Skill versus size/strength (martial arts vs. athleticism)

[The Arbiter]

It's pretty darn obvious that having practical fight training and experience is a huge boon when it comes to... well... winning fights. A skilled fighter will beat a novice in their weight class with no problems.

But weight classes do exist for a reason.

My question is: How much of a raw physicality gap can skill actually overcome? When does a size/strength/athletic advantage become just too large and no amount of honed skill can reasonably allow you to take a /majority/ of fights against them?

How small can an extremely talented and well rounded, world class martial artist be and still win more often then not against freak athletes?

I'm talking people with body types like Prime versions of Shaq, Brock Lesnar or high end pro NFL monsters. People well over 6 feet and 250lbs+ (at minimum) who maintain healthy athletic lifestyles with good genes but NO fighting experience at ALL.

Yes, I know Shaq and Brock have fight experience. I mean if that were wiped out and only their prime bodies and physical health were left. A blank slate super huge athlete like them.

Octagon setting, but no rules.

[Otto Gruenwald]

Unfortunately, skill can only go some ways. Sure, it allows a weaker person to defeat a stronger unskilled person, but there's a limit. A 100 pound guy isn't beating a 200 pound guy. All the martial arts knowledge in the world won't let you beat a grizzly bear.

[The Arbiter]

Unfortunately, skill can only go some ways. Sure, it allows a weaker person to defeat a stronger unskilled person, but there's a limit. A 100 pound guy isn't beating a 200 pound guy. All the martial arts knowledge in the world won't let you beat a grizzly bear.

That's the point of the thread. We all understand the basic idea of that, but where/when does it start to take effect? Just how much bigger then you do they have to be before they start winning a majority?

Can GSP beat Shaquille etc? Or some super athlete in the NFL?

[Sharpandpointies]

Good luck working this out, is what I can say. :P Size is just one of a lot of factors that tend to work with each other. Is it one of the IMPORTANT factors? Sure. But is there a synergy? Also, sure.

What follows is anecdotal. So not proof but just to ramble around to my point.

A ways back, I was in a school where we did heavy/often full-contact stuff (I'm too 'not young' and busted up for that crap now). We weren't trying to kill each other, but we were beating each other up pretty badly -- and stupidly -- with no more protection than MMA gloves and mouthguards. People got KO'ed, bones were broken (not often, thank god), etc. That's not me bragging, that's me shaking my head at the dumbness of it all, though to be honest it did teach quite a bit. Anyway. We didn't have weight classes, there were only about a dozen (Edit: thinking back, less than that) of us actively participating in this madness.

I was one of the smaller guys in the club. Most of them were about 5'11" - 6'1", weighing between 190 and 230. The shorter guy, who was an inch under me, still outweighed me by about 25 lbs, most of it muscle, and had a lot more time under his metaphorical belt doing this kind of stuff. I was and still am about 5'9" and 150 - 155 lbs (though my body fat is ridiculously low, so it's almost all bone and muscle). AND only experienced people were allowed to spar, so people knew how to hit and protect themselves.

Needless to say, I was getting beat up a lot (my wife was...not pleased).

However, I was the only person with any training in grappling (seven years of judo), and I discovered something: if I could get my hands on these big lunks -- who had a lot of good, solid striking ability -- I could relatively easily take them down and then wreck them on the ground. I kid you not. I've hit the ground with people who outweighed me by 60, 70 lbs and ended things in about five seconds. Sometimes it would take longer, but I'd shut down their attempts to strike (it's hard on the ground), worm my way into position, then choke 'em out or apply leverage to whatever limb they had given to me by trying to awkwardly hit me.

These guys were fighters. Not 'Mike Tyson', but they had the same level of contact experience as me, and years and years of training in club where we did unrehearsed resistance training, that kind of thing, rather than forms-forms-forms. They found this really interesting, and suddenly lots wanted to learn to grapple. I found it really interesting and surprising as well; the first time I hit the ground (I'd like to say 'mats', but it was linoleum flooring) with a huge guy, I damn near killed him because I was working with the idea he was going to wreck my ****...and he was nowhere close to that. I slammed him down (osoto gari, if anyone knows their Japanese throws) from a 'clinch' and slapped a choke on waaaay too fast while his brain was still trying to catch up to what happened.

Was a huge shock. For both of us.

One of these dudes, however -- the biggest guy -- I'd take him on and end up losing after about 2 minutes because I'd gas out. He had zero actual grappling training, but he'd been in LOTS of fights in his life (on 'Teh Streetz') and knew how to use his ~230 lbs weight. It was impossible for me to take him.

However, another one -- a 240 lbs, 6' monster, chunky but still really strong -- I choked out three times in a row, starting facing him just out of arm's reach, both of us on our knees. And using the exact same choke, slapped on from the moment he reached for me. This isn't a brag either -- dude had scratch-zero experience with this kind of thing, so it's not like I was doing anything awesome.

By contrast, there was a 130 lbs young lady there who would lose to everyone...but give them all HUGE amounts of trouble because she had all of three years of judo experience. They'd eventually get her, but they'd have a hell of a time because she had skill and they didn't (and we were into the level of 'can just reach up and peel her arms off my neck if she's trying to choke them'). Ironically, she made me work harder than a lot of the bigger guys because she knew what she was doing (and I didn't have 100 lbs on her).

And once one of the other guys -- 6', 190 lbs -- started training with me regularly and taking his grappling seriously, it rapidly got harder and hard to make him tap. We'd fight like maniacs every week, starting standing with striking but grappling fully allowed, and it felt like every time I needed to pull out something new to sub the guy if we hit the ground. I recall him beating me once before the club kind of fell apart (he also wrecked my knee in a standing situation, but that was at least partly my fault...).

Heck, even the other guys who didn't train as hardcore with me (I started running a grappling class because I saw there was a hole in our training) made things more difficult because they had some experience after losing to me a bunch of times. They LEARNED. And learned to use their weight better. I'd still beat them, but it would take longer, and I could see that eventually they'd learn to leverage their size in ways that would make things REALLY difficult, like the dude who was sooooo much bigger than me and just had a lot of experience in rough-and-tumble stuff.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that we can likely find EXAMPLES of 'size mattering waaaaay too much', but coming up with some exact idea of 'how much is that much?' is going to be nigh-impossible, due to all of the other factors that link in with it. Some completely unskilled tekla? Sure, a little, skilled guy (edit: with experience fighting) is going to run rings around him and hurt him badly. Someone who is athletic but unskilled? Narrows the potential size gap somewhat. Someone who is athletic and skilled in a single venue of fighting? Narrows the potential size gap further. Etc.

Also, one must consider the venue as well. Reach matters far more in, say, striking than it does in grappling.

tl;dr: There's just too much, in my opinion, to nail down 'when too much is too much'. One can only say 'at some point, it will be', and that point will depend on the people in question.

Mileage, it doth vary.

[Sharpandpointies]

Before people figure I'm tooting my own horn as the Chosen One of Grappling, I'll note that roughly at the same time as this I visited a SAMBO school to experience that particular style, run by an ex-Russian army guy who was one of the top Judo and SAMBO players in the world (Igor Yakimov, IIRC). His classes were brutal.

Rolling with some of his students -- roughly my size, because he had a big enough class we could do that -- was absolute HELL, and it was all I could do not to get subbed. They were mildly impressed that I managed that much (basically fighting defensively the whole time).

That's what happens when it's '15 years No Judo, and the cardio has dropped somewhat'.

[big_adventure]

Good luck working this out, is what I can say. :P Size is just one of a lot of factors that tend to work with each other. Is it one of the IMPORTANT factors? Sure. But is there a synergy? Also, sure.

What follows is anecdotal. So not proof but just to ramble around to my point.

A ways back, I was in a school where we did heavy/often full-contact stuff (I'm too 'not young' and busted up for that crap now). We weren't trying to kill each other, but we were beating each other up pretty badly -- and stupidly -- with no more protection than MMA gloves and mouthguards. People got KO'ed, bones were broken (not often, thank god), etc. That's not me bragging, that's me shaking my head at the dumbness of it all, though to be honest it did teach quite a bit. Anyway. We didn't have weight classes, there were only about a dozen of us actively participating in this madness.

I was one of the smaller guys in the club. Most of them were about 5'11" - 6'1", weighing between 190 and 230. The shorter guy, who was an inch under me, still outweighed me by about 25 lbs, most of it muscle, and had a lot more time under his metaphorical belt doing this kind of stuff. I was and still am about 5'9" and 150 - 155 lbs (though my body fat is ridiculously low, so it's almost all bone and muscle). AND only experienced people were allowed to spar, so people knew how to hit and protect themselves.

Needless to say, I was getting beat up a lot (my wife was...not pleased).

However, I was the only person with any training in grappling (seven years of judo), and I discovered something: if I could get my hands on these big lunks -- who had a lot of good, solid striking ability -- I could relatively easily take them down and then wreck them on the ground. I kid you not. I've hit the ground with people who outweighed me by 60, 70 lbs and ended things in about five seconds. Sometimes it would take longer, but I'd shut down their attempts to strike (it's hard on the ground), worm my way into position, then choke 'em out or apply leverage to whatever limb they had given to me by trying to awkwardly hit me.

These guys were fighters. Not 'Mike Tyson', but they had the same level of contact experience as me, and years and years of training in club where we did unrehearsed resistance training, that kind of thing, rather than forms-forms-forms. They found this really interesting, and suddenly lots wanted to learn to grapple. I found it really interesting and surprising as well; the first time I hit the ground (I'd like to say 'mats', but it was linoleum flooring) with a huge guy, I damn near killed him because I was working with the idea he was going to wreck my ****...and he was nowhere close to that. I slammed him down (osoto gari, if anyone knows their Japanese throws) from a 'clinch' and slapped a choke on waaaay too fast while his brain was still trying to catch up to what happened.

Was a huge shock. For both of us.

One of these dudes, however -- the biggest guy -- I'd take him on and end up losing after about 2 minutes because I'd gas out. He had zero actual grappling training, but he'd been in LOTS of fights in his life (on 'Teh Streetz') and knew how to use his ~230 lbs weight. It was impossible for me to take him.

However, another one -- a 240 lbs, 6' monster, chunky but still really strong -- I choked out three times in a row, starting facing him just out of arm's reach, both of us on our knees. And using the exact same choke, slapped on from the moment he reached for me. This isn't a brag either -- dude had scratch-zero experience with this kind of thing, so it's not like I was doing anything awesome.

By contrast, there was a 130 lbs young lady there who would lose to everyone...but give them all HUGE amounts of trouble because she had all of three years of judo experience. They'd eventually get her, but they'd have a hell of a time because she had skill and they didn't (and we were into the level of 'can just reach up and peel her arms off my neck if she's trying to choke them'). Ironically, she made me work harder than a lot of the bigger guys because she knew what she was doing (and I didn't have 100 lbs on her).

And once one of the other guys -- 6', 190 lbs -- started training with me regularly and taking his grappling seriously, it rapidly got harder and hard to make him tap. We'd fight like maniacs every week, starting standing with striking but grappling fully allowed, and it felt like every time I needed to pull out something new to sub the guy if we hit the ground. I recall him beating me once before the club kind of fell apart (he also wrecked my knee in a standing situation, but that was at least partly my fault...).

Heck, even the other guys who didn't train as hardcore with me (I started running a grappling class because I saw there was a hole in our training) made things more difficult because they had some experience after losing to me a bunch of times. They LEARNED. And learned to use their weight better. I'd still beat them, but it would take longer, and I could see that eventually they'd learn to leverage their size in ways that would make things REALLY difficult, like the dude who was sooooo much bigger than me and just had a lot of experience in rough-and-tumble stuff.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that we can likely find EXAMPLES of 'size mattering waaaaay too much', but coming up with some exact idea of 'how much is that much?' is going to be nigh-impossible, due to all of the other factors that link in with it. Some completely unskilled tekla? Sure, a little, skilled guy is going to run rings around him and hurt him badly. Someone who is athletic but unskilled? Narrows the potential size gap somewhat. Someone who is athletic and skilled in a single venue of fighting? Narrows the potential size gap further. Etc.

Also, one must consider the venue as well. Reach matters far more in, say, striking than it does in grappling.

tl;dr: There's just too much, in my opinion, to nail down 'when too much is too much'. One can only say 'at some point, it will be', and that point will depend on the people in question.

Mileage, it doth vary.

To throw a little support in there: my daughter took a few years of judo. It was kids stuff - taught by a legit instructor, but just once a week for 2 and a half hours. She was mid height but very thin for the class. But I taught her about balance - what I'd learned in my years of JJ and gifted her with very strong hands (from climbing). And she would dismantle everyone in the class. She would literally toy with them, as she put it, so they wouldn't feel bad. When she weighed under 30kgs, I watched her utterly dominate kids weighing 50kgs, and it was all through skill, balance and hand strength.

[Sharpandpointies]

Good stuff, that. I feel all kids should take a little judo. ^_^

For me, one reason I absolutely dominated big people without skill is the same reason a skilled striker dominates someone without any real experience striking in a striking contest: people who don't know how to do something, who have no experience doing something, tend to do what I call 'Freeze or Flail'™.

People who haven't trained in something will need to think before they act. Not only does it mean they make poor choices (zero experience), but it means their bodies will either stop dead (freeze) or just randomly thrash around or 'try stuff' (flail) while they try to figure out what to do next (and normally the wrong thing). Meanwhile, someone with real skill and experience isn't 'thinking' about their next move, they're simply moving -- they just react to or even preempt everything the other guy is doing, moving from situation to situation seamlessly (be that slamming home hits while interrupting the opponent's attempts, or shutting down the opponent while getting position and moving toward whatever submission happens to present itself at the time, and being flexible to change directions without worrying about 'a plan').

To the inexperienced guy, it can feel like the other guy is moving with such speed that they're 'blitzing' in real life. They're not -- they don't move any huge amounts FASTER than another person, really. They just don't have the same kinds of 'stops' or pauses people put in their motions (or between motions), and move more smoothly in a relaxed fashion. And with better timing, or 'stealing' the timing from the other guy. And more efficiently, without wasted motion.

And that's real speed.

But having been on both ends of that spectrum -- the experienced guy and the inexperienced, 'freeze or flail' guy -- I can say it can be unnerving to the person who seems 'slower'. **** just...happens, and it's impossible to follow.

It's the whole four levels of competence thing again, which applies (I feel) to everything, not just fighting:

1. Unconscious Incompetence: you don't know that you suck (this is where Freeze or Flail exists);
2. Conscious Incompetence: you know you suck (more 'freeze' than 'flail' here, I feel, because 'too much trying to plan');
3. Conscious Competence: you can think your way through doing something (which is better than the first two, but);
4. Unconscious Competence: you just do it, and probably don't fully remember what you did to get where you were going (ie, do you remember exactly everything you do when you're driving a car once you're good at it? No).

[big_adventure]

To my experience, VASTLY superior skill is probably worth 20% or so in mass, more if we're talking about someone who is simply COMPLETELY untrained - but that level of "untrained" is hard to have in real life.

The issue is this: imagine an an NFL offensive tackle, guys who average over 2M tall, and mass over 130kg, are ALSO very skilled at using their preternaturally quick hands to keep phenomenally athletic monsters off their bodies and off balance, and are strong enough to do things like squat 600 or more pounds and bench 400 or more. So even if he's never been in an actual fight, he has the required skills to make life difficult on someone who has trained for that, and the strength to make even a glancing shot very dangerous.

Shaq may have never been in a legit fist fight in his life, but in his prime he was spending hours a day pounding his 150+kg, 2m15 body into and through other world-class athletes. It's worth something - it's not the same thing as having legitimately no experience at all.

Another example: in my first year at university, one night, after having a few drinks, a friend and I started wrestling. He was a championship level high school wrestler, who was perhaps 5'8" and weighed 150 lbs or so. At that time, I'd gone through some injuries, and my form from my days playing football and basketball was lax. This was before I started boxing, shodokan and jiujutsu, but I had good experience from sports and some left over experience from some offbrand karate training when I was a kid. I was 6'2" and weighed about 200lbs, and I was more intoxicated in this case, so no edge there. As we start, he goes in deep for a textbook 2 leg takedown on me, and nailed it - he was quick and knew what he was doing. And... I proceeded to simply step forward - the match ended in seconds with me sitting on his chest. Had I wanted to do worse, I trivially could have. But size was simply too much edge - he never could have done anything about it.

[wjowski]

Size can only get you so far if you don't know what to do with it.

[Nik Hasta]

I'm less experienced and much more out of practice than others in here but I can speak a little to the experience vs size thing from a few examples.

Back when I was 21 and in the best shape of my life (this was off the back of University where I was doing martial arts three times a week + breakdancing twice a week + physical theatre five days a week + being completely teetotal) I started at a local Judo club after briefly moving back home with my family to save for moving to the capital. I am 6'2" and would have been around... 185 - 190 or something?

These days I'm like just under 210 and nowhere near as buff. Ah... I should go back to training. XD

Anyhow, I was older than the rest of the class, most of them being around 16 - 19 and, generally, much less experienced than me, so I got put with the teachers a lot. One of them was a bit shorter than me (maybe 5'11") and in classic "fit" shape, while the other guy was maybe 6'1" and had to be in the region of like 250 lbs or above and not exactly in the ideal physical shape. I would do randori and ground work with both of them and while they both outskilled me by some way the sheer weight difference of bigger trainer made him damn near impossible to throw. He could just plant himself with such authority that disrupting his balance was super tough. He also super knew how to use his weight effectively when on the ground.

Big dude was slow and a little ponderous but his legs were mad strong and he could just go defensive while I wore myself out on him. I could throw the other teacher from time to time but the sheer weight and size of the other guy made him a much harder matchup for me.

[Shellhead]

As a teenager, I was on the school wrestling team for three years. So I can only speaking about grappling with any real knowledge. Weight class was definitely important, but in actual practice, the better wrestler could still potentially beat someone who was several weight classes heavier. Our coach was a short, skinny guy in his late 20s, and he had also had a black belt in karate. One practice, he put on an amazing demonstration to emphasize that size wasn't everything. He wrestled the entire team, one at a time, in rapid succession and without breaks, going from heaviest to lightest. However, each match was either one minute long, or until the first successful takedown by either wrestler. He took down everybody who outweighed him, and it wasn't until he was tired and got to the quick, smaller guys that he finally got taken down a couple of times. Of course, that restriction made a big difference. If he had to go several minutes each against the heaviest guys, it would have been a hard workout and he wouldn't have gotten through to everybody. When it was my turn, I didn't fall for any of his feints and managed to dodge his first two shots at my legs. But he was just too fast and got me the third time.