How it reads your numbers
No secret sauce. Four ratios, four bands, and a rule for which one wins when more than one is out. Here is the whole thing so you can disagree with it.
The ratios
| Ratio | Healthy | Below the band | Above it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overhead squat ÷ snatch | 1.05–1.35 | You can snatch nearly everything you can hold overhead. No margin in the catch — overhead strength is the ceiling. | Plenty of room overhead. Holding the bar is not what is stopping you. |
| Power snatch ÷ snatch | 0.78–0.88 | A long way behind. Points at how fast you get from the finish of the pull to a locked-out bar. | The squat is buying you almost nothing. You are catching high and standing it up. |
| Snatch ÷ back squat | 0.58–0.68 | You squat far more than you snatch. The legs are fine; the lift is leaking somewhere. | Technique is carrying you. More leg strength is the cheapest kilos available. |
| Snatch ÷ clean & jerk | 0.76–0.84 | The clean & jerk is well ahead, so this is snatch-specific rather than a general strength gap. | Unusually close. If anything the jerk is the lift with room in it. |
Which one wins
Each ratio gets a severity — how far outside its band it sits, measured in band-widths, so a narrow band and a wide one are compared fairly. The overhead ratio then carries double weight, because it is causal as well as limiting: a lifter who cannot hold the bar overhead also catches high, and fixing the catch without fixing the overhead fixes nothing.
It is a multiplier and not a veto, on purpose. An overhead ratio that is barely outside its band does not get to hijack a dramatic finding somewhere else.
Where this stops being reliable
These bands describe a technically sound lifter. They are conventional weightlifting benchmarks, not laws, and plenty of people sit outside one and are completely fine — so every reading here is phrased as the thing worth looking at next, never as a diagnosis.
They are also only as good as the numbers you feed them. A snatch max from two years ago and a fresh back squat will produce a confident, wrong answer. Ratios computed from a max you have never actually tested are guesses wearing a decimal point.
And they cannot see you lift. A camera would catch things a ratio never will — where your feet land, whether the bar leaves you at the hip. This is the read you can get for free, from numbers you already have, in ten seconds. It is not the same as a coach watching you.
What a lift you have not tested does
Nothing. A ratio with a missing lift is reported as unchecked rather than filled in with an average, and if the only number you have is your snatch, you get a session and no diagnosis. That is the honest answer, and it is a better one than a limiter invented out of one data point.