IPF GL Points Explained: The Formula the IPF Scores You On

You finish a meet, the results go up, and beside your total sits a number that decides who takes Best Lifter. At an IPF-affiliated competition that number is GL points. Not Wilks. Not DOTS. GL, short for GoodLift, and it is the reason a lifter who totalled 40 kg less than you just walked off with the trophy.

Most people have never had IPF GL points explained to them properly, which is understandable, because the IPF’s own documentation is a parameter table and a single line of algebra with no commentary attached. You are left to work out for yourself why the number exists, what it does at 59 kg versus 120 kg, and why the coefficient calculator your training partner uses gives a different answer.

The gap matters more than it sounds. Two lifters can be ranked one way on GL and the opposite way on DOTS, with neither formula being wrong. That is not a rounding artefact. It is the two curves disagreeing about how much a kilogram of bodyweight is worth, and the disagreement gets wider the further you sit from the middle of the range.

This post covers the formula itself, the eight separate parameter sets, a full ranking example worked end to end, and an honest view on which score you should be quoting in which situation.

The short answer

IPF GL points are a bodyweight-adjusted score used by the International Powerlifting Federation to compare lifters across weight classes. Your score is your competition total in kilograms multiplied by a coefficient, where the coefficient equals 100 divided by an exponential curve fitted to bodyweight.

Written out, the coefficient is 100 / (A - B × e^(-C × bodyweight)), with A, B and C read from a published table. There are eight such tables: men and women, classic and equipped, three-lift total and bench-only. The curve rises steeply through the light classes, flattens through the middle, and approaches a ceiling of A at very heavy bodyweights, so the coefficient never behaves erratically the way a polynomial can once you push past the data it was fitted on.

GL replaced the older IPF Points formula in 2020. Roughly 100 points corresponds to a performance at record standard for that combination of sex, kit and discipline.

What GoodLift points actually are, and where they came from

The IPF used Wilks for a long time. In 2019 it switched to a formula generally called IPF Points, which worked on a different principle: it scored you as a standard-deviation distance above a modelled mean total for your bodyweight, with 500 as the anchor. The complaint about it was immediate and fairly reasonable. The scores were bunched, hard to interpret intuitively, and behaved oddly for outlier performances because the model’s spread parameter was doing a lot of quiet work.

GL points arrived in 2020 and threw out that structure. Instead of measuring distance from a mean, GL scales your total against a fitted upper envelope of what has been achieved at your bodyweight. The name comes from GoodLift, the IPF’s results platform, and you will see the score written as GL points, GoodLift points, or just GL on a scoresheet.

The change was not cosmetic. A distance-from-mean score and a fraction-of-record score reward different things, and they compress or stretch different parts of the range. If your GL number looks nothing like the IPF Points number you were quoted in 2019, that is why.

The formula, and why the shape matters

Here is the whole thing:

GL points = Total (kg) × 100 / (A - B × e^(-C × Bodyweight (kg)))

Everything is in kilograms. If you feed it pounds you get nonsense, not a converted answer, which is a good reason to run your numbers through a unit converter before you start rather than after you have published a ranking.

Reading the three parameters

The denominator is the part doing the work, and each parameter has a plain meaning.

A is the ceiling. As bodyweight climbs, the exponential term shrinks towards zero and the denominator approaches A. For men’s classic total, A is roughly 1200, which says the model expects the very best possible three-lift total to approach around 1200 kg no matter how heavy a lifter gets. That is a real modelling claim, and it is why GL stops rewarding extra bodyweight past a certain point instead of quietly punishing it.

B sets how far below the ceiling the curve starts. At a bodyweight of zero the denominator would be A minus B, which for men’s classic is about 175. Meaningless as a lifter, useful as a curve anchor.

C controls how quickly you climb from the bottom of the curve to the ceiling. Larger C means the advantage of extra bodyweight is used up faster. The women’s classic parameter set has a C roughly three times the men’s, which is not an arbitrary difference: it reflects that the women’s competitive bodyweight range is narrower and the curve has to do its work over fewer kilograms.

The practical consequence of an exponential shape is that GL degrades gracefully. Polynomial scores like Wilks and DOTS were fitted on the bodyweight range where data existed, and a fourth or fifth-order polynomial evaluated outside its fitted range can do genuinely strange things. An exponential with a positive ceiling cannot. Whether that theoretical tidiness matters to you depends entirely on whether you compete at 165 kg.

The eight parameter sets almost nobody checks

This is the detail that produces most of the wrong numbers on the internet. GL is not one formula. It is eight, and picking the wrong one does not give you a slightly-off answer, it gives you a meaningless one.

Two warnings on that table. First, the IPF has revised scoring parameters before and can do so again, so if you are computing scores that anyone will act on, pull the current values from the IPF’s published technical documentation rather than trusting any third-party table, including this one. Second, note there is no deadlift-only set, because the IPF does not run deadlift-only competition. Classic powerlifting, equipped powerlifting, classic bench press and equipped bench press are the four disciplines, and each sex has its own parameters within them.

The most common error I see is an equipped total scored on classic parameters. Because the equipped denominators are larger in the region where they matter, using the wrong set does not just shift the score, it flatters or crushes lifters inconsistently across the bodyweight range.

A worked example: two lifters, two rankings

Say two men lift at the same national qualifier, both classic, both making all nine attempts.

Gareth weighs in at 59.0 kg and totals 532.5 kg: a 197.5 squat, a 122.5 bench and a 212.5 deadlift.

Ryan weighs in at 93.0 kg and totals 705.0 kg: a 265 squat, a 165 bench and a 275 deadlift.

Start with GL, using the men’s classic total parameters.

For Gareth, the exponent is 0.00921 × 59 = 0.54339. Raising e to the negative of that gives 0.58077. Multiply by B: 0.58077 × 1025.18162 = 595.40. Subtract from A: 1199.72839 − 595.40 = 604.33. His coefficient is 100 / 604.33 = 0.16547. His GL score is 532.5 × 0.16547 = 88.11.

For Ryan, the exponent is 0.00921 × 93 = 0.85653, and e to the negative of that is 0.42463. Multiply by B: 0.42463 × 1025.18162 = 435.32. Subtract from A: 1199.72839 − 435.32 = 764.41. Coefficient is 100 / 764.41 = 0.13082. GL score is 705.0 × 0.13082 = 92.23.

Ryan wins Best Lifter by just over four points. Comfortable, not dramatic.

Now run the same two lifters through DOTS, which uses a fourth-order polynomial in bodyweight. Gareth’s DOTS denominator works out to 584.20, giving 532.5 × 500 / 584.20 = 455.75. Ryan’s denominator is 785.85, giving 705.0 × 500 / 785.85 = 448.55.

Gareth wins. Same two performances, same two bodyweights, opposite result. Nobody made a mistake.

The reason is visible if you divide one coefficient by the other across the range:

Men’s classic figures, computed from the published parameters for both formulas.

Read the right-hand column as a shape, not a set of values. It dips to a minimum somewhere around 90 to 95 kg and rises at both ends. In plain terms: relative to GL, DOTS is kinder to very light and very heavy men and slightly harsher on the middleweights. The spread across the whole range is about six percent, which sounds small until you notice that Best Lifter at a well-attended regional meet is frequently decided by less than two.

Here is where it gets more interesting. Run the same exercise on the women’s parameter sets and the pattern does not simply mirror across. At 47 kg the ratio comes out around 4.73, at 63 kg around 4.92, and at 84 kg around 4.87. The very light end is where DOTS is comparatively harshest for women, which is the opposite of the men’s picture. The two formulas do not just disagree about how much bodyweight is worth. They disagree differently depending on which parameter set you are in.

Why an IPF meet and a USPA meet can rank the same lifters differently

None of this would matter if everyone used one score. They do not, and I would argue they never will, because the choice is partly political and partly about who owns the intellectual work behind the formula.

IPF-affiliated meets score on GL. Several federations outside the IPF orbit, USPA among them, moved to DOTS. Others kept Wilks, or use Wilks 2, or let the meet director configure the scoring software. National federations also join and leave international bodies, and the relationship between some large national organisations and the IPF changed during the early 2020s, which means the answer to “which formula does my federation use” genuinely depends on the year as well as the federation.

Do not take a rule of thumb from a forum post. Open your federation’s current rulebook, find the section on Best Lifter and awards, and read what it names. If the rulebook is silent, ask the meet director before you enter, because it changes how you should think about which class to compete in. That decision has its own arithmetic, which we work through in choosing a powerlifting weight class.

GL, DOTS and Wilks side by side

One row deserves a caveat. The claim that Wilks systematically favoured light lifters is repeated constantly, and it is more contested than the confidence of the average forum post suggests. Different analyses using different result databases have reached different conclusions about the size and even the direction of the bias in some bodyweight bands. What is not contested is that Wilks was fitted on data from the early 1990s and that raw powerlifting has changed enormously since. The full timeline of who changed what and when is covered in Wilks, Wilks 2, DOTS and GL.

When to quote GL and when DOTS makes more sense

Quote GL when the context is IPF. If you are chasing a national team slot, comparing yourself to results from an IPF World or European championship, or working out what you need to hit at your next IPF-affiliated qualifier, GL is the currency and everything else is a translation.

Quote DOTS when the context is everything else. It is the score most non-IPF federations and most online databases run on, it has one parameter set per sex so nobody can pick the wrong table, and it is what your training partners are almost certainly using. If you want a number to check your own progress against over a two-year training block, DOTS is the more portable one, and you can run any total through the DOTS Calculator in a few seconds. Everything happens in your browser, so nothing about your bodyweight or your numbers leaves your device, which some lifters care about more than others and I think reasonably.

Quote both when you are arguing about who is better pound for pound. Honestly, the answer there is: it depends on which formula you pick, and if the two disagree then the honest conclusion is that the two lifters are close enough that the question has no clean answer.

The one thing I would push back on hard is switching scores to make yourself look better. Pick the score that matches your federation, track it, and stop shopping. A lifter who quotes their Wilks in January, their DOTS in June and their GL in November is not measuring anything.

How to calculate your GL points by hand

You will not need to do this often, but doing it once makes the formula stick.

1. Get both numbers in kilograms. Your official weigh-in bodyweight, not your walk-around weight, and your competition total, not a gym PR. If your federation weighs in pounds, convert first and keep two decimal places.
2. Pick your parameter row: sex, then classic or equipped, then total or bench-only. Write down A, B and C before you touch a calculator.
3. Multiply C by your bodyweight. For a 93.0 kg man in classic: 0.00921 × 93.0 = 0.85653.
4. Raise e to the negative of that. On most calculators this is the e^x key with a minus sign: e^(−0.85653) = 0.42463.
5. Multiply by B: 0.42463 × 1025.18162 = 435.32.
6. Subtract from A: 1199.72839 − 435.32 = 764.41. That is your denominator.
7. Divide 100 by that denominator: 100 / 764.41 = 0.13082. That is your coefficient.
8. Multiply by your total: 705.0 × 0.13082 = 92.23 GL points.

If you want to know what a given GL target demands of your total, reverse step 8: divide the target by the coefficient. A lifter at 93 kg needing 95 GL points needs 95 / 0.13082 = 726.2 kg, so 727.5 on the board. That is the kind of number worth having before you sit down with the Powerlifting Attempt Planner and start sketching openers.

Where people go wrong with this

Weighing in heavier than you planned. Your coefficient is set at the scale, not in the warm-up room. A lifter who intended to weigh 82.9 and weighs 83.4 has already given away a fraction of a point before touching a bar. It is small. It is also free to avoid.

Mixing units is the more embarrassing failure. A total entered in pounds against a bodyweight in kilograms produces a score roughly 2.2 times too high, and it looks plausible enough at a glance that people publish it.

Using a coefficient table for the wrong year is subtler and harder to catch. Scoring parameters get revised, spreadsheets get copied, and a coefficient from an old workbook produces a number that is off by a small amount consistently, which is exactly the kind of error nobody notices until two results disagree.

There is also the trap of comparing across disciplines. A 95-point bench-only score and a 95-point full-power score are both excellent, and they are not the same achievement in any sense that lets you rank one above the other. The bench parameters are calibrated so that a record-standard bench also lands near 100. That is the whole point of separate parameter sets, and it also means the scores are not interchangeable.

Last one, and it is the one that actually costs people placings: forgetting that a bombed lift means no total, and no total means no coefficient score at all. Nine attempts, three lifts, and a single missed opener on the squat wipes out your entire day on the ranking sheet regardless of how good your bench was. Reading a results sheet properly, including what happens to a bomb-out, is covered in how to read a powerlifting results sheet.

A note on rules changing

Scoring formulas, bodyweight classes and Best Lifter criteria all sit in federation rulebooks, and rulebooks get amended between seasons. The IPF has changed its scoring approach twice in recent memory. Weight class structures have been revised. Whether Best Lifter at your meet is decided on GL, DOTS or Wilks is a decision your federation makes and can unmake.

Treat everything here as a description of the mainstream position at the time of writing, and check the current rulebook that governs the meet you have actually entered. If you are unsure which document that is, the meet’s entry page will name the sanctioning body, and that body publishes its technical rules openly.

Frequently asked questions

What are IPF GL points?

IPF GL points, short for GoodLift points, are the coefficient score the International Powerlifting Federation uses to compare lifters of different bodyweights. Your total in kilograms is multiplied by a factor derived from your bodyweight, sex, kit category and discipline. The parameters are fitted so that a performance at record standard lands near 100 points.

Are IPF GL points the same as DOTS?

No. They are different formulas with different shapes. DOTS uses a fourth-order polynomial and a single parameter set per sex covering the raw three-lift total. GL uses a fitted exponential curve and has eight parameter sets, splitting classic from equipped and the full total from bench-only. The two can and regularly do rank the same lifters differently, particularly when one lifter is very light and the other is close to the middle of the range.

What is a good GL score in powerlifting?

As a rough reading rather than an official band, a first competitive meet often lands somewhere in the 40s or 50s, a strong regional lifter sits in the 70s, and national-level competitors are usually above 85. Scores at or above 100 are around record standard for that sex, kit and discipline. Treat these as orientation, not thresholds.

Why did the IPF stop using Wilks?

The IPF moved off Wilks for the 2019 season, first to a formula known as IPF Points and then to GL points in 2020. The stated reasoning was that Wilks was fitted on older data that no longer matched modern results, and that a single parameter set could not fairly cover both raw and equipped lifting. Whether the replacement is fairer is still argued about.

Do GL points use different formulas for equipped lifting?

Yes, and this is the detail most people miss. GL publishes separate parameters for classic and equipped, and separate parameters again for the three-lift total and bench-only competition. Scoring an equipped total against classic parameters produces a badly inflated number that means nothing. Check which of the eight rows applies before you compute anything.

Can I compare my GL points to a bench-only lifter’s GL points?

Not meaningfully. Bench-only GL uses its own parameter set, calibrated so that a record-standard bench also scores near 100. A 95-point bench-only score and a 95-point full-power score both describe elite performance in their own discipline, but they are not the same achievement and cannot be ranked against each other in any defensible way.

The practical upshot

If you compete under the IPF, GL is your number, and the useful thing to do with it is work backwards. Pick the score you want, divide by your coefficient, and you have a total to aim at. That total then drives your openers, your third attempts and how honest you are being with yourself about your bench.

If you compete anywhere else, DOTS is the more practical score to live with, and the DOTS Calculator will give it to you faster than looking up a table. Keep an eye on the Wilks Calculator too, since plenty of older results and gym conversations are still denominated in Wilks and you will need the translation.

Whichever you choose, choose once. The score is only useful as a time series.