It’s absolutely no secret that participation the sport of powerlifting has grown over the last few decades. But I needed a nice easy visualisation to start off with, so here we are.
Let’s start with the growth of powerlifting from the start of the open powerlifting database in 1966. Open Powerlifting is the most comprehensive powerlifting database in existence, and the team over there is doing amazing work.
The chart in this post uses meet data from the IPF and affiliates only. Mostly because it’s a smaller dataset and which is a bit easier (faster) for me to work with at this time. All meet types are included though (Bench and SBD mostly).
Region is not a field in the open powerlifting database, I have used the country and region mapping from the UN
From the turn of the century we see enormous growth in powerlifting meet participation, particularly in Europe and the Americas, with a five- and three-fold increase respectively up until 2020. Post-covid, participation has recovered well in Europe, Asia and Oceania. Participation in Africa by the end of 2023 is above pre-covid levels.
Also worth noting is the significant drop in participation in the Americas in the 1980s. My best explanation for that is not that the sport stopped growing there, but because there was more diversification in powerlifting federations around that time. However, feel free to reach out if you can add more insight to that observation.
In the next articles, I will explore the demographics of powerlifting, focusing on age and gender.