Lifting Strength vs Striking Potency

can someone explain to me why you all value lifting strength so damn much in these fights?

"oh luke cage can lift 30 tons so he can beat bane whos 2 tons" etc.

but surely the power to lift a bus is not going to help you all that much in a fisticuffs confrontation. we should be measuring what they can do when their fist actually hits you. who they've hurt before, what kind of damage they do, how fast the attack is coming, what magic or energy is imbued etc.

for example one punch man will never lift an island but he will still oneshot alot of people.

flash can go toe to toe with kryptonians but never lift up a skyscraper.

in fact anime is a huge example of most of its protagonists being unimpressive in terms of lifting things but still being amazing with striking and kicks. thats because they go more by the system of town level - city level - continent level.

don't get me wrong, lifting strength helps. but all too often ive seen it be claimed as a deciding factor.

Body builder lifts more.

Boxers hits much harder.

Lifting strength is very important to grappling and squeezing. Hulk has great striking but also if he catches someone his strength allows him to crush basically anything. Very important IMHO in a no-rules fight. Boxers punch harder sure, but in a no-rules fight you can break arms, bear-hug and crush fists, things are a lot different.

This is a generalization, but characters are sometimes classified in terms of overall power by their weightclass. This usually applies only to street-level to high-tier characters.

In comics, either extreme speed or extreme strength = striking power. There's little room for technique outside of street level characters.

I've seen fights in comics ended by something like a tackle or a take down or one character restraining another just as many times as I've seen them end with a punch or a kick.

General strength also helps blocking, picking up objects and throwing them at the other guy or even hitting them with it. Getting out of the other guy's tackles, grapples, etc.

General strength matters.

Just because I can lift 300 lbs wouldnt mean I can destroy, via striking, any object that weighs 300 lbs though.

@never_give_up: I slightly disagree. Strongmen are all around more athletic then body builders (which is more of an art) and since their goal is to be as beastly as possible they can match or surpass body builders in lifting (in most cases). Still, I agree with the concept that lifting and striking are not equal. Just because I can lift 400 lbs doesn't mean I'm crushing iron with my bare hands or punching a hole through concrete.

We all can pick up a diamond, pebble or a little rock but cannot crush it with a punch or a squeeze. Striking strength has never been equal to lifting strength but lifting strength can help in a fight like restraining your target, pinning him, bear hugs, squeezing... And some other ways. A character even needs durability to withstand the hardness or durability of what he punches, like new52 flash who hurt his hand punching girder, block(new villain who slows n can stop atoms making things very hard or immovable), or we humans messing up our wrists/fists when punching concrete outta anger.

striking strength and lifting strength are 2 different things though both play nearly equal roles in a battle.

I can lift a 10 pound stone. But that does not mean i can shatter said stone by punching it.

both are important if debated with properly

Debatable, which is more important in a fight I mean.

I think that perception holds true in battles mainly because a character's strength is also usually indicative of their durability as well. The stronger a character is the more punishment they can also take in most cases.

Striking matters a lot more than lifting strength. There is no correlation between lifting strength and actual physical damage to the opponent.

Lifting strength does matter. For example if a character has enough lifting strength they can literally rip their opponents body apart if they grab a hold of them.

Striking power is more important in most cases, but lifting strength is still important as well.

I don't know why this forum tries so hard to separate the two. If you are physically strong enough to lift mountains, you can certainly punch really, really hard. After all, striking power is just strength + speed with a little bit of technique thrown into the mix for maximum effectiveness. If you don't have the strength, your striking power is not going to be as good. Technique alone can only do so much and won't aways bridge the gap. Case in point: If X can lift mountains, he should at least have city level striking

Striking Strength

Flash hits Hulk. Before Hulk has a chance top lifts a rock.

Lifting strength is relevant to striking power. Yes, a trained boxer will hit harder than a strongman. But that 300+ pound strongman is still hitting much, much harder than an average person who doesn't train their physique at all. Strength is strength. Mass is mass. If someone can lift 10,000 tons they are almost definitely going to hit like a truck. The separation between lifting and striking isn't nearly as night and day as some will suggest.

The idea that a character that can bench press a mountain isn't going to be hitting hard just because he has no feats of striking someone is ridiculous. Now, if he actually has feats of hitting people and not seriously hurting them sure. That clearly shows that for that specific character there is an inconsistency between how much he lifts and how hard he strikes. But that shouldn't be the assumed rule for all characters.

I don't think lifting strength translates directly to striking, but common sense honestly dictates that if Superman can bench a planet for days, his striking power is at least in the ballpark of planet level.

You can drop a bus on your opponent

The way I see it is this:

It requires a certain amount of muscles in your muscular system to lift something (although more muscles.) Striking uses a lot of the muscles in order to deliver that force (although notably less.) So I do think lifting (at least in comics as they don't typically rely on technique) has notable relation to striking. Although a character's striking force will be less than their lifting force.

The simplest way to think about it is to look at real life. Benching 300lbs is an impressive lift that not many people can do. Hitting with 300 lbs of force is pathetic. Average adult male will generate around 600lbs of force off a punch, and heavyweight boxers can generate up to twice that. Some strongmen can lift over 1000lbs, but they can't hit nearly as hard because of poor technique. On the other hand, I know people that never touch weight sets that can kick with well over 1000lbs of force. Patrik Baboumian, a strongman champion, once challenged Joe Rogan to a fight over veganism (lol). Below is a video of Joe Rogan blowing GSP's mind with his turning side kicks. I would bet good money that with Patrik's overweight frame and (probable) lack of technique, he wouldn't be able to hit that 200lbs bag anywhere near as hard as Rogan does. The body mechanics for good striking are often very different to the body mechanics of a static lift (which most world records are).

For comic vine, I always use Aquaman as an example. He can lift a submarine, but Black Manta easily eats his elbows and then knocks him down with a headbutt.

@alavanka:

A bad example. Arthur is a trained fighter in-universe and would know the technique for landing hits. Black Manta's suit is just durable enough to tank his hits and makes him strong enough to hit back. You can easily compare your gif to what happened when Manta didn't have the suit to see the difference in performance.

If Manta wasn't in his suit a full force hit from Arthur would likely take his head off.

@metaljimmor: Doesn't change the fact that Arthur is not striking Manta with anywhere near the force it takes to move a submarine, unless you think the Manta helmet is harder to move than a submarine. Obviously Manta would get owned without the suit.

@alavanka:

We don't actually know how hard Arthur is hitting him. In fiction sometimes someone is harder to move purely because of how strong they are even though that makes no sense by real world physics. You see it all the time through the MCU and DCEU and basically every piece of fiction from anime to blockbuster movies.

For what its worth, Black Manta's suit is made of Atlantean steel, and in the final fight with Orm he gets struck over his helmeted head by a massive, spinning turbine the size of a building repeatedly. The helmet is unharmed and Orm was unphased.

Black Manta actually looked staggered for a bit when Arthur was punching him at different parts of the fight. This would mean either Arthur is hitting much harder than that massive turbine or that Black Manta's human physiology in the suit is just weaker than Orm. Or maybe a bit of both. We have no real way of determining this.

This, for the reference of the OP, is also why we tend to use lifting feats to get a general idea of a character's strength and assume a certain degree of striking power from it. It is far easier to calculate how heavy something is than to determine how hard a given strike was, as many artists through all mediums and genres don't actually do striking physics realistically. Most characters simply have very few quantifiable striking feats to work with.

If i recall correctly from all those flame wars in the past ,lifting strength was the only argument that comic fans used as a superior when they debated Superman vs Goku...It literally changed the debate from Goku stomps with ez to Goku losing because he only lifts 40 tons and superman lifts billion times more and he wins by default...

Lifting strength > striking power,skills,abilities,combat speed,experiance,energy projection,energy destruction,insticts,reflexes,talents....It was an uphill battle from there for anyone who tried to argue against lifting strength and especially for guys who supported anime characters...

Grappling is a thing, ya know?

While it's not a 100% translation, it does have correlation to striking. If you lift a boulder, you may be able to punch through said boulder, but you probably punch extremely hard if ya see what I'm saying