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I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
Which MA? Because this is just like not true in Judo or Wrestling. And while I am less experienced with BJJ and combined striking full MMA styles I would think Male + 50 Lbs + mild experience is insurmountable. Even in all male rooms 50 lbs is a lot, and 50 can make up for inexperience if the lighter guy isn't a much better genetic athlete than you. My primary combat sport was wrestling way back in HS. I'd willingly give up 50 lbs to any female wrestler age 18 vs me at 18. It would not be close. As a pretty good wrestler, I could sometimes take on guys 50 lbs more, but they would be typically pretty inexperienced, or just bad at sports. My best friend and I started as freshman at the same weight. I won the starting position and consistently beat him that whole year. In the offseason he grew a shit ton, and I did not. Next 3 years he consistently beats me with a 20-35 lb advantage. Muscle is pretty good.
Give an athletic guy 2 weeks and 50 lbs, your black belt is not going to get you far as a lady.
FWIW, I have gotten consistently beat by skilled BJJ women who were slightly lighter than me, with me having only very rudimentary grappling skills. But of course that was with a pure grappling ruleset.
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Bjj is what I’m thinking of. Of all the options, it is probably the best at letting skill overcome weight differences. A 120 pound woman needs a specific style to beat a 170 pound man (extremely high tempo position switches and constant attacks), but there are women who have that level of skill out there. It is very hard, and they essentially have to be at the level of high level competitors to be able to beat male hobbyists who outweigh them, but I have experienced it and watched it.
What I am seeing from you description is that high skill + top 1% athlete defeats 50th percentile fat guy. That isn't interesting.
The dude doesn’t have to be fat. I would consider myself a decent submission grappler and I’m not fat, but I will lose to this kind of woman.
I would say this is interesting, because it informs how realistic things like Hollywood movies with a female action star are. A tiny woman kicking the shit out of a bunch of dudes: pretty unrealistic. A tiny woman hitting a picturesque flying triangle, actually a little more possible (well maybe not because flying triangles don’t really work, but that’s what passes for grappling in movies). It’s a proof by contradiction that “no woman can beat a man” is false, which seems to be the position that some people are defending.
People are defending it because its basically true. We are talking about combat sports where Olympic level women can't make their own high school team. Where the star girl in a gym will routinely get humbled by a guy who's trying to get better at football and so is taking up the sport in the off-season.
That's not to say some men can't just be weak or unathletic, but it's silly to compare a 21 year old girl who's the best in the county to a 40 year old who works out once a week and picked up combat sports in his 30s and think that makes any sense.
If you think that’s the situation, you are mistaken. In college about five guys from the varsity football team came to the mma club to try out grappling. All of them were physical specimens, and when I rolled with them it would just be me submitting them every 30 seconds to a minute for the whole round. I just recently submitted a competitive college wrestler in practice (after getting thoroughly beaten positionally of course). I’m not a bad submission grappler and I’m not a 40 year old out of shape dad who just picked it up recently. I’m not a great one either, but I know my way around on the mat.
Bjj is just not something where strength matters nearly as much as untrained people think it does. There is enormous skill depth, on the level of chess or go. Given that it is something you can get good at by knowing things and making rapid decisions, it should not be surprising that some women are able to get good. Every gym has a 16 or 20 year old scrawny kid who has a great guard game and plays a good spidery high tempo defense against guys half again his weight. A athletic woman who lifts will have pretty much the same level of physicality as those kids, and if it’s not surprising when they hit triangles and heel hooks on everyone there is no reason to think a woman couldn’t either. Women’s minds are just as good at knowing things as men’s are (maybe modulo stuff at the tails which does not matter here).
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You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.
Is BJJ actually relevant in a combat scenario though? Grappling is pretty cool but what good is it if you're just getting pummelled by a guy with longer reach and more muscle-power? In an actual fight, you're allowed to strike, you can do anything you want, you actually are trying to hurt the opponent.
If you want to talk about actual combat scenarios...
If you can de-escalate the situation, you should. If you have a weapon and your opponent doesn't, use it. If your opponent has a weapon and you don't, just do what they tell you instead of getting stabbed or shot. If your're both unarmed and there's nothing keeping you where you are, just run. If you're both unarmed and you're trapped-- and this is the scenario woman (rationally) fear the most-- you're probably already grappling, so you might as well bring out the bjj.
Striking may be tactically useful, especially as a supplement to grappling, but if you get into a stand-up fistfight you've almost certainly making some sort of strategic mistake. I say this as someone who's dabbled in a few different martial arts. The most important thing your instructor can teach you about fighting is how not to. The second most important thing they can teach you is how to win the specific kind of fight you're training for-- whether that's in boxing ring, or in the living room against a rapey tinder date. To that extent, I think it's an important result that a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man.
Maybe in an arena with rules and social judgement for men who beat up women. Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic, good chance they start with a sucker punch or are in some cluttered space where technique is less relevant and both sides are improvising.
80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.
I agree 100% regarding weapons and avoiding fights. My point is that the sex that gets men to carry heavy things has no place in a fight fundamentally and should avoid it wherever possible.
Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic... but not in a way that particularly disfavors women in comparison to men. Also, a cluttered space is, again, exactly the kind of environment where grappling skills predominate. See: Carjitsu.
Do you disagree that "both parties are unarmed and in an enclosed space" is the modal practical scenario where any martial arts training actually makes a difference? Because my argument descends from the fact that such is scenario is exactly where grappling ability is most useful, and the fact that my personal experience in grappling demonstrates how technique can very convincingly make up for physique.
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I really would go out of my way to get the chance to roll with a female blackbelt at some point, just so that I could offer first hand experience on this instead of this theoretical opinion situation.
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Well, are we starting with grappling or does the woman have to take him down?
I guess I can clarify, if 'dirty' tactics like eye gouges and groin strikes are on the table, then size isn't an insurmountable factor.
Problem is a dude can win literally by just dropping all his weight on her and holding her down.
If you think you can win by just dropping all your weight one someone, it’s obvious you’ve never done submission grappling in a serious way. If someone with 50 pounds on me just drops their weight on me without any sort of skill behind it, I’ll be choking them in 30 seconds.
Takedowns are harder given a weight difference because wrestling is harder to do across weight classes than submission grappling is. I’m less confident that a very experienced woman could beat a dude who outweighs her and has a moderate amount of experience from the feet.
There's a point at which technique ceases to trump size and strength.
I should know, I've been training techniques for damn near 10 years, and I've got one buddy with ~40 pounds on me who can still ragdoll me at will if he decides to/I don't execute the technique perfectly. I can beat him at striking, though.
Look at Connor McGregor attempt to fight The Mountain from Game of Thrones.
I have yet to see any 'convincing' demonstration of a female submission artist defeating a male of similar size who did not want to be submitted. I will grant it can happen, but it is probably a fluke.
For demo purposes, it is hard to override the male instinct to 'play nice' with women so as not to inadvertently hurt them.
Thus, I think it is far, far better to not feed female ego on this point and just tell them straight up "your attacker will probably be a male, and probably be larger than you. Give up any hope of beating him on skill or strength and just CHEAT LIKE HELL and beat him on brutality." And carry a weapon and train with said weapon.
I realize it's my youtube algo, but it's funny because like three videos suggested next to it are "LMAO DUMBASS BODYBUILDER GETS MOGGED BY TINY BJJ BLACKBELT"
I was explaining to one of the girls I train with that we (all the male white belts) are all terrified of rolling with her, because there's no winning. If I win and tap her too quickly, I'm a dick who's trying to stunt on a girl. If I lose and she taps me, I just got beat by a girl. The winning move is to use very little strength and perfect technique string together a really technically compelling flow roll. I'm being called on to do this more by my coaches ("We need someone experienced to roll with Sydney because she's new, roll with FiveHour!") and while I'm getting better at it I kinda hate it. What I've started doing is closing my eyes and rolling by pure feel to try to develop better instincts.
I think part of it is that we just need to acknowledge that for self defense purposes, we are mostly talking about different things.
I don't mind doing some light sparring with a female. But my favorite demo at that point is to shoot for the legs, then bodily lift them off the ground and remind them that now, I can simply slam them to the ground and the fight is probably over.
Then show them a few ways they can 'cheat' to make it a little less lopsided.
Today I was showing a quite young, very athletic, but petite female student how to wrist lock when the opportunity presents itself. Then I showed her how hard it is to land a wrist lock on a guy (me) that is giving more than token resistance. So final lesson: "IF you can do it, then you go in with the full intention to break the dude's wrist as quickly as possible. Don't depend on pain compliance. In fact, don't even assume snapping his wrist is enough. The longer the fight lasts the worse it is for you."
Best general advice I can offer them is "use the bigger muscles of your body against the (relatively) small muscles on theirs when possible." And God bless her she has internalized the "groin kick first, ask questions later" mentality.
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That’s not been my experience. I’m actually pretty shocked you’ve never encountered a tiny male Blackbelt who can beat up guys a lot heavier than him with ease. The toughest instructor at the first gym I went to was 130 pounds and would thrash everyone, 230 pound blue belts included. I personally am not that good, but I’m a little on the lighter side and will fight relatively evenly with guys 40 pounds heavier and at similar experience levels all the time. There are similar guys at most gyms though not always to that level. MMA training usually doesn’t bring people much past purple belt level bjj skill (I’ve heard I don’t train mma), so if you are doing striking as well there is a chance you’re just not encountering as many full grappling specialists.
Finding women with that level of skill is a lot less common, so it’s not that surprising if you have never met one. I’ve had to move around a lot which has exposed me to a lot of gyms and I only encountered one with women at that level.
In terms of advice to give to women, I completely agree with you. Getting to that level requires talent and sustained effort over years. If you’re not going to seriously pursue becoming at least semi-pro there is no way you should plan to be able to beat men in fights, and even then it has to be s a specific scenario. Thinking you can beat a man is almost always delusional, and if you can do it you’ll know because you’ll have done it a lot in the years and years of practice it took to do there. Non freaks of nature should just buy a gun.
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