How to Rate Male vs Female Strength

[Kitsune]

Talking about women in service,

I received this:

Then you were at the very low end of acceptable body mass to begin with. The average 5'10" woman probably weighs more. I tend not to look at the ends of the distribution for data on which to make general judgments. In general, the 10th percentile man is as strong or stronger than the 90th percentile women (and I've seen that number as high as the 95th percentile). That's a real difference, even if the distributions overlap.

Is there a way of actually rating this?

[Kitsune]

I wanted to add a bit more....
When I was a teenager, I took Karate. One of the students was female and was right around my same height and weight. The Sensai used to team us against each for sparring. I found that we were of similar strengths.

[Dooey Jo]

I wanted to add a bit more....
When I was a teenager, I took Karate. One of the students was female and was right around my same height and weight. The Sensai used to team us against each for sparring. I found that we were of similar strengths.

That's the thing. Women are on average smaller than men, so a straight comparison of strength between the two groups isn't necessarily fair, depending on what exactly it is you want to examine. If you want to check which group has "better muscles", you have to take that into account.

[ArmorPierce]

I guess you can do it but first you have to take into account that the average man has more mass than the average woman. You also have to take into account that even if a man and woman are the same height/weight, the man likely has much more of his weight due to muscle than the woman.

[Hawkwings]

umm... once you compensated for all the factors that make men different from women, wouldn't you just find that human muscles is exactly equal to human muscle?

[Count Chocula]

Generalizing, women weight-for-weight have more leg muscle than men - one reason a healthy woman's legs are so appealing! Core strength, again weight for weight, is roughly equivalent. Men have much more upper body and arm strength, as well as generally greater height as a result of our genetics.

First-hand proof: when my wife and I were both working out 4x/week, I could squat 275# on a squat rack. Despite my outweighing her by almost 20# at the time, she could squat the same weight for 4 sets vs. my 3 sets. After she had been on the treadmill for 45 minutes.

[Akhlut]

Men tend to have an advantage as men produce testosterone, a known muscle-building agent. So men tend to have that going for them most of the time.

[Steel]

In situations that require strength and endurance women have a pretty massive disadvantage to men. For example in rowing, which is equivalent to where you have to lift a pretty heavy weight about 200 times.

On the ergo, (which is what all power testing is done on), the world record over 2000m for

women is 6:26, which equates to ~389 watts
men is 5:36, which equates to ~591 watts

This is a difference of 51%. It may actually be unfair to compare those 2 times, as there are only ~3 female rowers to go near that speed, compared to dozens of male rowers clustered pretty close to the top time in the 5:40s. The ratio of male power: female power is pretty consistent over all distances up to marathons as well.

For comparison purposes to eliminate weight differences, if we compare lightweight men (must weigh less than 71kg) to openweight women (can be of any weight and certainly exceed 71kg by quite a way) the lightweight mens record is 6:02 = ~472 watts, still 21% higher, despite the big disadvantage in muscle mass. It is actually quite easy for even pretty casual male athletes to beat the womens world record time.

In some ways women may be able to outperform men, for example long distance running, but in terms of absolute power or strength, just no competition.

[PainRack]

Generalizing, women weight-for-weight have more leg muscle than men - one reason a healthy woman's legs are so appealing! Core strength, again weight for weight, is roughly equivalent. Men have much more upper body and arm strength, as well as generally greater height as a result of our genetics.

First-hand proof: when my wife and I were both working out 4x/week, I could squat 275# on a squat rack. Despite my outweighing her by almost 20# at the time, she could squat the same weight for 4 sets vs. my 3 sets. After she had been on the treadmill for 45 minutes.

275 pounds?!?!?!?!That's over 100 kilos.....................I'm impressed.I can barely hit 100kilos during my best, and that's for 1 set only....

[Count Chocula]

Yeah, the rest of the gym was impressed too. Pre-pregnancy, my wife was a machine on the weights and treadmill. These days, our exercise consists of chasing a 4-year-old around the house.

[aerius]

For comparison purposes to eliminate weight differences, if we compare lightweight men (must weigh less than 71kg) to openweight women (can be of any weight and certainly exceed 71kg by quite a way) the lightweight mens record is 6:02 = ~472 watts, still 21% higher, despite the big disadvantage in muscle mass. It is actually quite easy for even pretty casual male athletes to beat the womens world record time.

True, but we can't forget that even for men & women of the same weight, the woman will have a higher body fat percentage and less muscle mass. Another big killer is lung capacity, men tend to have larger ribcages and more space for bigger lungs since they don't have a reproductive system tucked into their guts. Put it all together and men are going to have a big advantage in strength, peak & sustained power output, and pretty much everything else.

Now I don't think a 10th percentile man could beat a 90th percentile woman, else I'd be kicking my wife's ass in every sport and this is definitely not the case. Mind you she's a former national level athlete and still in the top percentile, but I'm no slouch either. We do an overall fitness test at the end of each biking season to see if we're getting better, and at the same time we pick over the database to see where the averages are and how we measure up. I'm a bit below average (this place tests mainly athletes) and she's the outlier on the far right of the chart, and looking at the curves on the printouts it would take about a 30th-40th percentile man to beat the 90th percentile women.

[Ariphaos]

For upper body strength, women tend to be about two standard deviations behind, which would suggest a solid 70% spread.

For a given weight class, though, I have not seen significant difference between men and women - under 10% usually. Considering there is a rather large participation bias in such activities between the genders, I am not convinces that there is a real difference in terms of potential at a given weight.

[Akkleptos]

Hormones and gender-specific activities aside, men and women could have the same potential for muscular strength development. But, if career-long surgeons' experience is any kind of indication, we could say with a reasonable degree of accuracy that the average man does have larger and better-oxygenated muscles, at least in the abdomen area, given doctors' accounts of men's abdominal muscles usually looking like "bright red beef" compared to the usually thin, pale-pinkish muscles for women, sedentary lifestyle and other factors notwithstanding. At least that's what I've been told by a couple of doctors. I have attended and assisted in surgery, but I have to admit that I never paid much attention to the abdominal muscle layer.

I guess one could always verify this by asking around with surgeons and other medical personnel who get to see the actual muscles and thus could confirm such observations.

[Renegade]

...Or we could just look around us...
Who is stronger men or women?
There are some very muscular strong women and very puny weak men, but in my experience (half an average human life) men are stronger.
I don't think the questioner wanted to know why or how...


Maybe I completely missed the point of this thread...

[Renegade]

Ah... I did miss the point. The questioner did want to know how.

Well.. I'll stand by my post. How to rate male vs female strength - observation.


Still not sure what you mean by rate it... Pounds per square inch, miles per hour, percentages.

(Maybe I would rate them: PUNY > WEAK > STRONG > SUPER)

Am I making as much sense as the rest of you?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

For upper body strength, women tend to be about two standard deviations behind, which would suggest a solid 70% spread.

For a given weight class, though, I have not seen significant difference between men and women - under 10% usually. Considering there is a rather large participation bias in such activities between the genders, I am not convinces that there is a real difference in terms of potential at a given weight.

This generally seems to top out as being on the mark. Upper body strength is the major male advantage, and we always have to remember selection bias--the women who compete are not necessarily a good cross section of women in general, and they're the ones the studies are largely based on. When controlled for all possible factors except sex, the idea that it's about a 10% favour toward men as an average seems reasonable (which, make no mistake, is enough to win a fight)--however that is not over the whole range of potential strength. It's especially concentrated in the upper body, where the advantage, as noted, is more substantial.

For people who don't understand standard deviations--let's imagine there was an "Upper Body Strength Quotient" rated at 100 as the exact average where the standard deviation was 15; in this case, the strength of a man with a UBSQ of 100 would be equal to the strength of a woman with a UBSQ of 130, and women with strength equal to men proportionately less common over the entire gradient. This however would be more normalized by considering strength in all different areas of the body.