The elephant in the room that you’re not considering is that the average US male includes a lot of typically shorter ethnicities, such as Hispanic men and Asian men.
You’d do better comparing the average white US male height for that reason alone.
And what PopMech didn’t do was have their test guys start wearing armor as a smaller child, a page working and training up to be a Man at Arms or Knight for 10-15 years. There are guys in the SCA who can do flips in full armor because they wear it anywhere from a couple hours a day to hundreds and thousands of hours a year at fighter practice and while practicing at the pell in their back yard.
Not - as far as I know - started as a small child but the test subjects were all experienced re-enacters, well used to moving and fighting in armour. The question was not how mobile you are in armour, it was how much additional energy does it take to walk or run in suit of plate compared to not wearing it. I don’t see how that is changed by practise - it is just a factor of the bio-mechanics.
Peer reviews of medieval armor would be written by dukes, viscounts, and the like?
Just to pick this up.
I don’t think you will find many - any? - regulars here claiming Wikipedia as an absolutely reliable source - certainly not for anything controversial. Everyone is very aware of its limitations. A quick look through this old thread suggests that it has been used sparingly and sensibly - the few links to wiki are to illustrate some point or provide some background, not as a definitive cite.
****sherryramirogomez ****- did you have an example in mind from this thread where someone has used Wikipedia as their reference source?
Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but the body armor worn by an American soldier nowadays weighs in at around 30 pounds (kevlar vest with front back and side ballistic plate inserts). That doesn’t include the helmet or any required equipment they’d typically have with them (weapons, ammunition, water, first aid kit, water, iphone, etc.).
If they brought their packs, that’s more weight, but I’m not certain how often it is for troops outside the wire to ruck around instead of using vehicles.
That Popular Mechanics article was one big pile of crap. Looking at the comments, I’m not the only person who thought so. The basic idea — put someone on a treadmill and see how much of a difference it makes for energy output — was fine, but nearly everything else in the article showed fundamental ignorance of anything related to armor.
The source, the actual research, was rather better done. They did have valid ways of measuring energy output, the armor was apparently fitted properly and was comparable to historical models, and they performed control comparisons with unloaded and loaded locomotion.
The one quibble I have with it is that you’re not doing a whole lot of walking in the kind of armor they used. Infantry armor is lighter, and in most armies from different time periods featured pretty minimal lower-body armor, if any at all.
In full armor, if you’re not mounted, it’s because something is seriously fucked up. Either that, or you’re fighting in a tournament event. In battle, if you’re on foot, you’re dashing short distances, pushing, shoving, bashing against a shield wall, whacking other guys in metal suits with unfriendly bits of pointed metal, climbing ladders or steps in a siege tower, or engaging in various other short-distance high-velocity movements.
The walk/run test is good for a very general baseline, but doesn’t have all that much applicability to the energy output of fighting in the stuff. Rather more of the activity is upper-body, which they didn’t test for. I’m not saying the results would be different — mind you — I’m just saying that what they tested is incomplete and so creates more questions than it answers.
Medieval warfare isn’t all that much different from modern, in some ways. One reason CrossFit has found such support in the military and emergency services communities is that it maps better to the physical demands of those occupations than most fitness programs that split up exercise modalities into discrete sections; picture your standard weightlifting one day, cardio on another. Combat and emergency response, on the other hand, is everything all at once: brief periods of hard, fast work with variable loads and movements, interspersed with random periods of lower-state work or near-rest.
People who don’t do that kind of training for preparation, or participate in activities that present those kinds of demands on a regular basis get the shit kicked out of them in just a few minutes. Either a triathlete and a weightlifter will be puffing like a winded horse due to demands outside their normal training: higher load and irregular power output for one, longer duration and strength-endurance over peak strength for the other.
Agree fully about the use of effective training and I doubt even the most dedicated re-creationist or fight-interpreter spends as much time in his armour as a 14th century knight or man at arms but I do take issue with the idea that lower body armour was not worn when fighting on foot.
Lots of near contemporary illustrationsshow battles with the men at arms (not the archers) wearing full armour while fighting on foot. Quite apart from the illustrations it makes sense - a man in a suit of plate complete has a massive advantage in a melee being nearly invulnerable to edged weapons, take away the armour from the legs and a large part of the advantage has gone - vulnerable to any low blow from some oik with a sharp pointy thing.
Bloodguard has a move where they do a wraparound shot that hits right under the butt cheek, it is called a Maltese Cross because the body reflexively sort of curves backwards and the arms go out [leaving them open for a nice followup shot combination] The maltese cross definitely takes advantage of the lack of leg armor in that part of the body from people only covering the fronts of their legs and thighs.
In period the leg armor worn by both infantry and mounted frequently didn’t cover the upper back thigh - the cuisse and tuille/tasset both tended to only cover the front and side because the underbuttcheek spot needs to be flexible to walk or sit. [damn I spent too much time pounding armor, I need a life!] If they were covered it was with mail goussets. I particularly liked the late style jousting armor where the leg armor was part of the saddle and the left arm was more or less part of the chest armor.
Ah, perfect - look at this diagram of 17th century tournament armor for foot fighting. See how both the elbow cops and knee cops leave the crook of the joint protected only by chain? And the same for the back of the thigh? The canned ham needs those areas for flexibility. [and you can tell by the bearspaw foot armor it is for fighting on foot, those are not designed to fit stirrups.]
