[eudamoniac]

I don't intend to convince you, but for onlookers:

1. As a young male, 1 plate bench/squat and 2 plate deadlift is extremely weak. Please strive higher than this. Anyone can achieve this in 6 months of intelligent training max. Many men start this strong untrained. The majority of young men can squat 1 plate untrained.

1. Soreness is not an indication of anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric loading. It doesn't correlate to progress. It is also a sign that your programming is not intelligent; you generally should not be sore after the first few workouts ever again.

1. Yes it is easier mentally, in the sense that doing easy things is easy. This is not a benefit, because doing hard things results in mental strength as much as physical.

[randysalami]

My max used to be 425 on deadlift back when I was taking it more seriously. Doing 5x8 of 225 on deadlift is enough to be strong to be healthy and active. You can only push yourself on a limited number of things in life so some things are just good enough.

[eudamoniac]

Sure, and 400 deadlift is decent intermediate for the average man, but let me suggest a counterpoint. Strength is the greatest indication of health among the elderly. A strong old man doesn't break his hip when he falls, he doesn't fall at all actually because strength is balance, and he doesn't have trouble getting off the toilet, and he doesn't need a cane. These are serious QOL issues.

It's a mindset issue. If you're 25 and have already declined from 425 to 225 deadlift, that doesn't bode well for your decline into old age. Strength slowly tapers off once you stop lifting, as most eventually do. You want to be as strong as possible while entering middle age so that you can be a strong old man. Strength is like a retirement account in this sense, and in this sense you are advocating for working minimum wage throughout life because it's easier. For a young man, whose training is most efficacious of all age groups, I recommend getting as strong as possible, at least 400 deadlift and symmetrical equivalent in other lifts (but most can achieve 500), and then maintaining that strength as long as possible, not cutting it in half immediately. If you can lift 350 at age 55 you're pretty much guaranteed to never break your hip or have a bad fall; that entire class of osteo related issues vanishes.

[capyba]

I’ve been a longtime competitive athlete and my best deadlift was 545 lb. I’ve been in many gyms in my life and I’ve only met maybe a dozen men lifting more than say 350 or so.

Expecting the “average” man to get to a 400 or even 300 lb deadlift is absurd. Sure, most people could be in better shape but a 4 plate deadlift is much more strength than most people need… and more than most people’s bodies can safely handle regularly. The risk of serious injury rises exponentially when you put on weight like that.

Building and maintaining strength, especially into the older ages, is certainly important but not to the levels you describe here. I suspect your comments here are based on neither personal experience nor proper education and training.

[eudamoniac]

The average male 20-29 in USA is 85KG. A deadlift of barely over 2x bodyweight is not remarkable at all! The average young man does not train and when they do they train stupidly; this has no bearing on the fact that they could achieve a 400 deadlift within a few years of intelligent training.

Most gyms are not serious. You'll find no one lifting heavy at Planet Fitness, and you'll find that a 350 deadlift is one of the weakest in a dirty powerlifting gym. Among people who actually do the activity, it's not impressive. The thing is you just have to actually do the activity. My metrics are only "absurd" if you think I'm saying that the average man has the willpower and interest to achieve this; of course they don't; the average man is obese and lazy. My claim is that the average man has the physical capacity to achieve this.

Please don't misconstrue my claim of what is possible for what is likely. The average man can easily learn to cook well, read a few books per year, get their chess elo into the top 30%, run a 5k, learn to draw basic portraits, deadlift 400 pounds, and many other things that the average man will never do because they don't want to train for it.

If I said the average man could practice drawing for a few years and end up drawing basic portraits, or study chess or cooking for a few years and end up better than almost anyone they know, this is mostly uncontroversial. When I say the same for strength training, it seems to anger a lot of people for some reason. My experiences tell me that these are comparable levels of goals.

To the original point, seriously, my 102lb wife squats more than 1 plate and she's been training for 4 months.