I’m not sure what he’s describing. A more common trick is to stand with your back against the wall and try to bend over and touch the floor. With a higher center of gravity men tend to fall forward since they can’t shift their CG backwards with the wall in the way. Make sure your heels and butt are against the wall, and don’t bend your knees.
As described, this exercise is trivially easy. I’ve been experimenting to try to figure out a version of it that would be difficult in some way, and give rise to a situation where a person would be unable to lift his head. But the dog came over and started licking my ear so I gave up.
That’s right, I couldn’t resist. The fact that she can do this makes her a superchild!! I will enter her in contests and try to profit from it. Why I should actually see if she qualifies for some sort of national award on fitness, or perhaps <gasp> a freak show of some kind. ARGH! Out of here now.
20 push-ups is not very easy. I’m willing to bet that even among healthy adults, only a minority can do 20 push-ups, and that among women the percentage is very small.
I attend a weekly Pilates class which is attended by a self-selected group of my colleagues who are relatively fit and active. Even among that group, (almost?) none of the women and not all of the men would be able to do 20 “real” push-ups, and none of the ones that could do it would describe it as “easy” or “very easy”.
I also tried it, and had absolutely no problem. Much, much easier than doing a sit-up. And I’ve got a pretty muscular upper-body and a little extra padding.
robardin: Are you sure you’re not leaving something out of the description of that parlor trick, because I’d be surprised if there’s anyone that can’t do that, as described.
^^^^
Ok, I just modified the exercise so that your hands are behind your head, and you’re not allowed to touch your arms or elbows to the ground. Now *that *was hard. I’ll bet that’s how it was supposed to be done.
As distances increase to 50, 100, or more miles, the differences between men and women (at the pointy end of things anyway) start to even out. On more than one occasion a woman has won an ultra outright.
One of the things that they often don’t throw into the mix of measurement is balance or center of gravity. Men’s bodies generally balance through the shoulders making them (on average) better at arm strength activities.
Women, on the other hand are balanced lower - through the hips. More of their mass is lower in the body than men. You can clearly see the difference by watching tumbling competitions. When they flip, women’s bodies rotate lower than man’s - rotating around their hips, not their shoulders.
This needs to be taken into account if the strength test involves the push/pull external objects type of test. I could out-leg-curl any man in my college weight-training class but they had me seriously outclassed in overhead presses.
So how do you make the measurement fair to our body structure differences? We leverage external weight from different places. I don’t have an answer.
Being able to continue doing push-ups past 15 or 30 or whatever is an indicator of muscular endurance more than it is of explosive power. If you can do those types of exercises much longer than most people I’d think that would give you a real advantage in most team sports.
we have kinda done this before on the Dope and the one sport that comes up as truly female dominated at the highest levels is rock climbing, which as has already been pointed out is less a test of strength and more about endurance. and given the top female climbers are also tiny women you begin to see how they do it. when I work out I use weights that weigh more than they do, but while climbing I am also hauling around over double the body weight of some of these women.
Rock climbing is more technique than raw strength. You aren’t doing a pull-up over and over again to lift yourself up a wall.
Look. unless you are Maria Sharapova, the typical man has about forty pounds and 6 inches in height on the typical woman. Let me put it this way. I’m an average size guy at 5’10" 190 lbs. Its only slightly more difficult for me to carry an average girl with a football across the goal line than if I were just carrying the football by itself.
Are you sure you are using good form? Up on your toes, chest touching ground? I wouldn’t call it impressive (for a male), and somebody who is training should be able to do it very easily, but I wouldn’t call it EASY. I wouldn’t expect an out of shape person to be able to do it, certainly.
What? Since when is climbing dominated by females? I used to be into climbing and kept track of who top climbers were… and I don’t remember it being women. Lynn Hill has done some impressive things, but her most notable accomplishment was also one that was well suited to an individual with her stature. For a while she was I think the only one to climb one particular route…but she was not the top climber in the world.
Women can do very well in climbing, but men still climb harder routes. There are certain moves that simply require ridiculous strength, that no amount of technique can make up for.
I just tried it again and was more or less pinned to the ground, so perhaps I’m not describing it well.
Kneel with both knees (not one) on the ground, with your body in an L shape. Now bend at the waist to move your head to the ground with your hands behind your back. Your back should be mostly straight. If you do this by sitting on your heels and putting your head very close to your knees by curling your back then yeah, I guess it’s not that hard.
Here’s a pic of Muslims praying towards Mecca; imagine doing what the guy leading the prayers in white is doing, but without the hands placed on either side. (Some of the other prayers look like they’re curling their backs - I have no idea if this is “poor form” for Muslim prayers.)
PS - I think the key is to put your hands behind your back BEFORE you put your head to the ground, that tends to force you to keep your back straight. If you kneel and put your head to the ground, and THEN put your hands behind your back, you probably end up curling your back.
AFAIK the only martial art where women can compete equally with men at most amateur levels is fencing, where up to a D, or maybe C-level you will see a proportionate number of women (that is, proportionate to those in the sport overall). But at the B and A-levels the number of men disproportionately exceeds that of women in the sport. The men as a group are just stronger, faster, and more accurate at touches than the women as a group, and unfortunately that’s all there is too it.
I could have sworn Cecil and I worked on a column on this subject, but I cannot find it. It might have been something he just asked me to look into.
