Good article, “How did so many girls get so good, so fast? The factors are many, from good nutrition and advanced training to a better understanding of girls' athletic potential.” - Good quote In fact amongst many academic sports researchers the debate is are we reaching the upper limits of athletic performance? Are humans soon reaching the limits of physical fitness? Consistently female athletes are defying the view that margins of improved sports performance are narrowing. While men stagnate, scientists aren't particularly impressed by men’s sport improvements, it is known and accepted in academia that competitive women are still continuing to get faster, stronger, more powerful, and female sporting achievements are likely to carry on improving….a lot! "The men's records are falling by a whisker, exactly as predicted". And women? "Women are completely different, it is almost alarming." Is a quote I was told from a male sports physio that really makes me chuckle. Women's performances consistently defy many’s assertion that athletes' margins of victory are narrowing as sports science and conditioning peaks. Now in universities, the notion that women are not only catching up but are about to surpass men is steadily gaining strength especially as the ranks of professional female athletes are broadening. The truth of female power is unravelling. While we know a lot about male physiology and it’s limitations, the ‘superhuman’ physical potential of the female physiology is starting to make scientists marvel at what women can be possible of achieving. "There's a new wave of stronger girls who keep getting better," ….And it not just in cross country, 16 year old Candace Hill has just recently ran the 100m in 10.98 seconds, which is a fantastic achievement for one so young. Interestingly the only reason women aren’t sprinting the 100m in faster time than men is due to height not strength. For instance the current women’s champ Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce who is 1m52 tall runs the 100m in 10.66 seconds. In terms of heights per second, this = 6.17. Usain Bolt is 1.96m, he runs the 100m in 9.77 seconds or 5.22 h/s i.e scaled the fastest woman runs 118% the speed of the fastest man, that is significantly greater, but not only that her muscles generate 15% more power over 100m. In fact if you calculated and scored 100m sports performance in terms of height Usain Bolt (who now drops to second place if only competing against men) would not even qualify to the final round against the fastest women. The fastest male sprinter in terms of height, Mike Rogers who stands 1.77m would fail dismally to finish in medal place.
(comment contd) But, masculinists say, women are naturally smaller than men and because of this will never be as strong yadda yadda. But it now looks like that as well as female weakness is due to simply society giving few chances to develop physical abilities, the same goes for female shortness! We now know that the hormone responciple for height and muscle development, HGH is present in the female bodies in concentrations 120 times higher than that of the male, we also know that diet and activity have drastic effects on how the body utilises this hormone. During the rationing period of ww2, while the average height of the western male gained by half an inch, the western female a whole inch! The height gap between men and woman started falling VERY fast. However in the 50s when rationing ended, along with less physical activity, excesses of bad fats and sugar found their way into the diet unfortunately halted this trend (sadly in the last few years women in the US have now found their average height dropping and waistline increasing alarmingly due to this diet amongst the general group). The scientific conjecture that you can very reasonably take from this (and I am being quite serious!) is that given greater gender parity and proper nutrition it will not take much more than a generation for future females to evolve into Amazonian superwomen. In nature the female should not only be (a lot) stronger but also bigger than the male Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce if she were to be the same height as Usain Bolt would run the 100m in 8.27s and this while women have not even reached their full athletic potential. We can but marvel at the results a drastic shake up in diet and lifestyle would entail for women and humanity, how feeble all male’s physical achievements would seem, how fantastic the world would be, a society of wonder women
Wow, I don't know where to start, except to register an initial heartfelt thanks for your totally amazing contributions to the blog, all of which are music to my ears. I will try to respond to as much as possible, probably in the form of questions as there is not much I can add and a lot to inspiration to digest. It would be great if you would join up and contribute directly to the blog - it's quite safe, but I understand if you would rather stay anonymous.... Many thanks again You are a total Star!!! :)
It's been thrilling to read the recent comments from Anonymous the last couple of days - to hear from someone so well informed, who marshals her points so brilliantly, and who backs up her arguments with solid statistical evidence. I emphatically agree with her on everything (with one exception) and would love to hear anything more she has to say.
Just to get in a contribution of my own, here is a link to an article published in Nature a while back that may be of interest to this blog. It was, unsurprisingly, quite controversial when it came out. It predicts (too tentatively, IMO) that women will not only outrun the fastest men in the 100 meter dash, but that they will ultimately break 7 seconds!
For what its worth, I agree with the article in principle, though I do have some disagreements.
The graph shows both men and women progressing in a completely linear fashion with women blowing past the fastest men on the planet by 2156 and never looking back.
What would be much more accurate, IMO, is a graph showing two curves going in opposite directions.
For men, I believe, the curve will progress with increasing slowness, ulimately becoming asymptotic at around 9 seconds. I think this is actually very generous given the physical limitations of men and the high premium our culture puts on men and boys to excel in sports. Unlike women and girls, men have largely plateaued.
When the cultural change that many of us hope for finally happens, and the perception that women and girls have of their own unlimited potential matches reality, the improvement in women's performance will be exponential and dramatic, surpassing the targets shown in the graph in a much faster time frame. Given the gifts nature has lavished on them, women may not have a plateau in any practical sense.
Another thing to point out is masculinists often use a study that measured the strength of the modern average woman to be 52% that of men in the upper body and 66 % in the lower as their argument that woman is unequivocally weaker. What they fail to realise is that the same study also says is that The women had 45, 41, 30 and 25% smaller muscle cross sectional area for the biceps brachii, total elbow flexors, vastus lateralis (thighs) and total knee extensors respectively. (While women tend to store more fat in the legs so they look bigger but the sedentary women has far smaller muscles in the legs than men who run around more) This actually implies that per unit muscle size the modern sedentary woman actually has between 116-127% (upper body) and 220-264% (lower body) the strength of more active men! Since for daily function the woman will be using her legs more than her arms it is very reasonable to suggest that if women lifted more heavy objects they can have 264% the strength of men in the upper body. Women do not have close to same amount of testosterone as men, but they do have a lot more HGH and strong women of the past have shown that it is quite possible for women to develop muscle. Not only that but if look at forgotton (suppressed?) history we can see that the world’s strongest man has already been beat and surpassed by a woman before in a fantastic example of female physical superiority. In early 1900s New York, Austrian circus strongwoman Katie Brumbach released a public challenge stating no man could lift more weight than her. The man who accepted the challenge was none other than the father of modern bodybuilding, and writer of the Olympic weightlifting rules, Eugene Sandow. Sandow the celebrity Arnold Swarzenegger of his day, he was a man carved of granite. He had sculpted his body to resemble the statues of the old gods. He was considered the most physically /perfect gifted man, the strongest man in the world. Katie in the eyes of all, was destined to lose. However when the contest began it soon became apparent who would win, Katie effortlessly matched every lift done by Sandown until Sandow could only perform a clean and jerk lift that he could raise to his chest with both hands. Laughing Katie then proceeded to lift the same weight over her head and walk around with it as if it were nothing. The strongest man on the planet had been totally destroyed in a strength competition by a woman. It was shortly after this that Katie adopted the name Sandwina, in mockery of Sandow. More on Katie here http://www.thehumanmarvels.com/sandwina-woman-of-steel/ http://forgottennewsmakers.com/2010/12/14/katie-sandwina-1884-%E2%80%93-1952-circus-strongwoman/
Wow, so the strongest woman in the world was considerably stronger than the strongest man? Incredible - well there you go! I would say the name change was definitely done in mockery of her beaten male opponemt rather than tribute - just so no-one would ever forget...Ha!
And it still goes on today, except now it’s just ordinary middle aged farmwomen beating the world’s strongest men :D http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2013/07/worlds-strongest-men-stunned-by-female-farmer-in-china/
Anonymous says that women could surpass men with adequate nutrition. If you look at the women of Juchitan this has already happened, and you can easily look up accounts from travel writers. There's a quote from one mother saying of her daughter 'she will get the best of everything'. Equal nutition and exercise must also have contributed to the situations in history where in whole societies, rather than just specific individuals, the women were as strong, or stronger. Ammianus Marcellinus writes that Gaulish women were stronger than their husbands, and Diodorus Siculus says that they were almost as tall. Also, late last March, in case you missed it, I posted here the link to an article showing that amongst the ancient Shawnee the women were generally robust and muscular and the men petite. This is shown by examination of their skeletons: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fort-actually-ancient-aqueduct-08-09-24. You can imagine these societies would arise if women were culturally favoured with better nutrition and more opportunity for exercise. Increasingly, you see images of strong women in films besting men in fights, but it is rarely made realistic by having them physically robust. If this should change, and I think it will, parents and girls will have a new cultural alternative, and ultimately perhaps, a new cultural norm. The point is that these accounts and remains from the past show us that humans are very adaptable: what's normal in one era is taboo in the next. Cast your mind back 100 years and the sanest people thought exercise would enervate and weaken women. In 100 years' time it might equally be received wisdom that men can't compete: first socially ( we see these arguments now), then intellectually (also commonly heard; look at uni entry statistics), and next physically. Once it becomes accepted through the mass media, reality soon conforms. What will change perceptions and hence reality is facts, statistics, academic studies gradually seeping into the media and being amplified in films and advertising. It starts off with 'it's OK for me not to diet', then 'maybe I can try this sport', and eventually becomes 'I can be that superherione', as indeed inspired Maria Wattel in the great video recently posted.
Excellent post - Thanks! You make some very good points there. I agree that in the past we humans lived in larger social groups which allowed females to be as active as the males and would have given them access to the same nutrition and ensure the same level of exercise. Women would not have been sidelined by child rearing duties because these would have been shared by the extended family group. Together with the archeological evidence from the past, we can see that there definitely was a time when women were as tall and as strong (or stronger) than men. they would have hunted with men, gone into battle alongside and against men - they were warriors!
The point you make about adaptability is an improtant one. Although females have been conditioned to be dependant and pathetic for centuries, their innate abilities are never too far from the surface. So with the right nutrition and physical conditioning, it really won't take long to get back to a situation where women are competing with and surpassing men physically. To me that is the exciting thing - that it won't take centuries to reverse the centuries of damage.
It is not unreasonable to draw parallels with what has happened in education - 100 years ago girls were thought to be not worth educating. Today girls far outperform boys academically on every level. There is no reason why the same kind of turn around can't be achived physically too, indeed the process is already well underway. The main battle is to convince more girls to change their lifestyles. Stop reading trashy "celebrity" magazines and start seeing themselves as physical entities. Stop dieting and going to the gym to impress your boyfriend and start doing it to physically empower yourself - raise your sights and compete with him actually!!
This blog is just one small (and so far isolated) voice in the struggle. There are however certain trends in mainstream media which appears to acknowledge females as independant and physically cabable. As you say it is quite common in TV shows now, to see women entering into physical confrontations with men and coming out on top - whilst I applaud the script writers for including this, I despair at the uniform lack of realism and believability with which such scenes are executed. The females concerned are almost always waif-like anorexics, the action too contrived and the overall effect is just patronising. That said I'm sure the drip, drip affect on the minds of young girls will encourage some at least to change their outlook on life...that female physical empowerment is not an un-realistic goal...
Female physical empowerment isn't just realistic. It is a must. So, the female population needs to know about several sports, so that enough options open up for newcomers. And, regardless of choice, it is very important to keep in mind that the basic thing one must always learn is how to defend. Attacking will let you score more, but will also leave you vastly open. The better one defends, the better the chances for a win are.
Exactly because there are tons of sports a woman can excel at, we need to point out as many of them as possible, so that every woman can find at least one (why not more?) sport(s) that will turn her into a complete athlete. As far as the importance of defence goes, No9 has once again done a great job. And whether you believe it or not, she's a striker. An exceptional one.
Good article, “How did so many girls get so good, so fast? The factors are many, from good nutrition and advanced training to a better understanding of girls' athletic potential.” - Good quote In fact amongst many academic sports researchers the debate is are we reaching the upper limits of athletic performance? Are humans soon reaching the limits of physical fitness? Consistently female athletes are defying the view that margins of improved sports performance are narrowing. While men stagnate, scientists aren't particularly impressed by men’s sport improvements, it is known and accepted in academia that competitive women are still continuing to get faster, stronger, more powerful, and female sporting achievements are likely to carry on improving….a lot! "The men's records are falling by a whisker, exactly as predicted". And women? "Women are completely different, it is almost alarming." Is a quote I was told from a male sports physio that really makes me chuckle. Women's performances consistently defy many’s assertion that athletes' margins of victory are narrowing as sports science and conditioning peaks. Now in universities, the notion that women are not only catching up but are about to surpass men is steadily gaining strength especially as the ranks of professional female athletes are broadening. The truth of female power is unravelling. While we know a lot about male physiology and it’s limitations, the ‘superhuman’ physical potential of the female physiology is starting to make scientists marvel at what women can be possible of achieving.
ReplyDelete"There's a new wave of stronger girls who keep getting better," ….And it not just in cross country, 16 year old Candace Hill has just recently ran the 100m in 10.98 seconds, which is a fantastic achievement for one so young. Interestingly the only reason women aren’t sprinting the 100m in faster time than men is due to height not strength. For instance the current women’s champ Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce who is 1m52 tall runs the 100m in 10.66 seconds. In terms of heights per second, this = 6.17. Usain Bolt is 1.96m, he runs the 100m in 9.77 seconds or 5.22 h/s i.e scaled the fastest woman runs 118% the speed of the fastest man, that is significantly greater, but not only that her muscles generate 15% more power over 100m. In fact if you calculated and scored 100m sports performance in terms of height Usain Bolt (who now drops to second place if only competing against men) would not even qualify to the final round against the fastest women. The fastest male sprinter in terms of height, Mike Rogers who stands 1.77m would fail dismally to finish in medal place.
(comment contd) But, masculinists say, women are naturally smaller than men and because of this will never be as strong yadda yadda. But it now looks like that as well as female weakness is due to simply society giving few chances to develop physical abilities, the same goes for female shortness! We now know that the hormone responciple for height and muscle development, HGH is present in the female bodies in concentrations 120 times higher than that of the male, we also know that diet and activity have drastic effects on how the body utilises this hormone. During the rationing period of ww2, while the average height of the western male gained by half an inch, the western female a whole inch! The height gap between men and woman started falling VERY fast. However in the 50s when rationing ended, along with less physical activity, excesses of bad fats and sugar found their way into the diet unfortunately halted this trend (sadly in the last few years women in the US have now found their average height dropping and waistline increasing alarmingly due to this diet amongst the general group). The scientific conjecture that you can very reasonably take from this (and I am being quite serious!) is that given greater gender parity and proper nutrition it will not take much more than a generation for future females to evolve into Amazonian superwomen. In nature the female should not only be (a lot) stronger but also bigger than the male
ReplyDeleteShelly Ann Fraser Pryce if she were to be the same height as Usain Bolt would run the 100m in 8.27s and this while women have not even reached their full athletic potential. We can but marvel at the results a drastic shake up in diet and lifestyle would entail for women and humanity, how feeble all male’s physical achievements would seem, how fantastic the world would be, a society of wonder women
Wow, I don't know where to start, except to register an initial heartfelt thanks for your totally amazing contributions to the blog, all of which are music to my ears. I will try to respond to as much as possible, probably in the form of questions as there is not much I can add and a lot to inspiration to digest. It would be great if you would join up and contribute directly to the blog - it's quite safe, but I understand if you would rather stay anonymous.... Many thanks again You are a total Star!!! :)
DeleteNo problem. it's important to share the knowledge and work for girl power and female dominance!!!!
DeleteIt's been thrilling to read the recent comments from Anonymous the last couple of days - to hear from someone so well informed, who marshals her points so brilliantly, and who backs up her arguments with solid statistical evidence. I emphatically agree with her on everything (with one exception) and would love to hear anything more she has to say.
DeleteJust to get in a contribution of my own, here is a link to an article published in Nature a while back that may be of interest to this blog. It was, unsurprisingly, quite controversial when it came out. It predicts (too tentatively, IMO) that women will not only outrun the fastest men in the 100 meter dash, but that they will ultimately break 7 seconds!
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8258751_Athletics_Momentous_sprint_at_the_2156_Olympics
For what its worth, I agree with the article in principle, though I do have some disagreements.
The graph shows both men and women progressing in a completely linear fashion with women blowing past the fastest men on the planet by 2156 and never looking back.
What would be much more accurate, IMO, is a graph showing two curves going in opposite directions.
For men, I believe, the curve will progress with increasing slowness, ulimately becoming asymptotic at around 9 seconds. I think this is actually very generous given the physical limitations of men and the high premium our culture puts on men and boys to excel in sports. Unlike women and girls, men have largely plateaued.
When the cultural change that many of us hope for finally happens, and the perception that women and girls have of their own unlimited potential matches reality, the improvement in women's performance will be exponential and dramatic, surpassing the targets shown in the graph in a much faster time frame. Given the gifts nature has lavished on them, women may not have a plateau in any practical sense.
Another thing to point out is masculinists often use a study that measured the strength of the modern average woman to be 52% that of men in the upper body and 66 % in the lower as their argument that woman is unequivocally weaker. What they fail to realise is that the same study also says is that The women had 45, 41, 30 and 25% smaller muscle cross sectional area for the biceps brachii, total elbow flexors, vastus lateralis (thighs) and total knee extensors respectively. (While women tend to store more fat in the legs so they look bigger but the sedentary women has far smaller muscles in the legs than men who run around more) This actually implies that per unit muscle size the modern sedentary woman actually has between 116-127% (upper body) and 220-264% (lower body) the strength of more active men! Since for daily function the woman will be using her legs more than her arms it is very reasonable to suggest that if women lifted more heavy objects they can have 264% the strength of men in the upper body. Women do not have close to same amount of testosterone as men, but they do have a lot more HGH and strong women of the past have shown that it is quite possible for women to develop muscle. Not only that but if look at forgotton (suppressed?) history we can see that the world’s strongest man has already been beat and surpassed by a woman before in a fantastic example of female physical superiority.
ReplyDeleteIn early 1900s New York, Austrian circus strongwoman Katie Brumbach released a public challenge stating no man could lift more weight than her. The man who accepted the challenge was none other than the father of modern bodybuilding, and writer of the Olympic weightlifting rules, Eugene Sandow.
Sandow the celebrity Arnold Swarzenegger of his day, he was a man carved of granite. He had sculpted his body to resemble the statues of the old gods. He was considered the most physically /perfect gifted man, the strongest man in the world. Katie in the eyes of all, was destined to lose. However when the contest began it soon became apparent who would win, Katie effortlessly matched every lift done by Sandown until Sandow could only perform a clean and jerk lift that he could raise to his chest with both hands. Laughing Katie then proceeded to lift the same weight over her head and walk around with it as if it were nothing. The strongest man on the planet had been totally destroyed in a strength competition by a woman. It was shortly after this that Katie adopted the name Sandwina, in mockery of Sandow.
More on Katie here
http://www.thehumanmarvels.com/sandwina-woman-of-steel/
http://forgottennewsmakers.com/2010/12/14/katie-sandwina-1884-%E2%80%93-1952-circus-strongwoman/
Wow, so the strongest woman in the world was considerably stronger than the strongest man? Incredible - well there you go! I would say the name change was definitely done in mockery of her beaten male opponemt rather than tribute - just so no-one would ever forget...Ha!
DeleteAnd it still goes on today, except now it’s just ordinary middle aged farmwomen beating the world’s strongest men :D
Deletehttp://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2013/07/worlds-strongest-men-stunned-by-female-farmer-in-china/
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous says that women could surpass men with adequate nutrition. If you look at the women of Juchitan this has already happened, and you can easily look up accounts from travel writers. There's a quote from one mother saying of her daughter 'she will get the best of everything'. Equal nutition and exercise must also have contributed to the situations in history where in whole societies, rather than just specific individuals, the women were as strong, or stronger. Ammianus Marcellinus writes that Gaulish women were stronger than their husbands, and Diodorus Siculus says that they were almost as tall. Also, late last March, in case you missed it, I posted here the link to an article showing that amongst the ancient Shawnee the women were generally robust and muscular and the men petite. This is shown by examination of their skeletons: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fort-actually-ancient-aqueduct-08-09-24. You can imagine these societies would arise if women were culturally favoured with better nutrition and more opportunity for exercise. Increasingly, you see images of strong women in films besting men in fights, but it is rarely made realistic by having them physically robust. If this should change, and I think it will, parents and girls will have a new cultural alternative, and ultimately perhaps, a new cultural norm. The point is that these accounts and remains from the past show us that humans are very adaptable: what's normal in one era is taboo in the next. Cast your mind back 100 years and the sanest people thought exercise would enervate and weaken women. In 100 years' time it might equally be received wisdom that men can't compete: first socially ( we see these arguments now), then intellectually (also commonly heard; look at uni entry statistics), and next physically. Once it becomes accepted through the mass media, reality soon conforms. What will change perceptions and hence reality is facts, statistics, academic studies gradually seeping into the media and being amplified in films and advertising. It starts off with 'it's OK for me not to diet', then 'maybe I can try this sport', and eventually becomes 'I can be that superherione', as indeed inspired Maria Wattel in the great video recently posted.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post - Thanks! You make some very good points there. I agree that in the past we humans lived in larger social groups which allowed females to be as active as the males and would have given them access to the same nutrition and ensure the same level of exercise. Women would not have been sidelined by child rearing duties because these would have been shared by the extended family group. Together with the archeological evidence from the past, we can see that there definitely was a time when women were as tall and as strong (or stronger) than men. they would have hunted with men, gone into battle alongside and against men - they were warriors!
DeleteThe point you make about adaptability is an improtant one. Although females have been conditioned to be dependant and pathetic for centuries, their innate abilities are never too far from the surface. So with the right nutrition and physical conditioning, it really won't take long to get back to a situation where women are competing with and surpassing men physically. To me that is the exciting thing - that it won't take centuries to reverse the centuries of damage.
It is not unreasonable to draw parallels with what has happened in education - 100 years ago girls were thought to be not worth educating. Today girls far outperform boys academically on every level. There is no reason why the same kind of turn around can't be achived physically too, indeed the process is already well underway. The main battle is to convince more girls to change their lifestyles. Stop reading trashy "celebrity" magazines and start seeing themselves as physical entities. Stop dieting and going to the gym to impress your boyfriend and start doing it to physically empower yourself - raise your sights and compete with him actually!!
This blog is just one small (and so far isolated) voice in the struggle. There are however certain trends in mainstream media which appears to acknowledge females as independant and physically cabable. As you say it is quite common in TV shows now, to see women entering into physical confrontations with men and coming out on top - whilst I applaud the script writers for including this, I despair at the uniform lack of realism and believability with which such scenes are executed. The females concerned are almost always waif-like anorexics, the action too contrived and the overall effect is just patronising. That said I'm sure the drip, drip affect on the minds of young girls will encourage some at least to change their outlook on life...that female physical empowerment is not an un-realistic goal...
Female physical empowerment isn't just realistic. It is a must. So, the female population needs to know about several sports, so that enough options open up for newcomers. And, regardless of choice, it is very important to keep in mind that the basic thing one must always learn is how to defend. Attacking will let you score more, but will also leave you vastly open. The better one defends, the better the chances for a win are.
DeleteExactly because there are tons of sports a woman can excel at, we need to point out as many of them as possible, so that every woman can find at least one (why not more?) sport(s) that will turn her into a complete athlete. As far as the importance of defence goes, No9 has once again done a great job. And whether you believe it or not, she's a striker. An exceptional one.
DeleteAlthough I'm pretty sure there already is a post for this purpose on this blog, I think we must keep the work up, so I agree with our Queen.
Delete