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The sport of Powelifting has seen substantial growth. This Substack was created to document some key trends or insights in evolution of the sport using data from the Open Powerlifting project.
From 2010 through 2024, we have seen increases in the number of powerlifting meets each year. This does exclude 2010, which was largely the result of covid lockdowns. In the latest full year, 2025, there has been a small decrease in the number of meets. The real question is whether that is an anomaly or if the growth of powerlifting has plateaued.
As the number of meets has seen a surge, the median number of lifters who competed in each powerlifting meet has declined slightly over the past decade. In 2014, there were 65 lifters who competed in a typical meet. By 2025, that has fallen to 42 lifters. This is likely the result of more meets that lifters can compete in, so the size of those meets has dropped.
Thank you for reading this first post.
I will dive much deeper into the data in future posts.
