Wilks and DOTS calculator · powerlifting

Wilks and DOTS score, with the math shown

Both scores land side by side as co-equals, never one without the other. Open the math and watch each formula worked all the way through with your own bodyweight and total plugged in.

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Sex (sets the coefficient set)

Bodyweight

Entry mode

Competition total

Wilks

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Original Wilks coefficients

DOTS

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Official DOTS (2019)

Enter your sex, bodyweight, and total to see both formulas worked with your own numbers.

Coefficients: the original Wilks formula by Robert Wilks (Powerlifting Australia), not the separate 2020 Wilks Formula 2; DOTS from the official 2019 release.

Wilks

The original Wilks formula, written by Robert Wilks of Powerlifting Australia in the mid-1990s. Coefflift uses its sex-specific fifth-order bodyweight polynomial, with the total scaled by 500. This is not Wilks Formula 2, a separate formula released in February 2020 that uses different coefficients and scales by 600. Vanderburgh & Batterham later tested this original formula in Validation of the Wilks Powerlifting Formula, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 31(12) (1999). That paper checked the formula. It didn't write these coefficients.

DOTS

The official 2019 DOTS coefficient release, adopted by several federations as the modern replacement for Wilks. Coefflift uses its sex-specific fourth-order bodyweight polynomial.

Wilks and DOTS reference: coefficient sets, multipliers by bodyweight, crossover points

Every relative-strength score reduces to one number per system: the multiplier, which is 500 divided by the bodyweight polynomial. Look it up once at your bodyweight and every future total is a single multiplication, no polynomial required. What follows is the lookup material behind that number: the four coefficient sets exactly as they ship, the multipliers they produce across the plausible bodyweight range, and the bodyweights where the two systems swap which one reads higher.

Coefficient sets

All four sets in ascending power order, so the row number is the exponent. These are the shipped constants: the original Wilks formula from Robert Wilks (Powerlifting Australia) and the official 2019 release for DOTS. The trailing digits matter and are printed unrounded.

n	Term	Wilks male	Wilks female	DOTS male	DOTS female
0	constant	−216.0475144	594.31747775582	−307.75076	−57.96288
1	bw	16.2606339	−27.23842536447	24.0900756	13.6175032
2	bw²	−0.002388645	0.82112226871	−0.1918759221	−0.1126655495
3	bw³	−0.00113732	−0.00930733913	0.0007391293	0.0005158568
4	bw⁴	7.01863 × 10⁻⁶	4.731582 × 10⁻⁵	−0.000001093	−0.0000010706
5	bw⁵	−1.291 × 10⁻⁸	−9.054 × 10⁻⁸	no term	no term

Wilks runs all the way out to bw⁵. DOTS is a quartic and stops one term short. The female Wilks set is the odd one out twice over: it's the only set of the four opening on a positive constant, and the only one with a negative bw term.

Multipliers by bodyweight

Score equals total times the multiplier for your sex and bodyweight. Multipliers are unit-free: apply them to a total in kg to get a score, and the pounds column is only there for finding your row.

Bodyweight (kg)	(lb)	Wilks male	DOTS male	Wilks female	DOTS female
50	110.2	1.0232	0.9948	1.2846	1.2530
55	121.3	0.9267	0.9095	1.1933	1.1731
60	132.3	0.8529	0.8440	1.1149	1.1085
65	143.3	0.7952	0.7925	1.0491	1.0555
70	154.3	0.7494	0.7512	0.9948	1.0113
75	165.3	0.7126	0.7174	0.9506	0.9740
80	176.4	0.6827	0.6895	0.9150	0.9422
85	187.4	0.6583	0.6663	0.8866	0.9150
90	198.4	0.6384	0.6466	0.8641	0.8915
95	209.4	0.6220	0.6299	0.8464	0.8711
100	220.5	0.6086	0.6155	0.8326	0.8533
110	242.5	0.5885	0.5923	0.8131	0.8243
120	264.6	0.5749	0.5743	0.7997	0.8024
130	286.6	0.5656	0.5599	0.7883	0.7864
140	308.6	0.5588	0.5480	0.7776	0.7758

Worked check against the fixture: a 90 kg male multiplier of 0.6384 on a 600 kg total gives 383.0 Wilks, and 0.6466 gives 388.0 DOTS. Multipliers are rounded to four places for lookup, so a score rebuilt from this column can sit a tenth off the tool's full-precision answer.

Where Wilks and DOTS trade places

Neither system is uniformly higher. Each band below is bounded by a genuine crossover where the two multipliers are equal; the gap is quoted as a percentage of the Wilks score, which makes it independent of the total.

Bodyweight band	Higher score	Gap at the band's extreme
Male, below 67.9 kg	Wilks	2.8% at 50 kg
Male, 67.9 to 118.8 kg	DOTS	1.3% at 91.3 kg
Male, above 118.8 kg	Wilks	1.9% at 140 kg
Female, below 62.4 kg	Wilks	2.5% at 50 kg
Female, 62.4 to 124.6 kg	DOTS	3.2% at 86.8 kg
Female, above 124.6 kg	Wilks	0.2% at 130 kg

The pattern is the same for both sexes and inverts twice: DOTS reads low at the light end, high through the middle, low again at the heavy end. The middle band is where the two systems disagree most in the female sets, peaking at 3.2%, roughly two and a half times the male peak of 1.3%. Anywhere near a crossover the choice of system is worth less than a rounding decision, which is why a lifter at 68 kg gets effectively the same answer twice.

Quintic versus quartic fit. Why dropping the bw⁵ term was a modeling choice for DOTS rather than a simplification.
Curve fitting on competition data. How both coefficient sets were regressed against meet results, and why sample thinness at the tails drives the accuracy complaint.
Unit invariance. Converting to kg before the polynomial rather than after, so a kg/lb toggle never moves the score.
Domain of validity. The bodyweight range where the denominator stays positive and the score stays meaningful.
Sex-specific coefficient sets. Why relative-strength scoring fits two curves instead of applying one curve with an offset.