Sunday, 23 September 2012

Women's technical advantages

Continuing to fulfil my promises, I 'll now analyse what technical advantages women have over men and how they occur.

First of all, it's a myth that "men are stronger". They just look bigger. Keep in mind that size isn't everything. Actually, the strength of a muscle is calculated with the following multiplication: size*quality. So, what is muscle quality? It's the pureness of the muscle mass. Testosterone has a big disadvantage that has an effect here: it is fat-friendly. So it attracts fat cells as it flows through the body, but these fat cells often can't get past all the gaps, so they stick in between the muscle fibres. And this is how the muscles get to look bigger without becoming stronger. This also explains why "pure testosterone" is, as I said in the doping article, a myth, as far as it goes for doping. And apart from all these, there also is that experiment a team of Swedish physiologists did, which proves that the female hormones actually protect the muscles (contrary to what masculinists scream all over the planet). They found a man and a woman of the same age, same height, same weight and same muscle mass percentage and told them to armwrestle. Not only did the woman win, but the man's bicep got ripped in two! The contestants were also wearing a special piece of hormone-monitoring equipment, which proved all the fat-friendliness of testosterone, while also showing that estradiol is a thinner liquid than testosterone, so estradiol not only keeps fat out of the muscles, but it also lubricates the muscle cells a lot more efficiently, which is why women can handle heavier training, while men often have to deal with muscle injuries (ruptures etc). But, no matter what your gender is, it is good to keep in mind that everything has its limits. Even the best cars break down at some time. Just like this, even the clearest muscles can't take any kind of training. How will you deal with this? Listen to your body. Plan your training according to how you feel your muscles. If you set your targets too high, you are at risk of a muscle injury. If you set them too low, you won't progress as fast as you can. (Yes, I understand that not every single girl/woman has or can buy the equipment needed for measuring hormone ratios... But if you have such equipment, keep in mind that, the more female your ratio is, the heavier the training you can handle with no problems.)

Proper sports though aren't all about strength, are they? Don't worry for this, girls! We have more advantages than just the ability to gain more strength (which in fact is just the tip of the iceberg). A very important advantage of estradiol is its conductivity. And if you wonder how this helps, I may remind you how our nerve system works. Or did you remember already that it works with electric signals? And exactly because these signals aren't very intense in any case, it's very important that we have estradiol which lets us enjoy a more efficient transportation of nerve signals (they travel much faster and do not have that much loss, compared to what happens in men). The better speed helps us react faster (training helps this even more by making the muscle cells more elastic and therefore the muscle more flexible, that's also how we are more flexible than men, in case you wondered) and the better signal end quality helps accuracy, which is extremely important if you want to perform difficult techniques or just aim very accurately (both things are essential in certain sports). A well planned training schedule also helps a lot with technique, because strong muscles that haven't surpassed their limits are very easy to handle when accuracy is more important than strength (i.e. a pass in football).

Many people think that strong athletes are artless, or technically advanced athletes are weak. Well, this is wrong, especially for women. Some strong men have no technique, I 've seen it. Some weak men are more accurate than these strong men, I 've seen it too. But there also are many weak men with no real technical skills, while most women do a great job combining strength (or the margin to gain it) and technique. One of the most important reasons for these differences in the ability to combine these two things is a thing we call "skeleton geometry", or more politely, "body infrastructure". This basically has to do with how the joints fold. The scientists still haven't found the exact reasons, but the more female your hormone ratio is, the straighter your joints fold. And this is a lot more important than it might sound. If you paid attention to physics lessons when at school, you should remember the lever law. Taking the bicep as an example, the lever is the forearm, the pulling force is the bicep's strength and the movement base obviously is the joint. So if the joint folds straight, the pulling force is applied vertically to the base's axis, so it sees no angle resistance, therefore the bicep's strength is fully used and the bicep itself doesn't have angular frictions to face against the arm bone it sits on. Do not get confused with this though. Most men's joints look good with bare eye, but they always have that slight inclination which may not be easily visible, but puts quite a big hurdle against men's muscle efficiency, which mostly affects accuracy though, as those angular frictions don't let the corresponding muscle work as it should, even though the muscle owner might not sense them.

Another technical advantage we have over men is our better breath system. Men's lungs are sometimes bigger but always much less efficient. Science hasn't figured exactly how this happens yet, but again the more feminine you are, the better you do. So it's not a miracle that the worst female football players cover more distance per match than the best males. I 've never seen a male football player cover more than 12,5Km, nor have I seen a female football player cover less than 14,5Km. Well, this (at least) 2Km gap isn't a result of some weird coincidence. (Note that I am comparing pros with pros. Amateurs aren't trained correctly, especially female amateurs, who are used by FIFA for nothing else than communicational reasons. Sad thing is that some of these female amateurs are labelled as "pros", just so that people don't discover the real professional football. This is also why the real professional women's teams have no internet sites, nor does their organising authority, which is named Women's UEFA but is totally irrelevant to Blatter's and Platini's advertisement companies. I 'll explain more on this at some time.)

Another technical advantage I mentioned above is flexibility, and I also explained how it occurs. I don't think I need to add anything on this topic. Just one name: Chloe Bruce. I think she's a good example of female flexibility. Her signature move (Scorpion kick) isn't doable by men.

And from all these, there is something else that occurs. A properly trained woman can and will run faster than any man in the universe. The straight joints help the most with speed, but the better muscle control is also very important, while the lubrication given by estradiol to the muscles helps maintain great speed for longer without weird pains. Ah, and as I mentioned pain, we also have better pain thresholds. This has been proved because pain can be measured, and childbirth pain isn't "a different kind of pain", so if a masculinist tells you otherwise, you can go scientific on him.

Apart from all these technical advantages of ours, we also have two mental advantages over men. Concentration skill and sense of discipline. Neuroscientists haven't figured out how the concentration skill ends up about 3 times better in women than in men, but the difference of skill itself has been proved multiple times. On the other hand, you 'll see that women's teams give out a more solid image than men's teams, and this totally has to do with the sense of discipline. While a male football player will go for dribbling everyone and scoring a goal at all costs, a female football player will quickly assess the situation and do something that actually makes sense and perfectly fits what the team's trainer has asked for in the dressing room.

If there is something you 'd like to add on this topic, you can leave comments. Thanks.