This page will contain various articles that I will be writing periodically from now onwards. For now, here’s a sample to kick things off with a common question often used as a marketing ploy in the martial arts industry:
Between two fighters of equal skill and equal strength... does size matter?
This question has been leveraged to promote grappling as the ultimate combat technique, suggesting that with the right joint-lock or submission hold, size doesn’t matter. It’s a bold claim—but misleading and incorrect. Why?
Size matters due to factors like reach advantage and weight advantage. However, when two fighters have equal skill and strength, size matters less at higher skill levels and more at lower ones. At advanced levels—beyond black belt—fights tend to last longer with no clear winner, often ending in a draw due to equal skill, with stamina or endurance as the tiebreaker.
I speak from personal experience. My training partner, Andrew Lengefeld, matched my skill and strength for a time but was bigger and taller. Despite our parity—and my grueling 14-16 hour daily training to keep up—we’d spar full-contact for 30 minutes to an hour with no decisive victor. His size gave him a slight edge, though.
Others visited our school to pressure-test and watch us spar. When an opponent can deflect all my techniques—and I theirs—with neither landing a submission, it boils down to who runs out of gas first. If you’re too exhausted to lift an arm, you can’t block the next strike or counter a hold or prevent yourself from getting thrown to the ground.
There is, how-ever, also a thresh-hold to size-differences involved, which I would say is somewhere between 3-5 times the size-difference; how and why? For one, the human-body can handle up to three times its own weight, average, and up to five times its own weight for those who are well-trained, that is known to have been accomplished in human-history thus far; once an opponent is five times bigger, don't bother thinking that the joint-lock or submissino-hold or any other technique of the smaller opponent is going to «equalise» the playing field, because techniques are meant as leverage and not as replacements for one's necessary physical-fitness conditioning! (More on this in another article soon...)
For beginners or white belts with low skill, size definitely matters much more. The lower the skill level between two equally strong fighters, the more size tips the scales. At higher skill levels, it matters less—but it still matters!