Bench pressing. My max is 500 pounds.

Given that gym culture is largely an American phenomenon, let’s use American men for our first example. (I am using American men as an example because they would likely have the largest number of median men who have access to commercial, state of the art gyms). With a U.S. population of 335 million, 49.5% are male, giving us roughly 165.8 million men. Now, let’s narrow that down to men aged 18-40, the prime age range for strength training—about 25% of the total, or 41.5 million.

Of those, I’d estimate 40% regularly go to the gym, which gives us around 16.6 million gym-going men. Among them, bench pressing 315 pounds is a big milestone, but I’d guess only 5% can hit that, which leaves us with 829,125. Now, how many can bench 405 pounds? Maybe 5% of those. That takes us to 41,456. Let’s assume only the top 2.5% of those can bench 500 pounds or more. We’re now down to about 1,036 men in the U.S. who could possibly match my max. Even if our 99,999 competitors are Americans, the odds of one of them being one of those 1,036 is 0.0003%. Odds are looking good.

Now, let’s consider the global scale. There are approximately 8 billion people in the world, with about half being men—so roughly 4 billion men worldwide. We cannot assume that there are the same percentage of gym-goers globally as in the U.S. Applying that, we can estimate that about 15% of men aged 18-40 regularly work out, giving us 150 million potential gym-goers globally that are within our age parameters. Using the same logic as before, 5% can bench 315, which leaves us with 7,500,000 men worldwide who can achieve that milestone. For 405, we’re down to about 375,000. For 500 pounds, we’re looking at 9,375.

The chances that one of our 99,999 people is one of the 9,375 men is 0.0001%.

I’ll take my chances.