Bear Strength

[Shadow]

(10-23-2018, 10:42 PM)Pckts Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 09:40 PM)Shadow Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 09:01 PM)Pckts Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 05:23 PM)Shadow Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 04:21 PM)brotherbear Wrote: I have watched that video numerous times. It shows the strength and wrestling ability of the grizzly she-bear as well as her courage and determination to feed her cubs and herself. Also, those caribou antlers are sharp. I could almost hear "the gears grinding" in the bear's head - bears are thinkers. Great video Shadow.

Adult predators show quite good their experience and it was obvious, that this bear understood danger with antlers. Anyway here we could see a predator making an attack without surprise element and practically "wrestling" opponent to fall down. Not an easy task to do when prey is bigger than predator. And before someone rush to say "that it bite also that caribou", I would add, that I know it and I saw it, but this was still impressive.

Still when I read that research from Russia, it is maybe even more surprising. I mean many times people talk about gorilla making comparison how many times stronger it is than a human (never it is quite clear if comparison is to average man or someone really strong and we never have anything where to compare actually). Then here we have a test showing, that bear lifts 4,6 times it´s weight and wasn´t even close to maximum. There we have one very comparable result from a bear now. Anyone can go to gym and test. 

But I think, that this is quite unknown test though. I find it surprising when knowing how interested so many are about animal strength. And there we have a 83,7 kg bear showing to be most probably stronger, than strongest man ever. And I don´t mean now about that pound for pound alone, but I mean, that how much it can lift actually compared to a man, who lifts more weight from ground than anyone else. Those scientists seemed to think, that it could have lifted anything between 770-1100 kg. Even if they would be wrong, we have a fact, that this bear lifted about 400 kg just like that, effortlessly. I think, that it is quite safe to assume, that at least anything between 500-600 kg would be possible and that alone is quite something. I think, that most untrained men weighing 84 kg would have hard time to lift even 100-120 kg. Someone trained would lift maybe 140-160 kg. Trained powerlifters (with steroids... oh, sorry, of course they are all "clean" ; ) then more, but still nowhere close to what this bear did there.

1 pound is 0,454 kg, so 400 kg is about 881 lbs.

You should read through our discussion on this starting around post #39
"The pull test showed that both bears needed to exert full force or almost full force to pull that weight and did fairly close to each others time. I have seen my coach pull massive trucks, so I'm a bit jaded there. What I am surprised about is the deadlift weight of 387 kg for a bear weighing 85kg and he did it with ease and could of doubled or tripled that weight. We have a 125lber (maybe smaller) and he pulls around 525 on the dl... Or about 54kg to pull 240kg. So very close to the Bears pull, the difference is that is his max while the bear could of possibly doubled or tripled that. So it is safe to say that these two bears are at least double the strength of an equal sized professional power lifter or roughly triple the strength of a comparable male human."


Obviously overall the bear will be much stronger compared to a man lb for lb, but really you should only compare men in great physical condition, not the "average man" because even a captive animal still is an active animal when compared to a man, animals never sit behind a desk for 8 hours a day and stuff their face, their diet is regimented and they're day consists exercise, sleeping and eating. It's obviously not comparable to the true wild but compared to the average man, it may as well be. 

Aside from lifestyle differences, you also have morphological differences that make it impossible to compare human strength to bear strength. 
To be honest, I believe men would compare far better to pulling strength than lifting strength of a Bear, but even then its still going to favor a Bear, regardless. 
 

I don´t know what you mean by that, that I should read your discussion from starting post. I now commented mostly about that research and especially that lifting there, because it is very easy to compare to humans. There is no need to make it too complicated, when we are having there a bear lifting a barbell from ground. So we can easily compare that strength to normal... should I say "lazy ass" man, then it is pretty easy to compare to someone who is more active and have decent condition and then again also compare to strongest there are. 

I have noticed that sometimes people make actually quite simple things complicated. Here we have now a very simple test, bear lifting almost 400 kg from ground easily and weighing about 84 kg. So we have there easy comparison to humans with different conditions. We really don´t have too much this kind of information about many animals, instead a lot of speculation. That is why I am in a way surprised, that this test seems to be quite unknown.

About pull tests some extra info would be nice to know. now there is space for speculation.

I'm not disagreeing, I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the different muscles and technique used to do a Deadlift (what the bear did) compared to a squat or a pull.
I also wanted to show you that a man is capable of deadlifting the same ratio as the Bear used in this experiment, but the ease of which the Bear did it obviously confirms that isn't the maximum for the Bear & the man I used to compare is the upper tier of strength for his size.

On a side note, I feel fairly confident that a Gorilla would be able to deadlift far more weight to bodyweight ratio than a Bear would simply off of it's morphology.
A Gorilla has long arms, short legs, a huge back and biceps and extremely strong hips and thus they wouldn't need to lift the weight as far off the ground and they are technically built superior to a Bear for this task, but I would never say that a 200kg Gorilla is stronger than a 200kg Bear, both would have certain tasks that they could outperform the other.

Yes, I noticed, that no disagreement there. I wanted to "highlight" this deadlift (or kind of), because we have so many testings, which are badly documented and results are pretty much always arguable. We can have some figures but everything else is more or less unclear and almost impossible to compare one test to another. Even this russian test is from 2003 and no photos or video footage. I keep that astonishing and not in the good way. Old saying is, that one picture tells more than a thousand words and it is so many times so true.

Luckily this one test was as simple as it was and they actually managed to make the bear to do it and looks like, that also so, that animals were treated ok. At least they made it lift only that 387 kg and not forcing it to go to limits. Or maybe they didn´t have room to load more weights to that barbell

I mentioned gorilla, because it is so often praised about it how strong it is. Strong it for sure is, I don´t doubt that. Still in videos, which I have been able to find, I have seen bears doing more impressive things showing strength compared to what can be found of gorillas. Brotherbear mentioned some old document, where gorilla broke bamboo. It would be very interesting to see that footage, but I know, that there are many old documents, which are not in youtube or anywhere in internet and very hard to track down decades afterwards. It is just, that many zoologists say, that gorilla bites bamboo before breaking it making it easier to bend and break. So those old footages would be very interesting to see to check things which maybe were missed when watching something with less critical view than later when more information about animals.

I can´t say if gorilla is stronger than bear or vice versa. It can be as you assume, but that is speculation as so many other things. That is why I was happy to notice this thread and that test from Russia. It would be very interesting if researchers would some day develop some comparable test, which different animals could carry out in decent way so, that they might even kind of have fun while doing it. Like those horses on video, damn they were eager to pull

But what comes to bear strength, this one test proved to me, that even "steroid boosted" men are not at same level. I assume, that that test is legit by science community. Reply