Matters of Size

The glaring innuendo of this topic dealt with in the title, I will try to be mature about it for the rest of this.

Like it or not, every human body comes with its mental and physical traits - it is a lot like in roleplaying games, where we assign different stats to our characters. Except in real life, you roll your character randomly, and nothing is balanced. As you get older, you do not, unfortunately, continue to level up and get stronger, tougher, quicker, and sexier. It is more like the old arcade games where everything keeps getting harder, and you always die in the end - all you can do is rank up your high score.

Write what you know, they say. So yes, fighting hugely larger, stronger and quite often also therefore faster people should be near the top of the list. I will reveal significant details about my tricks in this post, so if you want to learn them and beat me, feel free to read on. Also I will refer to all opponents as "him" because I normally fight guys, and if you get offended about it, you are free to come duel me. But needless to say, it applies to people of all 67 genders or however many we have nowadays.

There are quite a few reasons why size is a giant advantage in many kinds of fighting contexts. Most of it boils down to very simple physics. A longer lever makes for a stronger force. Every martial artist will tell you about the difficulty of fighting long-limbed, trollish types - not only do their spindly appendages reach impossibly far, a longer muscle fiber can contract over a greater distance, generating more force, like the string of a longbow. And since the bigger the person, the bigger the limbs, there come all the other advantages, like mass. Great for having momentum behind blows and manipulating the balance point in any grappling situation. The sheer mass of muscle for explosive force generation certainly doesn't hurt either, making blows hit both harder and faster. Unfortunately the idea that smaller people are faster is mostly a myth, even though we will get to the inertia and manouverability part.

Size is strength. Of course you can be huge, fat, and completely out of shape, but even those guys tend to be surprisingly strong just from hauling their own weight around. This is clear from weightlifting tables. The more muscle mass, the more force it can generate. A person´s strength is quite easy to determine by simply looking. If a guy is big, and at least reasonably fit, chances are he is strong as hell. The good news is, while there are significant strength differences between big and small guys, as well as between men and women, those differences account for about a factor of two or three at the most - so the average guy of average guy size is born with about twice the strength I was cursed with at birth. But what most people don´t realize is that with training, any individual can incrase their strength by a factor of 5 to 10 (for different muscle groups). This gives us incredible power to mitigate our biological disadvantages if we are just less lazy. Sure those upper strength limits that each of us has due to their size, age and gender come up in olympic sports - but at the amateur level so few of us ever even get near them, that they are more or less irrelevant. Complaining about the unfair disadvantages of bigger guys is therefore only justified when the night is late, you are very drunk and you categorically must bemoan your cruel fate.

If you can believe statistics, the size of my body actually falls in the average range. Either for females of my ethnicity and generation, or for the global population including those 70% of Asians. Either way, it does not even remotely fall into the average size of martial artists in my area, especially HEMAists. Or the average size of any fighting type, except the knight of the 15th century. But size certainly has not been on my side throughout the years. In fact, when I began to train longsword, I was not physically able to effectively handle the weapon, in spite of over a decade in martial arts. To be fair, my first sword was the old Regenyei Heavy feder that weighs over 1,8 kg. I was even told this sword was "too big/heavy for me". It took about two years of muscle aches to become effective with it. I won't even begin to describe how abysmal my performance in wrestling was - which brings us to the well known equalizing power of weapons.

There are some good reasons why all wrestling-based sports have pretty narrow weight categories. Wrestling people who are larger and stronger is hard - especially if they have some technique. Sure, technique can compensate for a lack of strength and momentum - but once people become similar in technique, the bigger guy has a clear upper hand. So, if there is a choice to wrestle or not, such as when someone is closing the distance in a weaponed fight, it is best to nope out. Preferably while stabbing. If you absolutely must wrestle, evasion is a big deal - slipping out of a grip and reversing it is much more plausible for a little person than trying to overpower.  

To win against a bigger and stronger opponent, you must embrace your inner hobbit. What do you see, when little guys fight giants? A lot of evasion mainly, jumping out of the way, then striking from an unexpected place. All Masters, from Lichtenauer to Musashi, teach us that striking first and striking hard, not letting your opponent recover, is the way to go. Around these parts, we call it the "Vor" and it is a good thing to be in, or so I heard. And it is completely true. But the same Masters also tell us that the way to beat a stronger opponent is to use his own weight and strength against him, and the only way to do that, is to master the Nach. This makes it inherently harder - instead of just learning a few techniques well and using them hard and fast before your opponent can respond, you must actually observe. Predict his actions, or fish the right actions out of him, then let him move whichever way he intends and helping him along. Onto his face. Now, keeping him there, that is another challenge...

If there is the option of staying out of your opponent´s grip, seizing it will make your day. And that is not the only reason why you want a longer weapon. Not only will a polearm, a longsword, a rapier, or any other long piece of pointy keep that hulking mountain of meat away from you so they can´t grab you and squish the lifeblood out of you, but it will help in the matters of reach. As already mentioned, long arms are a pain to deal with, and when the weapons involved are short, the much larger proportion of the reach is determined by the length of the arms. If we fight with one foot daggers, the weapon is a very small contributor to the reach compared to the arm. A four foot rapier is completely another story - sure the other guy may have longer arms, but now that difference is a much smaller proportion of the entire distance between the two of you. Two-handed weapons are even better - by using the leverage, it is easier for a weak and puny figher to handle them effectively, and having to hold a weapon with both hands additionally reduces the contribution of arm length to reach. And the longer the weapon, the further away you are from the guy you really don´t want to wrestle.

So is there anything good at all about being tiny? Not much, but there are a few things, and since your situation as the smaller combatant is anything but enviable, you should exploit the living daylights out of them. Big guys have mass, and they have intertia. So even though they may strike faster due to their greater strength, it is harder for them to stop. So letting them go whichever way they intend to go and simply not being there when they do is your best friend. I will not get into incredible detail about particular techniques that work better for or against shorter people, but there are certainly some attacks that are quite hard to defend from a shorter opponent, especially ones to lower targets. A smaller, lighter person will generally not hit quicker because of the importance of explosive strength in that matter - their advantage is instead in manouverability. Lower inertia makes it easier to change direction quickly, which increases the usefulness of feints, durchwechseln, nachreisen, and other techniques that rely on rapid changes of direction. It goes without saying that weapon geometry and a good control of the strong and the weak of both weapons is an absolute must and the mistakes you make against a stronger guy will definitely cost you. A lower center of gravity also helps with stability, especially when you carry a lot of weight in the lower body.

All that I described here is more or less related to martial arts contexts. I have not even scratched the surface of any other ones. Thankfully, I have very limited experience with fighting outside of the gym, so I will refrain from analyzing these situations too much. Let us just say that beside skill, strength, speed, resourcefulness and size, real life situations have another factor attached to it - viciousness. Simply being the person more willing to gouge the other one´s eyes out can decide the day much more readily than being larger or stronger. So let us let the big guys keep their advantage that follows from us all observing the rules of not really hurting each other - because we like the big guys. But also not forget that the best way to defend against a big guy, in case you really have to, is to seriously hurt him, and not to fight him fairly. Even though self defense should be about protecting yourself as well as your attacker, that is sadly often a luxury reserved for the big and strong. Here we could get into the discussion of overstepping self defense and "equal force" when dealing with people of unequal sizes, but perhaps another time...

Let me wrap up with a shout out to all my big guys who made it possible for us little shmucks to conspire against you like this and who are always a blast to fight!