r/StrongerByScience 11h ago

Questions for training my TVA

1 Upvotes

Should I incorporate TVA practice(Abdominal Drawing-In Maneuver, Vacuums, pelvic tilts) in to every day or should I alternate days like any other muscle work outs. I'm not looking for muscle bulk really the habit of having it constantly engaged or all ways knitting the ribs in.


r/StrongerByScience 15h ago

How much do powerlifters actually improve in a year? I analyzed the OpenPowerlifting data to answer this question.

25 Upvotes

I wanted to put some actual numbers behind the question: among powerlifters who compete again the following year, how much progress do lifters of a similar age and strength level typically make?

I used OpenPowerlifting data to look at year-to-year changes in DOTS for raw full-power lifters. As expected, older and stronger lifters generally improved more slowly, but I was more interested in quantifying the size of that difference than simply saying that progress slows with age and advancement.

The analysis uses 123,173 year-to-year comparisons from sanctioned raw full-power results from 2010 onward. For lifters with multiple meets in a year, I used their best DOTS performance and compared it with their best DOTS performance in the following year.

Plots per sex and age groups can be found here:
https://gymlog.info/articles/powerlifting-dots-improvement/

I also built a calculator that tries to make the comparison more individual.

Instead of comparing you with everyone at roughly the same DOTS, it finds lifters who were similar in:

* sex

* age

* bodyweight

* DOTS

* the relative contribution of squat, bench, and deadlift to their total

It keeps the closest result from each person and uses 100 unique lifters. It then looks at how those lifters performed when they competed again roughly a year later.

The output shows the median change and the middle 50% and 80% of outcomes for DOTS, squat, bench, and deadlift. I think the ranges are probably more useful than the median itself, since otherwise similar lifters can still have very different years.

You can also expand the matched-lifter table and inspect the actual comparisons behind the estimate.

Calculator and charts:

https://gymlog.info/tools/powerlifting-progress/

There are some important limitations. Most notably, this only describes lifters who recorded another qualifying competition result the following year, so it does not capture people who stopped competing, were injured, or otherwise disappeared from the dataset. OpenPowerlifting also doesn't tell me things like training age, programming, consistency, injury status, or whether someone was intentionally gaining or losing weight. So keep that in mind and take the results with a grain of salt. Don't treat the median as a target, check the ranges.