 230 lb. Say he manages eight clean reps at 150 lb. Our one rep max calculator puts that at roughly 190 lb for a single, which clears the intermediate line and leaves him about 40 lb short of advanced.
The label is the least interesting part of that. The useful part is the gap: he now knows the next milestone is 230 lb, that it is 40 lb away, and that adding 5 lb to the stack every couple of weeks gets him there inside a training block. A standard that does not hand you a target is just a scoreboard.
What These Standards Cannot Tell You
Three honest caveats before you take the number to heart.
A pulldown one-rep max is rarely tested and even more rarely honest. Most people find their true single by leaning back until the movement turns into a row, which raises the number without raising the strength it is meant to measure. If these standards are going to mean anything, judge yourself on a rep done with your torso close to upright and the bar arriving at your upper chest.
The tables also say nothing about how well your back works. Pulldown load is one narrow slice of pulling ability, and it will not tell you whether your shoulder blades move properly, whether your elbows are healthy, or whether your upper back holds position under a heavy deadlift. Use it to steer the loading on one exercise, not to grade your training.
More Tools
Work out your max, then find your level on the rest of the lifts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about these standards.
How much should I be able to lat pulldown?
For a 190 lb man the intermediate lat pulldown is about 180 lb for a single, and for a 140 lb woman it is about 85 lb. Enter your own bodyweight at the top of the page to see your exact figures at all five levels.
What is the average lat pulldown weight?
Most trained men in a commercial gym sit in the novice to intermediate band, which at 190 lb bodyweight is roughly 135 to 180 lb for a one-rep max. That works out at sets of eight to ten somewhere near 110 to 150 lb. Untrained lifters start well below that, and there is nothing wrong with starting there.
Is a lat pulldown as good as a pull-up?
For building the lats they are close cousins, and the pulldown has the advantage that you can load it precisely at any strength level. The pull-up is the harder skill because it also demands you control your own bodyweight, so most programmes use both and progress the pulldown while the pull-up count climbs.
Should I be able to lat pulldown my bodyweight?
For a trained man that is a fair target: the intermediate standard here sits just under bodyweight for a single rep. For women the intermediate mark is nearer two thirds of bodyweight. Neither is a pass mark, just the point where your pulling has caught up with the rest of your training.
Do these standards work on a home cable machine?
Roughly, but expect a difference. Home stacks and plate-loaded towers vary in pulley ratio, so the same effort can read 20 lb higher or lower than a commercial machine. Pick one machine and track your progress on that.
How are these lat pulldown standards calculated?
Each level is 48 percent of the deadlift standard for the same bodyweight and sex, rounded to the nearest 5 lb. They are estimates derived from typical ratios between lifts, not measured data from a test population.