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Hysterical strength?

Badger said:


Personal experience is that my muscles tear before tendons rupture, or bones break.

I've been lifting weights since I was 17 (23 years now). Every few years, usually while doing chores of some sort, I'll try to move something that's a bit too heavy, and feel that familiar twinge and hear that same, old sound which means I've f*cked myself up again, and it'll be another 6 weeks of loafing while things heal.

This is anecdotal, I know, but add it to the database.
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I know the muscles tear, but from what I remember the tendons or bone will disattach before the muscle totally disinitegrates. This is going back to second year physiology, which was nine years ago, so there's probably more to it.

Athon
 
I have once reached over the side of my boat a yard down to the water surface and grabbed a 70 pound outboard motor (hanging by the safety chain) and hauled it inboard, with one hand. Not exactly fantastic, but I don't think I'd have tried it if I had taken time to think about it.

Hans
 
Paul Anderson did lifts well in excess of the weight of the average car. Doubt is not proof.


neutrino_cannon said:
I'm pretty sure there are verified cases of said car being lifted, but I doubt the car was not touching the ground anymore, probably just the bit being tugged at a ways above the ground.

That would markedly cut down the amount of force we're looking at here.

That said, I don't think there's any human spinal column strong enough to support the entire wieght of a car, nor any humerus or other collection of arm bones strong enough to do the lifting.

I would say it's a fairly well established, if poorly described or known, phenonenon. Hardly supernatural, though it would be puzzling at first why we don't use all our strength (if there's all that untapped strength there in the first place) all the time.

Here's an experiment:

1) Find something imobile that there's no way (wih or without hysterical strength) that you could move. A tree's a good one.

2) Find a really good handhold.

3) Tug on the sucker. Hard.

4) You're not trying hard enough.

5) Harder you pansy.

6) Feel the burn!

7) I've seen grandma's do better than that!

You get the idea. When you release you death grip on the unfortunate tree, I predict that you will be in considerable pain. that is why our muscles are never used to full potential, their strength exceeds the structural limitations of our bones, tendons and ligaments.

Ever see the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the main character takes on the wierd tank thingie? This is what I'm thinking of.

I bet you don't exert your muscles to that kind of degree without harming the muscles either.
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TeaBag420 said:
Paul Anderson did lifts well in excess of the weight of the average car. Doubt is not proof.
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You sure about that? I thought the world squat record was just over 1000 lbs, and the deadlift record was around 900 lbs.

My Echo weighs in at around 2200 lbs, and is supposedly a very light car.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
My husband told me he and his friends once "moved" a parked car to a different place in the parking plot, just for the kicks.

I think, though, it was a "Yugo" (this was the reason why he brought up the subject, as I am from the former Yugoslavia where Yugos are made). I know that Yugo is probably lighter than most cars.

But, in general, European cas tend to be smaller than American cars. So if you are American, you might think it is impossible to lift cars, because you have never seen a small enough car.
 
I recall reading that a scientist who studied Hansen's disease (lepromatous leprosy) observed that a child seemed to have incredible strength. He could not turn a key in a gummed up lock, and the child strode forward and did it for him without a grimace. The scientist later observed that the key had left a mark in the child's skin, and he proposed a theory that the damage to a leper's extremities resulted from unobserved trauma to those extremities. Perhaps when pain becomes a low-priority, a person may able to perform "incredible" feats.
 
It seems to be down to pain, lifting heavy stuff hurts, and breaks our fragile bodies, but when the continuation of our species is at stake, pain becomes a low priority.

If you die because you can't lift a heavy object, game over for your genes, but if your tear all your muscles, and splinter all your bones so that they poke out of your skin in an orgy of blood and pain, but you live, you could still recover to breed. Because we are social creatures, and our desires have become bigger bosses over our bodies than just instinct, this urge also applies to friends and relatives. Good old natural selection.

So we can safely discount any feat of strength greater than bones and muscles can take, but we shouldn't be surprised if one day in saving a life we lift something we would never be arsed to lift otherwise, due to the extreme pain and damage.
 
SquishyDave said:
It seems to be down to pain, lifting heavy stuff hurts, and breaks our fragile bodies, but when the continuation of our species is at stake, pain becomes a low priority.

If you die because you can't lift a heavy object, game over for your genes, but if your tear all your muscles, and splinter all your bones so that they poke out of your skin in an orgy of blood and pain, but you live, you could still recover to breed. Because we are social creatures, and our desires have become bigger bosses over our bodies than just instinct, this urge also applies to friends and relatives. Good old natural selection.

So we can safely discount any feat of strength greater than bones and muscles can take, but we shouldn't be surprised if one day in saving a life we lift something we would never be arsed to lift otherwise, due to the extreme pain and damage.
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Indeed.

The so-called superhuman feats of people on PCP seem to be due mostly to reduction of pain.
 
If that is the case, i believe it would be safe to say that it's not a 'superhuman' feat, because the human body is capable of far more than what anyone has seen. However, we mearly lack the knowledge of how to perform at our peak. That is why when we see something like a mother lifting a car, we think of it as 'superhuman strength'. It's because we dont know that what we saw is mearly 'human strength'
 
Beckett said:
To my understanding, hysterical strength is a type of strength considered abnormal and superhuman triggered by desperation. It's often been said that mothers were able to lift their cars in order to rescue their trapped children because of this type of strength.

This is a subject I've long been interested in but haven't been successful finding much information on. The only thing I've read of value on the internet (before giving up my search) was an answer found at www.newscientist.com to a question about what causes a person to be hurled when they are electrocuted. I want more!

Is there any information (besides mere anecdotes) and data on the subject available on the internet or in books for me to peruse?

I must honestly say that at the moment I don't believe in hysterical strength, or rather, that I don't think what is often reported as examples of its use in action are anything other than ordinary. That is, I think the feats performed, such as those by the mothers aforementioned for example, were done by using proper posture, total body strength rather than arm or leg strength alone, and overriding fear of personal injury, but not of tapping previously restrained strength potential. Also there are other things to consider. What is the position of the car? upright? overturned? on a slope? Where is the child trapped? underneath the motor? underneath the trunk? underneath the hood? between the wheels? inside? If they are not within the vehicle, how far under are they pinned? From where on the car is it lifted and how high? What was the terrain like where the car rested upon? I think answers to these questions might help to explain just how the car was raised in each event, and, unfortunately to this comic book reader, less entertainingly so than the explanation of employment of hysterical strength. Still, I find it an interesting subject that seems to be more accepted than many of the things discussed in these forums.

What are your thoughts on the subject?
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Anecdotal evidence isn't proof. Keep that in mind when you read the following.

I've seen it.

In college I had a job at a mental hospital on the night shift. Part of my job was to handle people brought in by the police whom they thought needed to be in the nuthouse, not in the jail. So we're talking axe murders who did their family in, etc. The police would back a padded van up to a padded room, the door of the van and the door of the room would be opened.

Then we'd go in and first, get the person out of the van. The van door would then close, then the building door. Next our job was to inject a tranquilizer. This got old pretty quick, resulting in my quitting after a few months.

I am not sure if "superhuman strength" is a good term, but certainly the strength illustrated by some of these individuals was way, way beyond what a normal person might show when agitated.
 
I agree that pain (or lack of perception thereof) is an important part of the explanation of these phenomena.

If you go and lift the back end of your car as hard as you can, I can almost guarantee two things:

1. The body of the car will lift several inches. The wheels won't leave the ground, but the car will lift. This is due to the normal action of the car's suspension mechanisms.

2. You won't actually lift as hard as you can, for at least two of three different reasons: (1) there's nothing to grab hold of, (2) if there is something to grab hold of, it's not designed to be a handle, so it has edges that dig into your hand and hurt like hell if you try to lift hard, (3) you also don't want to risk injuring your back or other parts of your body for a silly experiment.

Reason (1) is common with today's newfangled bubble-cars that have smooth curvy priceless sculpture (costing thousands of dollars to repair the slightest damage) where the bumpers oughta be. But many of these mom-rescue stories appear to date back to when cars had proper bumpers, which provide great handles for lifting up either end of the car, as long as you don't mind what the rough metal edge at the bottom is doing to your hands in the process.

Take away reasons 2 and 3 due to the urgency of the situation, and use a car that has bumpers or a trailer hitch or something else to deal with reason 1, and a healthy person should be able to lift a lot harder for a lot longer, and raising the near end of a car by 6 to 8 inches is well within the realm of possibility.

It's hard to compare that kind of situation to sports training because in controlled conditions including athletic competition, most of the equipment is already optimized for performance of the task. If you made competitive weight lifters lift up weights attached to, say, a loop of 1/4" rusty steel cable (without using gloves) instead of a 1-1/2-inch round bar (with gloves), lifting the weights they lift now would seem to require "superhuman strength."

Same applies to breaking handcuffs. I imagine many men have the sheer muscular strength to break handcuffs, and perhaps if handcuffs were lined with properly countoured leather padding they would do so all the time. But pulling on real handcuffs hurts; pulling anywhere near hard enough to break them hurts like hell.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
I'm sure that many of the anecdotes are exaggerated. But keep in mind that Momma only has to lift one side of the car to let Junior crawl out. Or one corner, and less than 25% of it's weight, because the car is "floating" on springs.

I've been a mechanic, a furnituremaker, and an ironworker. Heavy objects are seldom actually lifted. One usually tips them up, and 'walks' them by pivoting them on one corner. And, the higher you lift it, the more it's own weight acts as a counterbalance. The farther they are tilted, the less weight I had to bear. So, Grandma and her armoire? No problem, just lean on it, and one side will come up.

Anybody here remember the thread last year, of the guy who moved a building by himself? He does it by using pivot points, near the center of gravity. He's got a movie on the web- his own site?
 
casebro said:
I'm sure that many of the anecdotes are exaggerated. But keep in mind that Momma only has to lift one side of the car to let Junior crawl out. Or one corner, and less than 25% of it's weight, because the car is "floating" on springs.

I've been a mechanic, a furnituremaker, and an ironworker. Heavy objects are seldom actually lifted. One usually tips them up, and 'walks' them by pivoting them on one corner. And, the higher you lift it, the more it's own weight acts as a counterbalance. The farther they are tilted, the less weight I had to bear. So, Grandma and her armoire? No problem, just lean on it, and one side will come up.

Anybody here remember the thread last year, of the guy who moved a building by himself? He does it by using pivot points, near the center of gravity. He's got a movie on the web- his own site?
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Casebro people in the condition that this thread speaks of are not rational exactly, they are not thinking about principles of lever. I agree with you, having moved heavy machine shop equipment ( 2-8 tons) repeatedly with simple iron rods and levers. Most normal people do not know these tricks, let alone someone in an extreme adrenaline or crazy condition.
 
But Mr Haze, even you or I stand a chance of needing to rescue somebody. Perhaps Grandma did tip the icebox a bit to sweep underneath it, and used the same technique to get the child from under the armoire? Or Momma has stuffed cribbing under the wheel of a car stuck in the mud or snow? And learned that she doesn't have to dead-lift the whole 5,000 pound car to get sonny out from under.

Also, I call confirmation bias- what about all those times when a child is trapped, and the bystanders CAN"T lift the weight? Fire departments and tow trucks get LOTS of those calls.
 
One confusion here that can be put to rest is the definition of "superhuman" strength. Obviously if humans are doing it, it's not really actually in fact superhuman, but something beyond normal everyday experience. I don't think anyone is advocating anything supernatural, are they?

I think at issue is that in special circumstances, things that might normally stop you from exerting more force than is wise (such as pain and good judgment) aren't there, so you really do "push it to the max".

Police and medical personnel say that someone on Angel Dust shows "superhuman" strength--but they just mean the person is so whacked out that they don't respond to pain that would normally make someone stop resisting. I'm pretty sure in some of these cases that they have broken their own bones with their own muscle contraction.

The mother lifting a car stories are most likely exaggerations. (Does a child hit by a car normally result in a car parked with a tire right on top of the child?)
 
From my knowledge hysterical strength is not as opinianated as most would believe. Actual feats of strength similar to hysterical strength have been verified such as for people with tetanus, it is a proven fact that people with tetanus have been able to produce contractions 40x-70x times stronger than normal contractions this type of strength is also displayed when someone is electrocuted. Hysterical strength may not be 100 percent factual but wether or not we use all of are potential strength is an easy answer.
 
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