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This was posted awhile ago on another forum.
quote: I Just thought this could have a little light hearted topic,maybe it's not so lighted hearted.
This thread is about men vs women in strength and would the average women ever become has strong has the average man in the future? or they becoming that way now.
Too many movies and shows seem to screw with some folks heads like salt and other recent movies.
Men vs Women - Lower Body Strength? Myth: Women are not strong enough to do heavy labor. Reality: The strength requirements for nontraditional jobs are often exaggerated. Many nontraditional jobs are less physically demanding than housework, and many traditional women's jobs, such as nursing and waitressing, are just as physically demanding as some nontraditional jobs. Moreover, the Occupation Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires that special equipment be provided for every heavy job regardless of whether they are being done by men or women. In addition, mechanization continues to decrease the level of physical demand of many jobs. Finally, while the average man is stronger than the average woman, some women are stronger than some men. Women have excellent lower-body strength and with training can develop strong upper-body muscles as well.
here are some comments i posted here.for more click below hulk55 is on a distinguished road Has anyone noticed that there are state wrestling champions who are girls in boys divisions? Has anyone noticed how women are winning more and more titles and matches than men? We men have to face the truth. Women are just getting stronger and soon enough they be even stronger than us men.
Wrestling isn't all about strength. Techinques and agility and conditioning play a major part. I think the most determined wrestler is going to win. You also have to remember there are weight-classes. In wrestling, you never wrestle someone significantly bigger than you except in heavyweight. I think whatever you're talking about is bunk. But I still think women can compete with men. They just have to use different advantages. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, it's all a matter of who exploits who. And if average joe runs 4 miles a week and practices twice a week, I am sure super-woman who runs 4 miles a day and practices twice a day could whoop him.
Myth Busters: Women and Upper-Body Strength This entry is a follow-up/sister post to the one I guest-wrote on The Capoeira Blog, “6 Keys to Building Upper-Body Strength“.
So, I have a confession to make. Originally, the guest post I wrote for Faisca wasn’t supposed to be a general guide to building upper-body strength. Originally, it was going to be something with a title like ”Upper-Body Strength-Building for Women”. It was my idea, but it wasn’t until I actually started working on the post that I realized something like that would actually go against everything I’ve/this blog has been standing for! Mandingueira is not for women; it is about women, and for everyone.
The reason I changed my mind is because to write an article about “strength-building for women” would imply that it is separate from the same for men; yet a strong woman would need the same level of advice as a strong man, regardless of her gender. By the end of my first draft, however, I realized that my post read more like a beginner’s guide to strength-building—but all my information had come from purported “women’s guides” to strength-building! Is anyone else seeing a pattern here?
Abada capoeirista shows how it's done!There was one thing in particular that nearly every article I came across had in common: “Women generally have far less upper-body strength than men.”
“Typically women do not have strong upper bodies.”
“These statistics merely illustrate what everyone knows, that women naturally develop less strength than men.”
“In terms of inherent upper body strength, we really are the weaker sex.”
“Most women have trouble performing a standard push-up.” (And adding insult to injury: “To perform a modified push up, simply push up from your knees. Most women can perform a push-up in this position.” Really, now?? Some of us actually CAN do knee push-ups?!? That’s AMAZING!!)
Wow, I feel weaker already. Kind of ironic, considering all these articles purported to help you build your strength, not doubt it!
The age-old myth of women having less muscular strength than men do is just that—a myth. This excerpt from Shameless Magazine puts it best:
Many people believe that all men, as some sort of single unit, are stronger than women. And reason says that simply isn’t true. Men’s strength is just as variable as women’s. Men, on average, are bigger than women, with a higher lean body mass-to-fat ratio. But women generate the same force per unit of muscle as men. That is, muscle pound to muscle pound, women and men are similar in strength. A strong woman is strong, full stop. (emphasis mine)
This observation was confirmed by a study from the US National Strength and Conditioning Foundation, which adds that although women and men have the same muscle strength, the reason many men appear stronger on the surface is because they have more muscle mass from being bigger (as opposed to muscle strength), have a higher lean body mass-to-fat ratio, and have different fat distribution in the body than women do.
Wait a minute (I can hear someone say), aren’t we just picking nits now? What does it matter if technically women’s muscles produce the same amount of power, if due to the other factors mentioned above, a woman’s body altogether still produces less power, on average, than a man’s body altogether? And if this is true, what’s wrong with saying so?
First, this distinction is important to make because it’s actually a pretty big one, with implications and consequences depending on whether one makes it or not. Stating without qualification that women have less strength than men, period, is inaccurate and suggests that this is an inherent trait in women, something that can’t be changed. As mentioned though, women’s muscles have the exact same strength as men do, and it is in fat distribution and lean body mass where they differ—factors which are variable and can be changed through training or exercise.
Moreover, even though muscle mass is cited as a contributing factor of men’s strength, the same studies have shown that women build strength the same way men do yet without building as much muscle mass—which is interesting, because if both men and women build strength equally, but only men’s muscles build much mass to go with it, to me that suggests that in the end, women’s muscles would actually have more power per inch/pound than men’s, to do the calculations! And as Shameless said, if a strong woman were matched with a man with less muscle (or lesser built muscles), more fat, and less lean body mass, she would in that case definitely not be “the weaker sex”.
Second, making this distinction is important because it affects how people approach this and related topics, and this ties in to the last question above. There is nothing wrong with explaining why many women have less net strength output than many men. After all, a fact is a fact, right? The problem arises when people start making unqualified statements like the ones at the beginning of this post, and making them frequently and thoughtlessly. Although clearly I was kidding when I said “I feel weaker already”, can you imagine what the effects of reading or hearing statements like that over and over again would be on someone’s mindset, whether consciously or subconsciously?
If you imagined the logical, you’re right: other studies have shown that women significantly underestimate their own strength, compared to men. Because we’re told we’re weaker, we think we have even less strength than we have to begin with. This affects everything from whether or not a woman will reach her full potential while weight training, to whether or not she’ll choose to fight off a man who attacks her in the street, or just “let it happen” because to fight back would make it worse (according to another disastrous, popular myth).
It’s all woven into one more narrative about what women are or aren’t or should be or shouldn’t be, whether it’s a young Mestra Edna’s relatives telling her “martial arts aren’t for girls”, or today’s average female capoeira student only able to find articles reiterating how weak she is compared to all the male capoeira students in her class—which may be true, but also just as well may not, and who’s the article’s author to say? So mulhers é meninas, remember this the next time you aim for that macaco/s-dobrado/bananeira/cool upper-body strength-requiring move!
Strength Strength is clearly more influenced by culture than is height. Most US 18-year-old boys have spent far more time than girls in rough-and-tumble play, vigorous sports, and other activities which use and stimulate the development of strength. Their female counterparts have had much less strength-promoting activity, and this was more true of the sample of US 18-year-olds measured in 1982 (see below) than it is today, thanks to girls’ sports.
Furthermore, different kinds of physical strength show different gender patterns. Women are constitutionally stronger than men – they live longer and are more resilient against fatigue, illness, famine, childbirth (!), and so forth. “Anyone who has observed women of Africa on lengthy treks carrying heavy loads of firewood and water cannot help seeing how arbitrary our indicators of strength are.”64
Data on strength are available from the US military – not an ideal sample, but similar to the general population in height. A 1982 report rates five areas of strength and gives male soldiers’ strength relative to females as follows: upper-body, 72 percent higher; leg extensor, 54 percent; trunk flexor, 47 percent; lean body mass, 33 percent; and aerobic capacity, 28 percent. Upper-body strength, the area of greatest gender difference, is emphasized in military training. Field exercises in which troops march sustained distances carrying heavy packs seem to be a key point at which men rate women as inferior. One West Point colonel said, “The women just drop.” On the other hand, sometimes women can use their bodies in different ways than men to achieve the same result.65
Lifting capacity shows the greatest gender disparity – probably in part because far more young men than women in US culture in 1982 engaged in weight training. The 1982 data indicate an average lifting capacity for women soldiers of 66 pounds, versus 119 for men (80 percent higher). The difference in lifting capacity is especially critical at around 100–120 pounds. An Air Force test for lifting 110 pounds was passed by 68 percent of men and 1 percent of women. I do not know how important lifting capacity is in the range of capabilities that enhance combat effectiveness, but it does resonate with the clincher line of the retired colonel’s argument quoted above (p. 159), that a weakling woman would be unable to save her wounded comrade’s life in battle by dragging him away. Thus, the 80 percent difference here seems far more likely than the 8 percent difference in height to explain why so few women participate in combat.66
Actually, however, the key question is not the difference in gender averages, but rather how much the bell-curves overlap. Figure 3.10 shows the data on lifting capability from the US military data. The curves indeed overlap less than for height, but not much less – still more than 10 percent of the military women have greater lifting capacity than the lowest 10 percent of men. Recall that these data are not biological givens but reflect the influence of a culture where men try to grow up big and strong, girls thin and pretty (back in 1982). Remember, too, that lifting capacity (part of upper-body strength) is the area of greatest gender difference among all the kinds of strength that go into combat (running, enduring fatigue, etc.). Thus, even the most pronounced gender differences regarding height and strength alike appear to show a nontrivial overlap of bell-curves, albeit nowhere near gender equality.
Figure 3.10 Lifting capacity by gender, US soldiers, 1982. Speed and endurance In addition to being large and strong, combat soldiers travel long distances on foot, sometimes at high speed. This requires running speed and endurance. It is an especially significant capability because of claims that it was important in our evolutionary past. (Some scholars see the human body as especially adapted to running over open terrain, in the context of long-distance hunting on the African plains. This capability would thus be quite primordial in the evolution of war. Evidence on this question is disputed, however.)67
In speed, as in size or strength, men score above women on average but men’s and women’s bell-curves overlap. I calculated the curves for the 1997 New York Marathon, which had posted on the Internet the rank and time of each of 30,427 people to finish the race (nearly three-quarters of them male). Figure 3.11 shows average speed over the 26.2 mile race. As the figure shows, although the median woman ran 11 percent slower than the median man, the great majority of men finish well behind the fastest women, and the great majority of women finish well ahead of the slowest men. The sample represented here is not typical of the general population. The bulk of the curve represents the most motivated and skilled long-distance runners from the New York area – less than 1 percent of the population. The right-hand end of the curve is even less representative since many of the fastest runners in the world compete in the New York Marathon. For example, none of the first 13 finishers were Americans. They came from Kenya, Italy, Mexico, and other countries. Presumably this elite sample would exaggerate gender difference, representing as it does the tails of the two bell-curves.68
Figure 3.11 Speed in New York Marathon by gender, 1997. Implications These data on overlapping curves imply that if armies included just the largest, strongest, fastest soldiers, then we should find many cases of women’s participation in combat, albeit in smaller numbers than for men. The actual gender composition of such an army would be determined by the extent to which a population was mobilized into the army. If being a warrior were an elite occupation practiced by a select few, say 5 or 10 percent of the population, then the best army might contain virtually all men. If, however, a society needed to induct half of the entire population into the army, it would score highest on size and strength by including something like 85 percent men and 15 percent women.69
Perhaps the virtually all-male armies found historically result from warfare’s being just an occupation of a small elite. This makes sense in that most people most of the time in the world are not at war, and in many wars only a minority of the population needs be mobilized as combat soldiers. In reality, however, the extent of mobilization of populations into warfare varies greatly from culture to culture and through time. These variations should be reflected, if Hypothesis 3C is correct (and given the data on overlapping bell-curves), in patterns of women’s participation in combat. We may frame this as a corollary to Hypothesis 3C – that is, a testable statement that should be true if the hypothesis is true: the participation of women in combat increases where mobilization for war is more extensive.
This corollary, however, receives very weak empirical support at best. True, in those few cases where nontrivial numbers of women participated in combat historically, extreme warfare forced extreme mobilization of a population (see pp. 60–70). However, these particular cases are a small minority of the cases in which societies centered around war or faced dire war crises. In the great majority of such cases, even when most of the male population lived by war most of the time, virtually no women participated in combat (see pp. 10–21). These cases include preindustrial warrior societies such as the Sambia of New Guinea and the Yanomamö of Brazil, as well as industrialized societies engaged in “total war” such as the World Wars. So the corollary would lead us to expect far more women in combat and far more fluctuation over time in numbers of women in combat than we actually find.70
The problems are compounded by a second corollary: the introduction of firearms to warfare, both locally and in a global-historic sense, should increase the participation of women in combat (by making size-strength differences less decisive). The problem is that this hardly ever happened. Furthermore, this point can be extended to all kinds of forms of industrialized warfare in which machines rather than human bodies alone provide size and strength – tank warfare, air combat, and so forth. The point is not that strength does not matter at all in these occupations, but rather that the introduction of such forms of warfare shifts the importance of body strength in combat forces relative to other combat skills of various kinds. Yet the historical mechanization of war produced little change in the gender ratio of combat forces over the past century – a problem for Hypothesis 3C.71
To consider an even more basic corollary: most wars should be won by the side with the larger, stronger soldiers. If size and strength are so critical to military effectiveness, they must frequently determine battle outcomes. But in fact this is not true. Military historians emphasize the importance of such factors as strategy, discipline, fighting spirit, accurate intelligence, and (especially) the quality of weaponry, in determining the outcome of battles – more than the importance of one side’s physical strength. Indeed, the one war that America has lost, Vietnam, was to an army whose members were substantially shorter and less strong than Americans.
The evolutionary implications of this corollary also run into trouble, since size and strength apparently have not been “selected for” in humans. Compared with species closely related to humans, notably the other great apes, humans have a relatively small gender difference in size. Gorilla and orangutan adult males, for example, are typically almost twice as large as females. Larger size exacts an evolutionary cost, mainly in higher food requirements, which would be worth it only if size and strength mattered greatly in fighting. Apparently for humans they did not. Men were probably about 35 percent heavier than women several million years ago, but only about 15 percent larger starting before Neanderthals several hundred thousand years ago, remaining around 15 percent heavier in modern humans. Furthermore, modern humans totally displaced the substantially stronger and larger Neanderthals about 30,000 years ago.
Finally, if gender differences in size underlay gender differences in participation in war, then we should find among primates that species with large gender differences in body weight should also have low female participation in intergroup fighting. In fact, however, across 21 primate species, these two variables are uncorrelated.
Overall, then, the data on size and strength give limited support at best to Hypothesis 3C. The major problem is that in the context of overlapping bell-curves, the considerable variations across time and space – in mobilization of a population for war, in size and strength, and in the importance of size and strength to war – do not produce the variations predicted by Hypothesis 3C in terms of gender composition of war-fighting forces.
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This indeed does happen at times, but overall the male sex has more strength than the opposite sex, the female.
Posts: 22249 | From: Omni | Registered: Nov 2010
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Meet The 17-Year-Old Girl Who KNOCKS OUT Men 🤯
quote:Before Smilla Sundell takes on Jackie Buntan for the inaugural ONE Women's Strawweight Muay Thai World Title on Friday, learn more about the teen sensation's stunning rise to the top!
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No need for Hollywood fantasy flicks like Xena warrior princess. Yes it's always possible for a woman to defeat a man in a fight. But possibility is not the same as probability let alone likely. Men have the physical advantage of size, strength, speed, and spatial judgement that are huge factors in a fight. The only way for a woman to overcome such odds is through pure techniques and tactics. This is why martial arts is crucial for women in that it gives them knowledge in such techniques and tactics to overcome opponents stronger than herself.
In parts of Asia there are elderly women who could take down larger and stronger men only because they are martial arts masters. If not they couldn't stand a chance.
Posts: 26494 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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In ancient Japan the wives of the Samurai were often trained in martial arts in order to be able to defend the home when the husband was away. Also the Kunoichi, a modern term for the female Ninja had to be well versed in martial arts , tactics and other skills.
The Ninja (including the Kunoichi) has gotten a nearly mythical reputation due to all sorts of fictional narratives spun around them, with the beginning in Japan and later spread to the western world.
Some fictional female warriors has become very popular like 17 year old Gogo Yubari in the film Kill Bill.
With training also women can get good spatial awareness and for example become very good shooters, like Annie Oakley or the Chinese skeet shooting Olympia winner Zhang Shan who defeated both her male and female competitors.
Concerning shooting, still today one can see women fishing with bow and arrows, like the Jarawa women on the Andaman islands.
-------------------- Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist Posts: 2851 | From: Sweden | Registered: Mar 2020
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^ In many cultures where conflict and warfare were common occurrence and part of daily life, then of course women were trained to defend themselves and their homes in case the men were away. Remember the oldest depiction of women in armed combat comes from Egypt with an Old Kingdom depiction of women villagers armed with spears fending off raiders. (I wish someone could find that picture).
Nobody is saying women are not capable of armed or unarmed combat, but against men they are obviously disadvantaged. This is why women only fought as a last resort OR as back-ups to men. Unfortunately many people, especially women, have had their views warped in regards to women's roles in warfare in combat.
Women from elite families such as royals could and at times did engage in warfare but only as commanding roles leading armies through strategies. Common women who participated did so in roles of logistical support i.e. serving as medics, cooks, clothing and equipment makers for the men etc. Even braver women also acted as cheerleaders behind the lines of combat in the giving emotional support and encouraging their warriors to not give up lest they (the women) be taken captive. Very seldom did women engage in actual combat as shield maidens unless a dire situation called for it, though by 'Classical' times this only happened for northern European tribal peoples not the Romans or Greeks whose women were kept out of warfare completely. In Germanic tribal law anyone who owned property and contributed to the war effort had the right to vote which is where English law eventually derived from.
In Asia women learned martial arts to defend themselves and preserve their sexual honor as well as defend their homes in case their men are absent. Like in Europe, elite women could engage in combat as commanders though with heavy guard.
The same was also true in Africa and even in the Americas.
All in all, a woman beating a man in fight is the exception to the rule. Which is why whenever such a fight occurs I would bet on the man unless I know the woman is far more skilled.
Posts: 26494 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Talking about Xena. Lucy Lawless who played Xena in the TV series also presented some TV programs about warrior women through history. Those I remember is
Jeanne d'Arc, the French female leader who fought the English in the 15th century France.
Wang Cong'er who fought the Ching dynasty in 18th century China
Lozen, an Apache leader and healer who fought the American troops in Southwestern USA in the 19th century.
All these women were leaders. Jeanne d'Arc later became a saint. Wang Cong'er is still held in high esteem in China and Lozen is still loved by her people.
-------------------- Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist Posts: 2851 | From: Sweden | Registered: Mar 2020
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^ Yes, all of the women military leaders you mentioned were noted for this strategic abilities than their combat abilities not that they weren't capable of fighting.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26494 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Here is a movie from a couple of years that should be seen. Extremely brutal women on women fighting and killing.
Raze - Official Trailer | HD | IFC Midnight
Nov 25, 2013
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Awakening after being abducted, JAMIE finds herself in a concrete bunker, and she discovers that she is not alone. She and SABRINA, a fellow abductee, both soon realize that they are in a modern day "coliseum" where, along with 48 other women, they are condemned to kill each other in order to protect their very own loved ones.
Starring Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms, Sherilyn Fenn, Rebecca Marshall and Doug Jones, RAZE is a powerful action-thriller poised to leave even the heartiest genre fans shaken and pummeled. It opens in theaters and on demand January 10.
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