Big, slow fighters with training?

[Swordfry]

One of my characters in my story is a 9 ft tall humanoid. He is pure muscle, built like a professional bodybuilder on steroids. However, he is very fast on his feet and with his hands. This is mostly due to having survived in the wild his whole life, trying to survive through and dominate nature's deadliest predator's. His bulk is due to magic tampering with his genes to sculpt his body like that, but his skill comes from being fast and knowing how to control his mass.

 

[ThinkerX]

I have a couple of big fighter types:

Casein is built along the lines of a pro wrestler, former 'pilus primus' in the legions (modern equivalent might be 'sergeant major.') One of the best human fighters in my worlds - big, strong, fast, and very well trained.

Kyle is big and strong, but also a bit on the slow side. He's a peasant who was drafted into the legions, did ok, but nothing spectacular, then got pressed into the 'Arcane Cohort.' A capable fighter, but not really his thing. See if I can't paraphrase something I read a long time ago...

'...of every hundred men, ten do not belong on the battlefield at all. Another eighty will be there, and that is all that can be said of them. Another nine will be capable enough, good men to have at your side. But that last man, now he will be a warrior.' (I probably really botched that.)

But Casein would be the one true warrior in a hundred in that quote, while Kyle would be one of the eighty, though perhaps a tad more formidable.

 

[psychotick]

Hi Lvl20,

You reminded me of a friend of mine from my uni days - which I will not mention how far in the past they are. He was one of the Nigel's I knew - there were two of them in the flat - big and small. Small Nigel would have been around five foot six, Big Nigel another foot taller. But in a fight little Nigel would have won hands down. It wasn't about technique, strength, speed or anything else. It was purely about fight. When things went messy he just went completely nuts (I could use another term!). It didn't matter how big his opponent was or even how many there were. He would be on them, smashing them as hard and fast as he could with absolutely no holding back and no thought of self preservation.

As they say it's not about the size of the dog in the fight it's about the amount of fight in the dog.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Russ]

Hi Russ,

Just to comment on reaction times. It's not a myth. In order to understand reaction times you must consider the reaction process. So consider that you put your finger on a hot plate. Your reaction is in three stages. The first stage is essentially the information from your finger tip reaching your brain or spinal column (for some reactions). That takes a measured amount of time based on the speed of the nerve impulse and the distance that has to be travelled. Then comes the neural processing, ie deciding that the impulse says I'm in pain, and then deciding on the appropriate course of action, ie move the finger. This as far as I know doesn't really depend on size. Then comes the last part, sending the impulse to the finger to move, and again the response is dependant on the speed of nervous conduction and the length of nerve it has to travel.

Bigger people have longer nerves. But usually the difference of a couple of inches is a miniscule amount and not noticeable by most tests considering everything else that's happening. However there is plenty of evidence to show that this effect is there. Consider the difference between sticking your finger on a hot plate and sticking your toe on one. The distance between your finger and your brain is roughly one metre. The distance between your toe and your brain is roughly one and a half metres. And considering everything else, we would expect the reaction of the toe to be slower. And there is plenty of evidence that it is.

Equally the question of power to weight holds. The strength of a muscle is based onthe crossectional area of the muscle. This is because muscles work by a process of having muscle fibres slide over one another as they contract. The larger the cross sectional area of the muscle, the more fibres are able to slide over one another and the greater the strength. But the mass of the part of the body moved - say the arm - is dependant on its three dimensional volume. So as a person increases in size all other things being equal, his strength increases by the square of his linear size increase, but his weight increases by the cube. So consider a three foot tall person and a six footer of exactly proportional dimensions. The strength between the two increases by a factor of four (two squared) but the mass of what he has to move increases by a factor of eight (two cubed).

These are biological factors that cannot be ignored. But in a fight that other advantages confered by size may well outweigh any speed or power to weight ratio advantage given to the smaller fighter, especially if the size difference is only a few inches. And the factors, of training, knowing how to fight, where to hit, your opponent and the terrain completely outweigh everything else.

Cheers, Greg.

In theory that is interesting.

But I just finished a trial with one of the top human factors experts in Canada. She tells me there is no data supporting measurable differences in perception reaction time in humans based on their size.

That is likely because the difference in time it takes to travel those distances is so small as to make no noticeable difference.

The toe and finger examples are bad ones because both different types of neurons are involved and the function of the area of the body is quite different. Nerve conduction speed varies greatly within the body itself.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I'll bow to your expert's wisdom.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Russ]

Hi,

I'll bow to your expert's wisdom.

Cheers, Greg.

She's a really cool lady and I was lucky enough to be the first one to convince her to testify in a civil case.

I am super lucky with the people I get to work with, and pick their brains!

 

[ArenRax]

I have to ask. Does size affect pain tolerance?
like a muscled/or not smaller person hitting a muscled/or not 6'7 person.
I know that when a much smaller person tries to hit me and cause me pain they fail but when my almost as big as me friend tries, it can hurt.
Or does this all tie in to willpower?

 

[Russ]

Pain is a crazy complicated subject.

I have never read anything that suggests pain tolerance is related to size, or even particularly predictable among individuals.

I suspect the reason that it hurts you more when someone bigger hits you is because they are hitting you harder.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

In my experience, pain tolerance has zero to do with size.

I've known big, muscle-bound men that'd run screaming down the road like their hair was on fire from nothing more than a paper cut. Conversely, I've known waifish young women that could tolerate pain to absurd levels.

Pain tolerance, I suspect, is partially biological, not in any way tied to gender or size, but rather linked to the individual ways our neurons process pain. On top of that is pure mental toughness, which again, has nothing to do with size, gender, or any other physical trait.

 

[Devor]

I have to ask. Does size affect pain tolerance?

I mostly agree with the others that the answer is no.

But height isn't completely random biology, and neither is your response to pain. There might still be a correlation between people who have eaten and behaved in a way that makes them taller and bigger, and people who have behaved in a way that's numbed their responsiveness to pain, especially when you look backwards in history.

 

[Trick]

Expectation must have a lot to do with it. Not by everyone, or in every place, but it seems that big men are expected to be tougher than other people. If you spend your life pretending to be less affected by pain than you really are, you will actually grow tougher from the practice so... That's my thought, but I agree that it seems to be genetic also and I've known very small people, male and female, who could handle a lot of pain.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I also don't know of anything linking pain to size. But pain is linked to damage to an extent. The more damage you endure the more pain you should experience - though it's not even close to an exact science. So if a four hundred pound gorilla punches you as hard as he can it's probably going to hurt more than if a forty pound gorilla does.

There are also a load of psychological factors involved in experiencing and showing pain. For men, especially tough men with a reputation to keep, showing pain or giving into it could be a bigger slap to their self worth than to others. Therefore they may choose instead to tough it out, and over time habituate themselves to pain. There are also studies that show women have a higher pain threshold than men.

Also different types of pain hurt differently. Twenty years ago I smashed my ankle up fairly badly. I had to walk about a mile on a broken leg which looked like it had a basket ball on the end of it. That was bad, but other than for the initial break there was no screaming etc. On the other hand the dentist's drill is absolute agony for me.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Trick]

There are also a load of psychological factors involved in experiencing and showing pain. For men, especially tough men with a reputation to keep, showing pain or giving into it could be a bigger slap to their self worth than to others. Therefore they may choose instead to tough it out, and over time habituate themselves to pain. There are also studies that show women have a higher pain threshold than men.

Agreed. I think it varies from person to person as so many things do but if you've witnessed birth, and there are definitely a variety of experiences therein, women could easily surpass men in pain tolerance. However, and this is only from personal experience and not a legitimate general statement, women often complain more about minor pain than men. My own wife will tell me a hundred times that her back hurts but she does not complain about child birth. Men seem to complain (or brag) about major pain (i've heard my dad's multiple spinal tap and bone fusing surgery stories TOO MANY times) but they don't seem to mention smaller pains as much, often gouging a hand while working and just continuing to work. That, I think, is society's influence.

 

[Devor]

There are also studies that show women have a higher pain threshold than men.

Based on my anecdotal experiences I'm not surprised. It sounds counter intuitive to what you think about men and women.

On a possibly related note, I was coming to the thread to wonder aloud if pain thresholds had anything to do with the amount of muscle underneath the skin.

 

[wordwalker]

Based on my anecdotal experiences I'm not surprised. It sounds counter intuitive to what you think about men and women.

On a possibly related note, I was coming to the thread to wonder aloud if pain thresholds had anything to do with the amount of muscle underneath the skin.

Let's remember, the female pain threshold is at least partly calibrated for childbirth.

But I've heard that one about muscle armor too, at least for more specialized strikes to the nerves. (The kind of strikes that are probably half-hype anyway-- but maybe not all hype.)

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

What's that old saw? If men had to have babies the human race would die out in a generation!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Russ]

Hi,

What's that old saw? If men had to have babies the human race would die out in a generation!

Cheers, Greg.

The truth is, it is an old saw.

The latest science is quite clear that men have higher pain thresholds than women in general.

How Men & Women Handle Pain, on MedicineNet.com

And many, many more.

But as I noted above, pain is a very complex subject that we are just beginning to understand.

 

[Penpilot]

There are also studies that show women have a higher pain threshold than men.

Mythbusters did a test that supports this.

 

[Devor]

Mythbusters did a test that supports this.

I think what Russ said is probably true, that pain is crazy complicated. I find myself wondering if the results would be any different, for instance, if they tried a different type of pain, paid out cash to people who made it the full 3 minutes or let them watch Bugs Bunny while their hands froze. (For all I know they did - I haven't seen the full episode.)

But I just find it interesting.

 

[Tom]

I don't know if this would contribute to the pain test, but women have a physiological quirk where the capillaries in the extremities constrict in response to cold much faster than men's do, drawing the blood to the body's core. So women may just be able to resist cold-induced pain better than men, not all pain types in general. And that's another thing--pain is not just a blanket sensation. There are many different types, and they all feel different. Maybe men and women are equipped to resist different types of pain. It's interesting to think about.