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posted by martyb on Friday June 14 2019, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the *you*-try-keeping-up-with-a-bunch-of-children-all-day dept.

From Medium article:

https://elemental.medium.com/what-makes-women-strong-2c927bf286ef

"What Makes Women Strong?
Science is revealing that when it comes to physical prowess, women may actually be the more powerful sex"

"If discussions of human physical strength used endurance as the yardstick, women would be strongest. Women have already caught up to, or surpassed, men in some sports like long-distance swimming and ultrarunning, racking up the wins in mixed-gender races (with less support and training than the men). Recently, Camille Herron won 2018's Desert Solstice run, which lasts for 24 hours (she ran 162.9 miles in that time) and Courtney Dauwalter has won 11 mixed-sex ultramarathons, including the Moab 240, a 238-mile race along the Colorado River in Utah. Dauwalter beat the next-fastest competitor there, a man, by 10 hours.

In fact, plenty of research points to the idea that the longer the distance, the better chance a woman has in beating a man, possibly due to a combination of factors like high pain tolerance and less muscle fatigability. There could also be metabolic reasons — some researchers theorize that women burn energy in a way that supports long-distance energy needs. As investigative reporter David Epstein notes in his book, The Sports Gene, when a man and a woman are evenly matched, "the man will typically beat the woman at distances shorter than the marathon, but the woman will win if the race length is extended to forty miles."

[...] "Women are also bodily powerful (the definition of strong) in other ways: Women are also more flexible. "Women tend to have somewhat more laxity in their tendons than men; they are more limber," Dr. Steve Jordan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, told The New York Times. Limber people are less likely to get hurt — less time spent on the sidelines or in surgery. Woman also have a very high degree of accuracy — and depending on the physical pursuit, that can make one athlete stronger than the next. Women on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour regularly significantly outdrive professional men. And according to the National Rifle Association's Colonel Kenneth Haynes — a military logician in the Army who taught both men and women to shoot over a multi-decade career — women shoot guns more accurately: "My units had around 20 percent female personnel in both officer and enlisted ranks. All the women fired Expert their first day, but less than a third of the men did so," writes Haynes."

So, I really wanna hear the fireworks....


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 14 2019, @01:11PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday June 14 2019, @01:11PM (#855523)

    At least in the ultramarathons, women genetically store more fat in more places, and probably access it more easily.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 14 2019, @02:57PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 14 2019, @02:57PM (#855587) Journal

    "in more places"

    Never thought of that. It probably takes more energy/work to derive energy from a larger mass of fat, than from more diffuse areas. I got nothing to back that up, but it's an idea.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Friday June 14 2019, @03:55PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Friday June 14 2019, @03:55PM (#855624) Journal

    And women use oxygen more efficiently: in scuba diving have you noticed that women go down with one tank whereas men need two?

    Oxygen efficiency is needed for the long haul: not so much for short bursts.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 14 2019, @04:56PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday June 14 2019, @04:56PM (#855647)

      scuba diving have you noticed that women go down with one tank whereas men need two?

      Our instructor (in 1983) attributed that mostly to the women's smaller muscle mass and therefore lower baseline energy consumption. They also need more lead to achieve neutral buoyancy, mostly attributable to higher bodyfat ratios. Of course, he also called a Porgie a Yellowtail Snapper, so I didn't really consider him a complete authority on everything.

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