What are Intensity Points?

Brawn aims to normalise the gym experience for everyone. Intensity Points allow you to compare people with different ages, body shapes, and gender.

What are they?

Intensity Points are a unique scoring system for strength training which measures

 relative strength performance. It provides a robust and useful metric for lifters of all kinds to monitor progress throughout their fitness journey. By calculating a universal score for each workout set, the performance of lifters from heavyweight males to lightweight females can be compared, allowing for our community t

o compete in challenges and leaderboards. 

Intensity Points has been developed by learning from industry-standard scoring methods such as Wilks, Glossbrenner, Reshel, and IPF points. We have validated Intensity Points with the results of various studies and other strength-scoring systems used in the sport of Powerlifting. 

How does it work?

It considers the lift you did, the weight you moved, and the reps you performed. It is then compared against what we expect people like you to lift, to provide a score for your set. Your workout score is calculated by adding all the set scores together. 

When we say people like you, we mean people who have the same attributes as you. We use a number of attributes, such as gender and body weight. We do this so that the scores achieved by people of all shapes and sizes can be compared fairly. It is a score based on relative strength. This allows the performances of everyone to be compared with each other without the need for weight, gender, and age categories - it is one level playing field. Lighter lifters can equally score the same or better scores as heavier lifters.

This is what your scores say about your performance:

How can I use it?

You can use Intensity Points to see how a lift is improving over time, the greater the score, the stronger you are becoming.

The scoring system balances out lifts, so it is possible to achieve the same score on a typically heavy lift, such as a deadlift, and a typically light lift, such as a shoulder press. That means you can also use Intensity Points to identify where your strengths and weaknesses are to achieve a balance of strength across your body. If you are scoring higher on your bicep curls than your leg curls, then it is likely that your biceps are proportionally stronger than your legs, and you may benefit from focusing on improving the strength in your lower body.

You can also do this to identify moves that work better for you. Perhaps you get higher scores on your dumbbell bench versus your barbell bench, and so for the sake of progress, you may want to swap out the barbell for the dumbbells.

The other comparison you can make is against other people. If two or more people do the same workout with the same number of sets, then the scores at the end can be compared to see who is relatively stronger. This can provide significant motivation to people to increase their scores and climb the leaderboard.

How can I improve it?

Your score for a set will increase if you lift heavier weights than last time. It will also increase if you do more reps. The impact of reps on your score is calculated on a sliding scale, which means your score will improve if you do more reps but each additional rep is worth less points than the one before it, for example, doing 1 more rep might increase your score by 10, but doing 2 more reps might only increase your score by 15 and not 20 (2 x 10). 

You can increase your workout score by increasing the weight and/or reps in your sets, as well as adding additional sets to your workout.

Hope this helps!