Sorry for the rant, got in to argument with someone on this topic today so I thought I'd write something out I can link in case the topic props up again.
Most of you have probably heard that chimps are 5-7 times stronger than humans. You may have even heard elaborate sciency sounding explanations as to why this might be the case but I've always been skeptical of this so I did some digging and found the evidence for this claim to be thoroughly lacking.
This myth has relevance to martial arts since people's belief in this myth often reflects people's poor understanding of physiology and athletic performance. One of these related myths is that humans are "geared" for endurance rather than strength. Whilst it's true that (active) humans have a very high capacity (though massively exaggerated) for endurance automatically make us weak.
This myth leads a lot of people to believe they should neglect strength training because it will slow them down which simply isn't the case. The fastest and most agile people in the world, elite sprinters and gymnasts are extremely muscular. As for endurance there are quite a few endurance athletes who are incredibly strong, Alex Viada and Scooby1961 come to mind and there is a considerable amount of research showing that improving your squat will also improve your marathon time. It makes sense, if you only need 25% of your strength to jog at a given speed chances are you can keep going longer than someone who needs 50%. Excessive muscle will reduce your endurance however, muscles require energy and there does reach a point where your lungs simply cannot keep up but unless you take a lot of anabolics this is unlikely to ever be an issue.
Anyway chimps certainly do have their strengths. They have evolved to climb trees so you'd expect them to be good at upper body pulling movements and have strong grips. They also have much stronger jaws than us since we have evolved to eat softened cooked food and walk upright carrying stuff in our hands.
This superior pulling strength is where the 5-7 times stronger myth originated. In 1926 a study found these results by testing pulling strength:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1373587...n_tab_contents
The study however failed the test of repeatability. In 1943 another test was performed with more rigourous methodology and found
chimps have about the same pulling strength as men. Chimps are of course about half our size so for their size they are better at pulling which is exactly what we should expect.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1374806?...n_tab_contents
So that is it for the evidence. Chimps are about as strong as men at pulling but are about half our size. Despite this reputable publications such as Scientific American repeat this myth and exaggerate it even further:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w98mem4FVQ0[/youtube]
They have taken the results of a flawed 1926 study, applied it to ALL aspects of strength/power rather than upper body pulls and rather than comparing chimps to average men they compare it to the strongest olympic lifter on the planet who trained their who life and took as many drugs as they could get away with to achieve that result. Moreover Olympic lifts are extremely technical. There are 50kg women who can out lift my at the olympic lifts despite having about half my strength at every other lift and I'm pretty sure my technique is better than a chimp's.
SA are using ad hoc reasoning to try and explain a premise which hasn't been proven in the first place. If it's true that chimps are so strong and have evolved to use this strength on a regular basis where is the evidence?
If it's true we should have at least one video of a chimp punching someone's head clean off, pulling another ape clean in half, tipping a car over, lifting it over their head or throwing another ape 30ft in to the air but we don't!
Absence of evidence where there should be evidence IS evidence of absence!
They can climb well and chew people's faces off but apart from that there is zero evidence of them being physically gifted and good reason to believe they are not.
Pushing strength has never been successfully tested and I see no reason to believe chimps are especially strong. Chimps don't need a strong chest, delts or triceps for climbing, fighting or fucking. Humans however strike with our fists, push and lift heavy things over our heads for building. we've likely been doing this for at least 2 million years. This does require strong pushing strength.
As for legs and back again chimps don't need to be especially strong in this regard, humans do! We build, we need to be able to carry heavy **** on our backs or in our arms and walk with it for hours a day. This is where our real strength specialisation lies. Even elephants 100 times our size can only pick up and carry 270kg with their trunks a feat which even local level strongman competitors can surpass.
It's likely SA have overestimated chimp strength by a factor of 30-60!
