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Been watching avengers and thinking about black widow, and I hear a lot about how women can't beat men in a fight, how most women are weaker than most men, etc. Seems culture-war adjacent because of the whole trans in sports and such.
Setting aside superpowers, I don't dispute the truth of this fact, and I don't dispute the truth that elite men will be much stronger than elite women, and well-above-average men will be somewhat stronger than elite women, but it seems people take this too far and think even a trained woman can't beat an untrained man, and I don't see why THAT is true.
I've seen a study that said women of the same size as men, on average, will have 50% the upper body strength, 50% grip, 65% leg strength.
Surely these are just average joes and average janes? Do you mean to tell me if the woman trains for a couple years, and is healthy / responsive to training, she wouldn't be stronger than the majority of men that don't train, or are just fooling around in the gym / not really progressively overloading? (to what degree am I overestimating performance of average jane after several years of training? I'm guessing there was a large genetic component to why powerlifting women are so strong? What is the average ceiling for strength for a woman that trains powerlifting AS A HOBBY for a few years?)
Don't most women just avoid actual strength training / bulking out of temperament/desire for their body to look a certain way and not out of inability to do it and see results that would put them above-average for men?
I'm just not that familiar with female athletes, with exception of powerlifting and streetlifting spaces where there were strong women who could do shit like bench 200, squat 400-500, etc while being pretty lean. In retrospect those were probably very elite women, but are you seriously saying average joe is stronger than them?
And, if those women just decided to start learning some MMA for a few years. I could see a black widow-esque level of performance against men who are buff but not trained in MMA, or trained in MMA but not buff? Add in some genetic talent, special training, equipment etc. and it isn't so far fetched to have someone like black widow. Maybe she'd need to be a bit bulkier to be realistic but still.
Are dudes supposed to just walk into a gym, being sedentary, and start benching 200? Is that a normal thing for men? (genuinely asking, I'm a dude but have a very small frame. maybe some big frame people out there just naturally have strength? But again, those wouldn't be average joes.)
How much of this is a question of female temperament? Are they simply not encouraged to weightlift , bulk, or train for combat as frequently? And most MMA girls are mainly training skill and don't have a powerlifting base to build off from? If a 5'10 girl bulked to 180 or so, and does powerlifting as a hobby, how much weaker is she really than an average 5'10 joe who isn't trained? 5'10 criminal joe that comes up to mug her or something, are you really telling me 5'10 powerlifting mma chick doesn't clock him?
Note I am making sure to equate the sizes of the woman and man in question. I'm not making 5'4 hero chick go against 5'10 criminal with ease, but if the sizes are equal I just don't see how the hero chick loses. Although if you make 5'10 criminal (who likely has some training, but doesn't powerlift) into 5'10 average joe, then even against 5'4 powerlifting mma chick...just how much of a disadvantage is the size if strength is equal? It's gonna be a close fight at least, no?
A lot of responses that are non-central to your question. Grip strength, powerlifting, etc. You (originally) asked about fights. It’s my understanding that many if not most fights end up as glorified grappling contests, especially when at least one of the participants is untrained. As such, it’s far more fair to consider fights as grappling contests. Especially when we are talking Black Widow comparisons. Think "half-drunken skirmish outside the bar by people who hate each other". Time and time again most fights pretty soon devolve first into close contact, one or both grabbing the other and attempting punches or other action with a free hand, and then pretty soon it goes to ground. If both people are really out to do damage, at this stage the fight usually doesn't last an incredibly length either.
In this context, a few hard truths. Weight matters a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. Wrestling is very very narrowly sliced up into 10 or 15 pound windows for a reason - and other combat sports too! ~50-60 pound weight advantage is massive that even a very skilled grappler will have trouble with. This is not linear: say a 20% body weight advantage is big, a 50% advantage might be insurmountable. Critically, in uncontrolled grappling, the skill advantage is even weaker, because there aren't really "rules" limiting what you can do. Remember that body weight scales better than muscles do, essentially, in humans. Why weight? Mostly, inertia, though bulk can help. Sheer mass makes it more difficult to be swept, moved, submitted, etc and it doesn't usually take much skill to leverage weight offensively either. Moving a huge weight is really exhausting. Factor #1 is almost always weight.
Now, I know you said "I'm making sure to equate the sizes of the woman and the man" so forgive me if I've gone off on a tangent, but "all else equal" isn't very realistic. Pure weight matters more than almost anything else, and weight differences are pretty common. The other things are more fun to talk about, and sometimes have culture war implications, but weight is the boring but accurate answer.
Gender is probably #2. Upper body strength is actually pretty important in grappling, and men have more even just proportionally, plus men with their broader shoulders and generally longer limbs and height (even denser bone!) can have some real substantial advantages in leverage, which is a force multiplier. Men have better muscle fiber density and explosive power. All else equal, it's probably true that a gym-trained woman can beat an untrained man pound for pound, but even a bit of training erodes that.
Skill falls probably down to #3. As mentioned, chaos is less kind to skill than sport is. Okay, one caveat: I think pound for pound skill probably comes above gender (!!). But skill scales much, much worse. Most fights, again, are not pound for pound. Your question is fundamentally asymmetrical: how much does the skill of a very fit woman impact her fight chances?
Gym training is probably #4. It's real but usually overstated. Functional strength encompasses wider ranges of movement, better positional awareness, flexibility, etc. It's fun but unrealistic to isolate this completely from #2 as well, as we do use our muscles regularly in daily life, not just in the gym. Many men use muscles in their work or leisure. So gym training has some limited upside, and we all know that you get up against diminishing returns pretty easily.
So, a few illustrative matchups:
170 pound fit regular guy vs trained 170 pound trained grappler. Grappler wins north of 90% of the time. Skill is super potent when things are roughly balanced.
170 pound pretty good grappler vs 240 pound untrained but not pure fat regular guy. That's a big ask, probably near the tipping point I think. On the feet the bigger guy can just fall on the grappler. Bigger neck, wrists, legs all make pins harder and escapes can be exhausting.
140 pound fit very trained woman vs 150 pound untrained but healthy guy. The woman wins a pretty large chunk of the time. Competitive but not dominant - grips on arms are hard to get out of, in the chaos of an uncontrolled fight raw explosions of strength can be a problem, but if she's willing to fight dirty and is smart on her feet she should be able to do fine.
200 pound top tier male powerlifter vs 185 pound guy who did a good amount of wrestling in college 5-10 years ago. The lifter is crazy strong and has amazing grip, posture, resistance, etc. But the wrestler has spent years shooting levels, sprawling, controlling wrists, and understanding base. The lifter doesn't know what a double leg feels like coming at him, has no hip defense, and will be exhausted in 45 seconds of real scrambling. The wrestler wins this handily.
On top of all this there's an irreducible source of variability of the chaos of a serious fight. Humans can get injured easily on some uncontrollables. Someone slips, hits their head in a weird way, uses a makeshift weapon, makes a passionate error, all this means there's usually an upper limit to how dominant any single person can be. I think this is actually the silent killer, the black mark against a Black Widow: sure, maybe she can take down 4 guys in a row especially with surprise at her back, but it only takes one time to mess up when the margins are thin and so maybe a fifth will go wrong.
(I didn't talk about tech or weapons, of course, that's a whole other ball game. Black Widow has like, stun guns and stuff, but also guns exist for everyone.)
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As far as I can tell, what it seems to you according to this sentence isn't reflective of the actual reality; it seems to me that people don't take this that far, except the Lizardman Constant. The idea that you could take some random 50th percentile man from the street and have him face off against, say, an MMA world-champion-caliber female and have him consistently come out on top is something I've seen pretty much no one ever express, except in cases of extreme differences in weight (controlling for which is usually already built-in anyway in competitions like this in regular cases). Or comparing deadlifts with a world-champion-caliber female power lifter or anything of the like. The point of comparison when comparing elite female athletes unfavorably to males has always been with male athletes, in my experience, usually ones that are even higher level than, say, a local rec soccer league (which is already a much higher level compared to the median man off the street).
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No. Do the math, and it shakes out that elite women only reach the 50th percentile of men in a bunch of categories. Even if they match strength, they are still smaller at the same height. The average woman at 5’10” (1.5% US population) isn’t the same weight as the average guy at that height. Men also bring anatomical advantages, too, in the form of denser and thicker bones (useful in a fight). Go do BJJ or Judo and the differences will be obvious to you. Or, watch elite women’s Basketball or Soccer. They display less athleticism than just about any non-selective high school varsity team with a class of a couple hundred.
Nope, but (fit) women walk into a gym and start benching <45 pounds. Seriously!
Yes, but that doesn’t matter when women are much smaller on average, and much much weaker even at the same weight. They can’t make up the difference, and there is no way to literally grow a thicker skull. I would not want to roll the dice in a street fight on those odds.
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I suspect a lot of discussion of athletics focuses on biological advantages because the discussion is often about elite athletes. At that level, it can be assumed people have coaches, regiments, etc that are dedicated to squeezing every ounce of advantage out of things they can be doing to improve their performance. So focus goes to biological advantages. Not because those are the biggest differentiators across the entire performance spectrum, but because they can be large differentiators at the level of elite athletes. At a more beginner/amateur level more hours spent practicing is almost certainly more valuable than all but the largest biological advantages. Like, the reason I could squat 400+ lbs five years ago, but can't now, is not because I am became biologically incapable of squatting 400+ lbs in that time, I just spend a lot less time in the gym than I used to. At non-elite levels the amount of time and effort you put in can have very large effects.
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Also ditto this whole question for small men vs larger men. Look at people like llamar gant, 120 lbs 5'2 and deadlifting pretty much 700 lbs, bench 350 at 130 lbs (with bad leverages, he had severe scoliosis so his arms are actually average-length). Is that dude seriously weaker than average joe at 6'0? Or even 6'5? I mean when you get to that level of strength, you can manhandle anyone no, even if they a foot taller than you?
Like if you can squat the taller dude on your back and regularly throw around 300 lb+ weights in the gym, are you really at much of a disadvantage in a fight? I guess striking you would be due to body length of course.
Is the hard part the statistics that its difficult to get to that level of strength at that height? I just don't see how these things work exactly. Why dont more MMA fighters get to those powerlifting numbers? Llamar gant had the leanness for MMA but the strength for powerlifting, why isn't that combo more common, and why wouldn't it make a big difference going against heavier folk? I'm assuming everyone must be training powerlifting to the same degree and their MMA training just doesn't let them recover well enough to get as strong, pound for pound, as people like llamar gant? A sort of deal where everyone is training equally hard and some are just also bigger than others, thus they win?
How much is genetic and how much is will / desire to be strong? How much is frame size a factor?
Yes, reach is a bitch. Based on limited personal experience, a large height gap strongly overcomes a muscle gap. Top tier athlete/power lifter might swing the balance back, I would guess, and all of this is assuming no particular training discrepancy, but a foot+ of height advantage is massive.
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It's not fighting, but there's at least one grip strength study showing mean and standard deviation for men and women.
https://file.scirp.org/pdf/Health20111100008_37035818.pdf
Men are roughly 2.5 SD ahead of women, so the -3 sd male score is just below the female mean and the male mean is just below the +3 SD female performance.
I would guess most physical characteristics are going to have a similar standardized distribution.
Whether that difference overcomes training is probably going to depend quite a bit on the activity and rules.
Also, once you are grappling, grip strength seems directly relevant.
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There's actually a pretty easy way to check this, compare women's elite performance in weightlifting to the men's beginner weightlifting.
So let's check.
ChatGPT gives me for a 25 year old male.
So let's say 135 to be really fair to our untrained male, top of a beginner who has already done a few sessions. And that's the high end according to this comment
Wikipedia says
457.4>135
Obviously this is the record, but I think we can take from it that trained women elites can be stronger than the typical untrained man. IDK where the numbers come from but this strengthlogs site also shows that advanced/elite women would beat beginner men and its cutoff for "elite" is only 198, less than half the record. Also backed up by this other site with beginner men at 103 and intermediate women at 111. I checked three others as well, intermediate women > beginner men also applies to shoulder presses and deadlifts as well. And in dumbbell curls, even novice women beat beginner men there
That's not a great example. "Equipped" is cheating and that women has higher testosteronal than any natural man.
Which is why I put the raw bench for the comparison and not the equipped bench.
Yeah that isn't unbelievable she is on roids, but the other sites I provided also do seem to suggest that the intermediate and up women can beat out beginner men in various weightlifting categories.
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There's certainly a couple big caveats in here. First is how long you've been training. The original comment said stuff like "a couple years of training". There's obviously going to be a significant effect of how long they've been doing it for how far along the progression toward "elite" they will be. You're grabbing stats from record-setting women. It would be much more nuanced to take, say, some sort of typical progression after 2-5 years.
The second big caveat is body weight. A quick look at April Mathis on OpenPowerlifting puts her around 250-260. I doubt ChatGPT is really considering this. I happen to be freshly training a newbie right now. He's male, about 160lbs. It's been a couple of months (I just checked my records, and it's been eight bench sessions). I haven't done any 1RM training with him, just very slowly progressing on a beginner program. He's shown absolutely no sign of plateauing; I'm certainly not pushing him to progress maximally quickly; we're just taking it slow and steady. With what he's already done, my estimate of his equivalent 1RM would be about 165lb. So, I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT estimate is quite low. I'm sure ChatGPT's estimate would be even worse if the guy had a bigger frame and body weight.
It would certainly be interesting to consider body-weight-equivalent trajectories for men/women. I'm 100% confident that if both were completely untrained, the male would be able to bench more than the female. I'm also 100% confident that for two elite, been training specifically for powerlifting for a decade or two, lifters, the male would be able to bench more than the female. Interesting questions would be things like, "About how many years of training does it take for the body-weight-equivalent female to surpass the completely untrained male?" Also, how do those trajectories progress? I'm thinking of a plot where the x-axis is something like "Number of months of training for the male" and the y-axis is "number of months training for the female". Each data point would be a point at which they are roughly equal in performance. My guess is that the second derivative of such a plot would be positive (that is, each additional increment of training for a male would require even more increasing increments of training for a female). And obviously, the plot would just tap out at some point, because even non-world-class male lifters will be able to surpass the female world records.
Well yeah, trained males always beat trained females without any hormonal fuckery. But in trained females vs average untrained male, it doesn't seem to just be elites but intermediate level according to the two benchmark sites I had found. I don't know how exactly they determine what intermediate even means, but the same thing that decently trained women > untrained men seems to be evidenced in multiple ways there.
I really don't know, but based off that, the strength benchmark sites and the Reddit comments in that one thread I linked, it seems like it's just that your guy is actually just very high if he can bench over his body weight. Maybe he's just built different or maybe he has a more active job/lifestyle than many untrained men do.
Well yes but again the topic is untrained male vs trained female. Not both of them having done training for years.
This is what I tried to basically give a conjectured definition of:
You also use the phrase "decently trained women". Like, what is that? This is what I'm getting at.
I think you're going off extremely few data points and seriously underestimating how effective a moderate amount of training and technique can accomplish.
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A competition bench press very much does not equal to what a recreational gymgoer is doing for reps. They're essentially gaming the fuck out of the rules to do the least amount of bench press possible and I'd wager the gap would be a fair bit smaller if you took the average beginner (physically) and taught them the proper technique for absolute max 1RM. Also if you google April Mathis you're not exactly getting a typical phenotype.
But yeah definitely the strongest woman in the world is going to beat the average man at most sports
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Doesn't seem to be the case, as the repeated instances of 14 year old high school boys beating (and usually outright demolishing) women's Olympic teams, World Cup teams, etc. would demonstrate:
US Women's soccer team loses to an under-15 boy's team, score 5-2
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
Australian Women's soccer team loses 7-0 to an under-16 boy's team
https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html
High school boy's team beats Olympic US women's team at hockey, 2-1
https://www.espn.com/olympics/news/story?id=2281644
And there are countless more instances of this. I'm sure these high school boys are more fit than typical boys their age, but male physical strength generally peaks between 25 and 35, so they are likely physically weaker than the median untrained adult male.
The numbers I've seen over the years (I'd have to try and track them down) are that a woman has to be in roughly the top 5 to 10% of women to beat a male in the bottom 5% of male strength.
Edit: found a chart of female vs male grip strength, you can see that they barely overlap. Grip strength is hardly the only form of strength, but from my recollection other forms of strength show similar trends:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mahmut-Eksioglu/publication/279634285/figure/fig3/AS:718522762137613@1548320584635/Frequency-distributions-of-dominant-hand-GS-of-females-and-males.png
These are well above average, albeit usually not literal top 1%, 14 year old boys.
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In 2009, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost a spring training game to Manatee Community College. In 2019, Chelsea lost to their own youth team. By your logic, the Pirates should have forgotten about Andrew McCutchen (who played in that game) and signed some of the Manatee players, who were readily available. I do not believe any of them ever got so much as a rookie league contract.
The US Women's team thing wasn't even that level of a loss, because it wasn't even a real scrimmage, because national teams don't do scrimmages. They were sharing a training facility in Texas with the boys youth team and when the youth team came over to watch them practice/get autographs they ended up agreeing to play a kick around game. They don't play games like this a tune-ups or anything because the team members would have played about 60 games per year between the pro and national teams. The only reason anyone even knows about this is because that particular camp was interrupted by contentious contract negotiations with US Soccer, and US Soccer decided to release the results without any context to gain leverage (while sabotaging their own product). Just think about it for one minute: If you're a player or a coach, are you going to risk injury by trying to win the game? Or are you going to treat it like a fun treat for the kids that under normal circumstances nobody would hear about? Look at the NFL; they play fewer games than soccer players but are averse to playing in the preseason and absolutely allergic to the Pro Bowl. Now imagine that you aren't making nearly as much money and that your pro career can end in an instant.
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Yeah but those are generally rep/professional-pathway squads so it's not random athletic averages.
Even in BJJ terms I've trained on-and-off with a woman who's the best woman at her weight class in the world and has good arguments for being the best woman in BJJ overall. She's about 120 pounds, I'm about 260 pounds and have been training long enough to 'lolnope' her. I've also seen her absolutely tool athletic big units (admittedly not spazzing their hearts out but that's not really an effective way of beating her unless you fluke an injury) on their first classes at my size.
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When people say men are generally much stronger than women, there's usually the implicit caveat that it's women without exogenous testosterone.
That said, holding height constant, and comparing a natural woman who regularly lifts heavy to an average man who doesn't work out at all, I think the woman would be able to come out on top, at least sometimes. But with those restrictions, you've limited the population to something like the top 1% of women. And if the man works out at all, she's never coming out on top in a purely physical conflict.
Yeah, the third caveat that I didn't mention in my comment above is chemicals. Both male/female world-record type stuff is obviously contaminated by all sorts of gear.
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