Strength is highly trainable. Endurance, flexibility but particularly power and speed less so. Benching 225 doesn't require genetics, 95 out of 100 men (if not higher) can attain that with training. Maybe competition style would be more difficult but my wrists and ankles are in the bottom 10 percentile for size and that's after resistance training for nearly two decades. My fast twitch fibre ratio is also poor, while being one of the leaner students in my high school I would only perform slightly better than average in the 100 metre (and our entire year would run it in our school athletics carnivals). Yet I can still touch and go bench 275 naturally.
Judging from my low weight (155-160 pounds), lack of explosiveness (average speed in the 100 despite being leaner than most as well as poor jumping ability) small frame (wrists and ankles smaller than 90 percent of males even though I'm average height), small hands (sculling oar handles in rowing come in three sizes, blue handles for men, yellow for women and pink for schoolgirls, mine were so small even the schoolgirl pink oars were too thick to be optimal, and boy schools only have the blue oars anyway), I suspect at least 9 out of every 10 males can bench 275 pounds touch and go with enough training.
I agree that strength is much more easily improved than speed, clearly. I think you're understating the ability to improve endurance and perhaps flexibility. But one we get to the premise of 95% of people being able to bench 225+ lbs and 90% benching 275lbs in the gym, well then I have to completely disagree. Already basically went over this in a Wilt Chamberlain thread ironically, and this is an old thread...but here is my response:
1. Right off the bat I think you're approaching this from the viewpoint of "I have the worst genetics in the world!" when in reality you are probably close to average and perhaps above average specifically to press. You cite wrist/hand/ankle size but then you're also saying you bench 275 or more. So which is it? Maybe you also have short arms/levers and are built for benching pretty well.
You are benching 275+ at 155-160lbs you say. That is a 1.72x to 1.77x BW bench press. That's definitely not going to be achieved by 90-95% of people, even if they trained semi-seriously for years. If that were the case, and let's split the difference - 1.75x the average US male weight of 190 or 200 lbs = 332 or 350 lbs bench press.
You are framing and implying and directly stating your genetics suck ass. Yet if everyone were simply on your level genetically and benched press (and I think tons of people DO bench press vs something like deadlift or even squat) then everyone would pretty clearly be benching 3 plates, very close to it, or above it. Which leads me into point two...
2. Okay, then why don't I or anyone here walk into a commercial gym in our lifetimes and see TONS of 315lb+ benchers just fucking filling the place up. Why isn't literally everyone sans fresh noobs and women benching 225+?
In reality we do not observe this. Nor do we observe anywhere close to 90%, or even 50% of gym goers being able to bench 275lbs. Or even 250lbs. We definitely don't see anywhere close to 90-95% of dudes benching 2 plates either, what are the odds of that? Maybe like 25-40% can at a given gym? And we're talking of the guys who do bench, because Jimmy Treadmill ain't benching 2-3 plates.
I think you're dramatically overrating what the average male can achieve. And looking back on this old ass post, my point was that you can't compare numbers for speed by using random bums off the street who don't train. I didn't do that here, if I did then I could just use all men who don't train bench. And yes you can improve strength lifts far more than sprint speed or jump...we agree on that
