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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?
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
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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