The State of 5x5

How much you actually gain

Among the 1492 lifters who trained consistently (at least four logged sessions with real progression), here's the median weight added to each lift. The lower-body lifts climb about twice as fast as the presses — exactly how 5x5 is built to work.

Median weight added per lift · 1492 consistent lifters.

Where lifters end up

Squatting your own bodyweight is the classic first strength milestone. In our data, 26% of active lifters were squatting at least their bodyweight — for sets of five, not a one-rep max. Because a 5-rep working weight sits well below a true max, the real share who could squat bodyweight for a single rep is meaningfully higher. Only about 1 in 37 had pushed their working squat past 1.5× bodyweight, the line where "intermediate" starts to become "advanced."

The real bottleneck isn't the program — it's showing up

This was the clearest finding in the whole dataset. 5x5's progression is almost foolproof: add a little weight every session, deload when you stall. The lifters who followed it got strong fast. But the median lifter logged just 7 sessions. About 4 in 10 reached 10, and only 1 in 10 reached 25.

The takeaway isn't that 5x5 fails — it's that consistency, not programming, is what separates the lifters who add 30kg to their squat from the ones who don't. The hardest rep is the one where you show up in week three.

Half of all lifters start at the bar

Half of lifters (49.5%) started with the empty 20kg barbell on squat — the program's recommended default. That share was 58% in July: more people now arrive with training behind them and enter a heavier starting weight. Starting light feels too easy, but it's the point: it lets you nail technique while the linear gains do the work. The lifters who started here are the same ones who added 30kg a few months later.

What changed since July 2026

First, the counting. This edition only counts workouts logged in the app. The July edition's 15,128 also included about 5,100 workouts that lifters had imported from another app. Counted the same way as today, July was 10,019 workouts, so the dataset has grown from that to 24,205, and from 852 to 1,492 consistent lifters.

The two biggest lifts did not move at all: squat +30kg and deadlift +25kg, identical in June, July and October. Overhead press held at +10kg. Two medians slipped: bench went from +17.5kg to +17kg and row from +12.5kg to +11kg. Consistency went up: 39% of lifters now reach 10 sessions, up from 31%, and the median lifter has logged 7 sessions instead of 5. Part of that is simply time: an older dataset has given more lifters the weeks they need to get there.