Men might usually be classed as the stronger gender because they can usually lift heavier weights than women, but a bizarre internet challenge challenges the norm – in a pretty surprising way!
The ‘chair challenge’ caught on first on the new teen app Tik Tok, which allows users to share videos, but now it’s gone viral, with would-be athletes of all ages testing their ability. And the videos show that women typically find the challenge easier than men!
How do you take the challenge? For starters, if you have a dodgy back, hips or other joints, you may have to sit this one out. But if you’re feeling relatively fit and flexible, all you have to do is bend over at a 90-degree angle and place your head against a wall. Your body should be in an inverted L-shape.
Next, someone places a chair underneath you and you must pick it up and hug the seat of the chair to your stomach, before carefully trying to stand up while still holding the chair still in place.
Sounds easy, right? Well, for some men, it’s not – many struggle to stand without losing their balance. Women, on the other hand, tend to do it with ease, as you’ll see from the videos all over social media.
https://twitter.com/SamTwizzy5/status/1196946695352922112
Social media user @SamTwizzy5, seemed fairly confident going into the challenge and managed to lift the chair off the ground easily enough. But when he attempted to stand up straight holding the chair, it all went downhill.
He bent his legs into a squat position and lent up against the wall for support, but still he couldn’t stand up straight. Women, however, show they can smash the challenge without any problem at all.
https://twitter.com/maddynay_/status/1199839237178351616
It’s left many quite confused as to why women would tend to find the chair challenge less, err, challenging, but according to US scientist Jeremy Johnson there’s a simple explanation for the chair challenge differences and it’s all about the centre of mass.
(Warning: Johnson has other centre-of-mass challenges in his blog – we can’t be responsible for any injuries incurred in giving them a go at home!)
“The centre of mass for most girls is lower to the hips, while the centre of mass in boys is much higher,” he explained in a blog post. “Therefore, for most girls, the centre of mass while bent over the chair is above their feet, while the centre of mass for most boys is above the chair.”
Professor Brian Ford from Cambridge University, however, reckoned it was more to do with foot size. He told The Sun that because women generally had smaller feet, they were able to stand closer to the wall than their male counterpart.
Doing so forced women to lean back away from the wall to pick up the chair, while men were forced to lean forward, making it more difficult to pick up the chair.
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