Think about it – how long have human females been set about to be less active than human males? Now compare that to how long they’ve actually been set to be *active* through serious sports and weight lifting – anything organized for them has been developed in the past two hundred or so years.

You’re all settling on women’s performances today after they’ve essentially only been able to develop themselves for about a fraction of the time that human males have.

It’s the biological conditioning of gender. Women keep training, they’ll get better and strong, or society can keep selling them the anorexic female image, to be a child for their male daddies, and keep getting weaker. Men can keep hiding their insecurities by developing muscle mass over them, and lord over their little codependent girls.

If you’re a woman – get stronger, physically and mentally. Or, like some of the posters here, you can settle for things as is and live in a world where your daughters always have to depend on someone else to be their ‘daddy’. How disgusting is that?

I actually think women should train with men, so that the conditioning goes even faster. Yeah, you’re going to get hurt and whatever, but that’s how you adapt, not by staying in your safe zone.

My interest isn’t in absolute or even relative strength, but functional /dynamic strength. The competitive strength-based examples given by previous posters generally are hyper-focused on a few aspect of strength, such as absolute power or explosive speed. In these areas men do have an advantage. Not only due to muscle mass or twitch fibers, but also because of the propensity of men to use their brains in more compartmentalized ways. Women have advantages with regards to agility and balance, which relate to our propensity to use both sides of our brains more in unison. Evidence for this includes women having a thicker corpus collosum, the central region of the brain that connect the right and left hemispheres.

Part of what I love about capoeira is that to be effective requires dynamic, spontaneous movement that comes out of energy transference. Brut strength, power, bendyness, flow, and strategy separately aren’t enough. It’s about the synthesis of these (and more).

Personally, my goal is to get strong enough to move through any movement my body is compelled to go, functional / dynamic strength. I believe that once I can do this freely, then it will open up the game in a whole new way. Like when a child goes from crawling to walking, there is an accompanied developmental explosion in other areas, physically, cognitively, and socially. I guess in my case i also include persistence, and adaptability in my definition of strength. These last two seem to be increasingly influential as i get older, and yet still try and increase my abilities.

It’s not just physical strength either. Men are also faster, have more stamina, faster reflexes, are more explosive, and even a much higher tolerance for pain, all of which are very important factors in a fight.
Men also (usually) have the weight and reach advantage, which are also important.

Women can be stronger than most people believe them to be, but most women are still pretty weak. I see this on a daily basis at work, where most women can’t even handle doing a lot of the semi-heavy lifting that even the men who weigh much less can do. Less than 0.1% of women can be considered “strong” by a man’s standards of strength.

Firstly however, sometimes in western societies people are given black belts far to easily – so having a black belt only really means something if its gotten from a training club where you actually have to work hard for it. I know this because I do taekwondo as well. Also, taekwondo focuses on kicks and punches, not on grabs. If she did jujitsu or hapkido, she would most likely be able to break free (that kind of thing really relies more on technique than on strength anyway).

The writer of this article is arguing that a lot of the idea of a strength difference comes from psychology, not from biology. Expectations of each gender has a huge difference on how people (in particular, conformist idiots) act.

The thing is – when a girl is strong (even if she is stronger than the average male), her muscle size won’t show it.

The maximum capability for a guy is stronger, that’s obvious – but the point is that women can be a lot stronger than people believe them to be. The idea about the push ups is particularly true. A few years ago (in school) we had to do as many push ups and sit ups as we could in a minute. I (a girl) did more push ups (proper push ups, not girl ones) and sit ups than all the girls, and all but one guy. I am below average height, have no noticeable muscles, and at the time I had only been doing taekwondo for about a year.

Also, although it is stupid to be in a dangerous place late at night – there have been numerous cases where women have been able to defend themselves due to martial arts. Anyone doing martial arts would understand how much difference training can make. If you want to look at averages (which I hate doing, but anyway), women are more flexible. Generally, men often have to stretch a lot before they are able to perform the technique of the kick, whereas women have to work on making the kick stronger. It produces the same result of being able to break someone’s face. Once a guy at my taekwondo club joked that the stretches were unfair (since I was doing them easily, and he was struggling).

Short story, the writer of this article is not denying “reality” – they are showing that biologically, women can be stronger than people believe them to be, and conditioning has a great effect on making girls think they are weak. Besides, people need to be judged as an individual and not by gender.

One more thing, I understand that you felt like you could throw this girl the ground. This does have a lot to do with height, but can be bypassed with technique (using their strength against them). As I did hapkido for a while, I felt like I could throw (some) guys, taller than me, to the ground as well (and in fact, I have).

I know this has been long, but I think people are missing the point of this article.

I remember my first judo class, almost being sick with fear because it was all male except for me and I’d heard all those sayings like ‘you don’t realize how massive the strength difference is until you roll with a guy’…I had it in my mind I was going to get ripped in half. One or two sparring sessions later, which were fairly even, I was smiling my ass off and looking forward to next session already. Where the hell was that insurmountable strength difference I’d been hearing SO MUCH about? I certainly didn’t feel it. I think the only time I had that problem was when I was suffering from persistent vertigo, which would mess anyone up, male or female. And to think I’d walked in there with the attitude that I wouldn’t even try and stay upright, because of the strength difference, “oh no, if I even go force against force for a few seconds I’ll surely get hurt”…

A few years back, I was dating a woman who was around 5′ 6″ and 120 lbs. She had a habit of going into semi-dangerous places at night when she was out with a few girlfriends having fun (we were living in a largish city that was not very safe downtown at night). I told her I was concerned she wasn’t taking enough safety precautions. She brought up that she had a black belt in tae kwon do (which she earned a few years back but was not actively training in) and that this made her feel like she was safe.

I then asked if I could grab her the way that an attacking male might and for her to try and break free without doing something like gouging my eyes or ripping my nuts off (I didn’t want maimed ya know). I thought maybe she was not aware what a huge difference size and strength can make and perhaps wasn’t aware that she was comparatively weak.

Well, I’m 6′ and 180 lbs, not a huge guy, but probably 2 to 3 times stronger than she is. You likely know the rest of the story. I grabbed her from behind with my arms crossed and trapping her arms and then just lifted her into the air a foot or so. I did this gently and was actually only holding her enough to restrain without hurting/bruising her.

There was very litle she could do. If I was a bad guy and she tried something fancy, unless it was devastating, I could’ve easily thrown her down with enough force to break her bones.

She was much more careful after that.

I suppose every experience related to this has been totally wrong!