Percentages · How it reads your numbers

Sinclair calculator

How good is a snatch for the lifter's weight? Sinclair is weightlifting's answer: a coefficient that puts a lighter lifter's snatch, or total, on the scale of the heaviest class, so two lifters of different bodyweights can be compared. Type your numbers and this page gives you the coefficient, your Sinclair snatch and total, and your snatch ÷ bodyweight. It runs in this tab — nothing is sent anywhere.

What Sinclair is

The IWF fits a curve to the world-record totals across the bodyweight classes, once each Olympic cycle. Its coefficient is how much heavier a lift would be if the lifter weighed as much as the point where the curve flattens out — b, below. Multiply a lift by it and you get the Sinclair lift. Above b the coefficient is 1: the heaviest lifters are the yardstick.

coefficient = 10^{A · (log₁₀(bodyweight ÷ b))²} for a bodyweight under b, and 1 at or above it, with bodyweight in kilograms

The constants are the IWF's for the 2021–2024 Olympic cycle, published by the IWF and not set here; bodyweight in pounds is converted to kilograms first, because they are in kilograms.

Why bodyweight says less than your other lifts

Sinclair, and snatch ÷ bodyweight, tell you where a snatch sits against lifters of other sizes. They cannot tell you why it is where it is. Two lifters with the same Sinclair can be capped by entirely different things — one cannot hold the bar overhead, the other has the strength and misses the turnover. Bodyweight is not a lift, so it carries no information about the pull, the catch or the squat.

The ratios between your own lifts do. Each one compares your snatch to a lift that trains part of it, and the one that is out of line names the limiter:

• Overhead squat to snatch ratio · 1.05–1.35
• Power snatch to snatch ratio · 0.78–0.88
• Snatch to back squat ratio · 0.58–0.68
• Snatch to clean and jerk ratio · 0.76–0.84

That is what the planner reads, and why the result above ends there. How the four ratios are weighed →