Discussion Main / StoutStrength

Female examples include: Female Olympic shot putters, Michelle Carter and Valerie Adams

This trope has kind of a misleading title. Stout just means thick and short, especially short and strong.

Removed this:

• The relevance of body fat (along with body size, structure and total mass) is obvious, for example, in all of the Western-type martial sports. In boxing, it is implied that a heavyweight will quickly obliterate the lightweight while taking all the punishment the latter can throw at him (hence the weight classes). There are, of course, considerations of movement speed and, more importantly, stamina (heavy fighters can do their best for shorter time). But the sheer force of their hits, consisting of larger total moving mass and more muscle mass, hardly compares to lightweight fighter's punch. In other martial arts and in real-life hand-to-hand combat there IS a lot of variation: smart tactics, improved stamina and crippling moves can score a win for a light, agile, wiry opponent; but large people also can train themselves to be very fast, endure long exertion and use effective crippling techniques, while it costs them much less to make a mistake in a fight. So the fictional tendency of Goliaths to be always defeated by small and agile Davids is not always realistic. Essentially, in a real-life brawl, a trained stout man is just like a Boss in a video game: capable of taking a lot of punishment, unlikely to topple, and dealing out a lot of damage very quickly (which is the essence of street fighting).

This example seems to be a rambling generalization about big fighters versus small fighters. I don't think it really has much to do with the trope of stout strength.