Sam Strong

Math 2040-001
Term Project
Is Max Bench Weight Related to Height?
I enjoy working out a lot. I work out every day; I even work at Planet Fitness. In all my
time at work or working out, I meet a lot of different people of all heights, strengths and body
types. This is what sparked my interest for this project. As I was meeting all of these different
people I wondered if there was a relationship between height and strength. There are many
different muscle groups in which one can be strong, for this research I chose one muscle group,
the chest. Again there are many different exercises that strengthen the chest, so I chose one
exercise, the bench press. The bench press is a common exercise that most people have at least
heard about. One last thing I did to control the research is I collected all the data from males. So
after laying down all of the criteria, I finally was able to make a defined research question, which
is as follows: Is max bench weight related to height in males?
In order to collect this data I simply talked to people at Planet Fitness as I was working or
working out, I would ask people at school as well, in the hopes to get a sample that would most
accurately represent the entire population. I was able to talk to and get data from 33 different
people. The data is shown below.

Using this data I was able to calculate statistics for both of my variables, height in males
and max bench weight of males. Taking a look at the
stats for the height in males to the right, we can see my
sample had a minimum height of 66 inches, and a max
height of 76 inches. The histogram to the right also
shows the distribution of height in males. To help see
the distribution a little better, I also created a boxplot,
below, to represent the data. By
looking at the histogram it seems
as if the data is approximately
normally distributed. And by
looking at the box plot we can tell
that the distribution for the height
in males is approximately normal,
and by using 1.5x the inner
quartile range (which is 3 x 1.5 =
4.5) we can see that there are no
apparent outliers. It is centered on
a mean of 70.73 inches and is
distributed with a standard deviation of 2.44 inches.
Now to look at the stats for the max bench weight in males. Below we can see my
sample had a minimum bench weight of 90 pounds, and a max bench weight of 410 pounds. The
histogram shown below illustrates the distribution of the max bench weight in males, and it

appears that it is skewed to the right.

Also using the box plot we can see that
the inner quarile range is 65, using that
multiplied by 1.5 we can find the
outliers the lower fence is 82.5, so there
are no outlier in this direction. The
upper fence is 342.5, this shows two
outliers one at
385, and another
at 410. These
two outliers are
contrbuting to the skewedness of the distribution.

Comparing the two variables together a scatterplot is created. It is shown below. This
scatterplot helps to express the relationship between height and max bench weight in males,
which was the purpose all
along. From my sample data
there was a linear coeficient
of determination
R2=0.0235 which would
give us a correlation
coeficient of

R=0.1533 . The equation for the line of regression is

y=4.2462 x+ 513.2

. The critical value for correlation for a sample like mine is .349, in this case

|-

0.1533| = 0.1533 < 0.349. There is not a strong enough relationship between height and max
bench wieght.
My original question was, Is max bench weight related to height?, and in the back of
my head I was thinking that as height went up max bench weight would go down. From my
sample however I found that there was not a strong enough correlation to suggest that as height
in males increases that their maximum bench press weight would decrease. I think if the two
outliers from the max bench weight, 385 & 410 were not present in my sample that the
corellation would be a lot stronger, but at the same time because they are present in my sample I
feel that it more accurately represents the population.