The Factory Floor

2:00 AM

Does anyone know of a good resource describing the average composition of a human body in terms of fat, muscle, bone, and so on?

elemtilas

3:24 AM

@Geo --- The Font of All Knowledge is your friend! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

Geo

@elemtilas I wish it were that easy! That article is more focus on the chemical composition of the body rather than the kind of composition I'm thinking about. It doesn't list any figures for how much bone we have or anything like that.

Geo

3:40 AM

If the average muscle mass is somewhere between 30% and 50% of the body and the average weight is 135 lbs, what does that say about the weight of the non-muscle parts of people's bodies? How heavy do you figure the squishy bits are in total?

The internet doesn't seem to want to tell me the actual muscle mass of the average person. It keeps giving me these huge ranges.

bruglesco

because the muscle mass of human beings is in huge ranges

Geo

But I just want to know the weight of all the rest of it. I only want to muscle mass so I can subtract it from the total mass.

When I add up the average percentages of bone, blood, fat, and muscle, I don't get anywhere near 100%. I wonder what I'm missing.

Feeds

4:47 AM

Sitting here idly trying to figure out how the population of the Old West in the late 1800s compares to the number of Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

Bellerophon

6:38 AM

@Geo There's all the organs like skin, brain, heart etc.

Geo

@Bellerophon I may have to go through all of them looking up their weights. This way harder than I expected.

Bellerophon

Do you need to know the mass of all the components or just muscle mass?

Geo

@Bellerophon I just need to know the mass of everything other than the muscle. I'm trying to figure out a way to estimate how strong a person is based on their weight, to keep weights and strengths consistent.

Bellerophon

7:00 AM

Surely you just need to know what % muscle makes up and scale the weight from that.

In general it's 30-40% with men being higher than women and people having less muscle as they age. Atheletes like weightlifters tend to be a bit higher, maybe 40-50%.

Geo

7:25 AM

@Bellerophon That's a pretty big range! I've seen it listed as a bigger range. But perhaps you're right.

I suppose if I narrow it down as particularly as possible, to a specific age and gender, I might be able to get more precise numbers.

AndyD273

12:40 PM

@Geo I kind of think you might not be on the right track here... You can have a person who doesn't weigh all that much be a lot stronger than a person who weighs a heck of a lot more.

Rico Verhoeven, ultra heavy weight kick boxing champion, 118.7 kg (262 lb)

Joe Wexler, guy on a tv show, 792 lb

I'd be willing to bet that pound for pound, Rico is significantly stronger than Joe.

elemtilas

1:09 PM

Actually, the second person pictured is really a lòt stronger than you'd imagine. Keep in mind, when Rico stands up, his legs only have to lift 262lbs, while Joe's legs have to lift 792 pounds. And Joe has to carry that 792 pounds around with him all the time!

@Geo -- The WP article does eventually get into tissues, though I didn't read too thoroughly. It sounds like what you really need to do is simple maths: you simply subtract an arbitrary 40% from 262 to get 157lbs. That's the (approximate) weight of all of Rico's squishy bits. Keep in mind also that much of your muscle mass is not really going into "strength" so much as "support". Most of your muscles are there to keep your body from falling to bits.

You'll have to tease out which muscles are going into what kind of strength measure you're interested in.

AndyD273

@elemtilas Yeah, I took that into consideration. When measuring strength you need to look at the external results. Two machines can both lift 800 pounds. One of the machines weighs 250 pounds, the other weighs 792 pounds. One is able to put up a 550 pound load, the other is able to put up a 8 pound load.

Though probably a better example is Eddie Hall, world record dead lift holder.

his weight: 410 pounds. His record dead lift: 1,102.3 pounds.

So yeah, weight does have some correlation with strength, but it's not the only factor

Talking to my middle child yesterday
Her: "How old is grandma"
Me: "Around 70"
Her: "Then why is she shorter than you?"
Me: "Because age isn't the only factor with height."

Nex Terren

1:55 PM

Wait, what are we categorizing as strength? Usable (functional) strength? Full body strength? Because with either (or more accurately, both) of those there's no way that someone who's strong "because they have a lot of body to haul around" is strong compared to someone who trains based on weight outside their normal body weight.

AndyD273

2:27 PM

@NexTerren That's pretty much my point. Body weight is not the important factor when it comes to strength.

Nex Terren

Agreed.

Even muscle mass... even muscle mass relative to height/frame can be deceptive, as muscles can be compact and more efficient.

James

@Green I need your abstract analysis skills for an idea I had.

AndyD273

@NexTerren I believe there are different kinds of muscle. There's fast twitch muscle and "slow" but strong.

Nex Terren

@AndyD273 You are 100% correct

Bellerophon

2:52 PM

Do measures of muscle mass count muscle we can't conciously control like cardiac muscle?

Nex Terren

@Bellerophon I'd presume so. But to provide a comparison, Google says that the average heart weight is 310 grams. I did a quick Google, and someone on /r/Fitness claimed that the muscle on a single leg was 23 lb (10,400 grams)

Hosch250

Oh man, I can't imagine being a walking jelly like poor Joe...

Also, that guy is going to have massive funeral costs...

AndyD273

3:16 PM

@Hosch250 He actually was able to lose a lot of the weight after that picture. The wife likes watching that show.

I think he lost 500 pounds?

I can't watch it, but I can respect the people who actually put the effort in and do what's needed to get healthier.

@Bellerophon Dunno, but heart muscle can make a big difference to overall performance. The wife really likes horses, and after the Secretariat movie came out she was looking up a lot of info on him. IIRC, after he died they did an autopsy for science, and his heart was significantly bigger than an average horse, which goes a long way toward explaining the power and endurance that he had.

AndyD273

3:47 PM

Secretariat's heart is the picture on the left, compared to an average horse. It was 22 lb, while 8 lb is normal.

HDE 226868

4:03 PM

Do we have a question somewhere around here about how quickly life can evolve from nothing, under optimal conditions? I almost remember reading one, but I can't seem to find it.

elemtilas

Another can-o-worms!

What is "life"?

What kind of life?

What are optimal conditions?

AndyD273

@elemtilas really really good mud?

elemtilas

@AndyD273 --- Not to belabour the point, but I'd really like to see Eddie Hall strapped into that 1000 pound weight and carry it around with him every waking moment of his life. Sitting down, laying down, getting up, walking around, lifting other things than that 1000 pound weight.

Re life conditions -- must be some good mud!

HDE 226868

@elemtilas Yup, an enormous one. I'd ask it, but . . . that seems really difficult to formulate. Might be a Sandbox question. . .

elemtilas

@HDE226868 -- Maybe a short series of related queries?

You know, baby steps?

Also: does it actually evolve from nothing?

HDE 226868

4:14 PM

@elemtilas Yeah, that might be the way to go. Although I know a lot of people are going to respond with "Well, we only have one data point. . .", which is totally true.

So, yeah, baby steps.

elemtilas

Well, maybe yest, maybe no.

I did a speculative paper in college on the nature of life. It's pretty complicated. And modern science I don't think can say definitively that life only began once on Earth.

There's some question as the origins and history of viruses, for example.

AndyD273

@elemtilas Some scientists start to feel pretty cocky about the state of their technology, and decide to challenge God to a life creating contest. God agrees. God gathers some dirt together forms it into a dog, breaths life into it, and it runs away happily barking. The scientists take their turn, and pick up a shovel. God says, "No, make your own dirt."

elemtilas

Precisely.

Also, by "origins" I wasn't indicating first principle.

Thát, at least for some folks, is a whole nother and much bigger can-o-worms!

Just that, in the physical sense of material existence, there seems to have been a time on Earth when no life was, and then a time when there was life.

AndyD273

I read something a while back that I'm having trouble locating again, but it said that a lot of mathematicians have a really hard time with the idea of darwinian evolution, where small mutations add up over time to big changes. Never mind the problems with jump starting it in the first place; something "simple" like a flat worm has so many genes that for it to develop one mutation at a time, adding DNA slowly, it would take considerably longer than the earth has existed.

This is why the panspermia theory exists; life almost could not have evolved here on earth using that model.

Journeyman Geek

4:45 PM

@AndyD273 where did that life evolve?

AndyD273

@JourneymanGeek I personally hate the panspermia theory.

Panspermia

Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan), meaning 'all', and σπέρμα (sperma), meaning 'seed') is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and also by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.Panspermia hypotheses propose (for example) that microscopic life-forms that can survive the effects of space (such as extremophiles) can become trapped in debris ejected into space...

The general theory is that it evolved "in space" and arrived on earth on meteors, comets, space dust, or "on space craft".

It's just pushing the problem away instead of addressing it, and seems way more far fetched.

Geo

5:41 PM

My current plan is to stop trying to weigh various organs and instead use curve-fitting to data from this website: strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/deadlift

Journeyman Geek

5:59 PM

o0

James

8:19 PM

@Green pay attention to me.

James

9:17 PM

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