This is an issue I have investigated quite a bit. I must say that both winniethebeer and vk got their numbers almost right. It is certainly a very interesting issue for a L&C fan (at least it is for me, hehe).
When I was 18 yo I had a friend, a 17 yo girl who used to piggyback me every now and then (good old times...). She was 50 kg and I was 69 kg at the time. I used to fantasize about how heavy a person should be if I wanted to lift a person doing the same effort as my friend. I did my calculations just based on weight proportions, but that's not how it works.
As vk said, smaller people are able to lift proportionally to their weight more weight than the bigger people. You can check the marks of the professional weightlifters, those support these facts.
On the other hand, investigating the differences between male and female strength I found a paper, a study from the US Army that was comparing female and male strenght and athletic in different situations (trained and untrained soldiers, etc). It was very technical but quite a find for me. There was some dispersion of the values (gaussian distribution of strenght) and of course some overlap: the strongest girls were stronger than the weakest men.
I also remember that men had much stronger upper body strength and still stronger lower body strength even at the same weight. However, this is true in part because women have less muscle per kg than men, they have usually more body fat.
I agree with Slevin that these facts are not depressing, it's not that hard for an average woman to lift an average man. I'm not an athletic guy, not big and not very strong but I can piggyback guys much bigger than me. I know I'm certainly stronger than most girls, to me it's very easy to carry someone that weights the same as me.
There is this general misconception that an average person should not be able to carry someone heavier, but that's just not true: an average man is more than able to do that and most average women are capable of that as well.
There is a huge difference in being able to piggyback someone for 30 seconds and to lift someone over your head, of course.
In my experience, a physically active girl (I'm not saying an athlete, just someone who practice some kind of sport regularly or just goes to the gym 2 or 3 times a week) is very capable of carrying a man up to 80 kg, even 90. Of course, I'm talking about easy lifts and not for long time. Some tall or bigger girls are extremely strong and can do more than that, but they are the exception, not the norm. Also, there are a good number of girls that aren't capable of lifting anyone bigger than them. I've experienced this, many girls have not been able to piggyback me weighting between 75 and 82 kg (depending on the year...)
Another thing regarding strenght, it depends mainly on three factors:
- Density of muscular fibers in a cross section of the muscle. You can build more fibers with training and proper nutrition.
- Ability of these fibers (to elongate, etc), this can be improved with training as well.
- A neurological factor that implies somehow the coordination of all the fibers to perform the same movement at the same time. This is usually genetic but training may improve.
I can't remember where I read those factors exactly, but they explain why people that don't look strong are really strong and other people that may look stronger aren't that strong.
To summarize, in my experience asking girls to lift, and taking into account that I don't like big girls:
- Most (if not all) physically active girls can carry an average man (75-85 kg) with no much trouble, performing easy lifts for not a very long time. A few (very sportive or just naturally strong) can perform hard lifts or do long lifts.
- A few physically active girls have a hard time lifting an average man. Those usually just engage in not very demanding sports.
- Some not sportive girls are capable of lifting men with relative ease. I would say about 20%. The rest, usually struggle a lot or are just not capable.
There are of course other factors, as someone said if a girl really wants to lift you she may overcome her physical limitations (to an extent...). I have also noticed some girls faking their inabiliity to lift me, maybe because they don't wanted to look "masculine" or it seemed weird to them... who knows.
Sorry for this long rant, I could talk about this for hours, hehe you know this is not the typical topic you talk about with your friends in a bar (at least not for some time without getting it weird).
|