Raw powerlifting means competing without supportive gear like squat suits, bench shirts, or knee wraps. You wear a singlet, a belt if you want one, and minimal accessories like knee sleeves and wrist wraps. The idea is simple: the weight moves because of your strength, not because specialized equipment is storing and releasing elastic energy to help you through the lift.
This stands in contrast to “equipped” powerlifting, where lifters wear tight, reinforced suits and shirts made from one or more layers of stiff material. Those garments compress against the body and create a spring-like effect at the bottom of a squat or bench press, allowing significantly heavier loads. Raw lifting strips that away.
What You Can and Can’t Wear
Under USPA rules, the raw division allows a non-supportive singlet, a t-shirt, a belt, knee sleeves, wrist wraps, and elbow sleeves. Knee wraps of any length are not permitted. The key word in the rulebook is “non-supportive,” meaning nothing you wear is designed to mechanically assist the lift. Knee sleeves provide warmth and mild compression, but they don’t store energy the way a tightly wound knee wrap does.
USA Powerlifting (the IPF affiliate in the United States) follows similar guidelines. At national-level competitions, every piece of non-supportive equipment, even your singlet and belt, must come from a manufacturer on the IPF Approved List. At local and state meets, the brand doesn’t matter as long as it meets the rulebook’s specifications. This is worth knowing if you’re planning your first meet: check which federation is hosting and look up their approved gear list so you don’t get turned away at equipment check.
Raw vs. Classic Raw vs. Equipped
The terminology gets confusing because federations don’t all use the same labels. In the USPA, “Raw” means knee sleeves only, while “Classic Raw” allows knee wraps up to 2.5 meters long and 8 centimeters wide. A Classic Raw lifter can also choose to wear sleeves instead of wraps if they prefer. The wraps cannot touch the singlet or socks during a lift; there must be visible skin between the wrap and any other garment.
In the IPF system, what most people call “raw” is labeled “Classic.” Equipped divisions use single-ply supportive suits and shirts, plus knee wraps. Some federations also have a multi-ply division, where suits are made from two or more layers of reinforced material for even greater support. If you hear someone say “raw,” they almost always mean no supportive suits and no knee wraps, regardless of which federation they compete in.
How Much Gear Actually Matters
The performance gap between raw and equipped lifting is substantial, especially in the squat and bench press. Research comparing male world records across weight classes found that equipped totals (the combined weight of all three lifts) averaged about 15% higher than raw totals. For the squat alone, equipped competitors averaged 313 kg compared to 247 kg for raw lifters, a difference of roughly 27%.
The bench press shows a similarly large gap, which makes sense: a bench shirt is essentially a stiff slingshot across the chest that helps reverse the bar at the bottom. Interestingly, the deadlift shows no statistically significant difference between raw and equipped world records. A deadlift suit provides some hip support, but because there’s no eccentric (lowering) phase to store energy, the carryover is minimal. The bar starts on the floor, and you simply pull.
How Raw Lifting Changes Technique
Without supportive gear, you rely entirely on muscle to control the weight through its full range of motion. This changes how the lifts look and feel in meaningful ways.
In the squat, raw lifters tend to hit deeper positions more naturally. Equipped squatters sometimes struggle to reach proper depth because their stiff suit resists the descent, which can lead to borderline or shallow squats. Ray Williams’ famous raw squat, performed with only knee sleeves, was noted for plunging well below parallel with no question about depth. That kind of convincing range of motion is more common in raw lifting simply because nothing is fighting against it.
The bench press is where the contrast is starkest. A bench shirt can add over 100 pounds to a lift by assisting the press off the chest. Without one, the lift is a pure test of pressing strength. The bar path, grip width, and how you set your arch all become about maximizing what your muscles can do rather than optimizing how to load a shirt.
For the deadlift, the main practical difference in raw competition is that straps are not allowed. You must hold the bar with your bare hands (chalk is permitted, and most lifters use either a mixed grip or a hook grip). This makes the deadlift a test of both pulling strength and grip strength, and grip often becomes the limiting factor at heavier weights.
Why Raw Became Its Own Division
Powerlifting didn’t always have separate categories for gear. Lifting suits and knee wraps started appearing on platforms in the 1970s, and as the equipment evolved, the gap between a suited lifter and an unequipped one grew too large for them to compete side by side. In 1994, the AAU hosted what’s considered the first raw meet in the United States, allowing competitors to use only a belt. Over the following decades, raw divisions spread across every major federation and eventually became the more popular format. Today, at most local and regional meets, the majority of competitors lift raw.
The appeal is straightforward. Raw lifting has a lower barrier to entry (no expensive suits, no learning curve for gear), and many lifters see it as a more direct test of strength. Equipped lifting remains its own respected discipline with a dedicated community, but if you’re signing up for your first competition, you’re almost certainly entering the raw division.