The strength discrepancy between the average man and the average women is, without a doubt, one of the cruelest designs of nature. Nic Pizollatto said, speaking from the mouth of Rachel McAdams in the second season of True Detective “The fundamental difference between the sexes is one of them can kill the other with their bare hands.” Its a biological fact, and its ridiculously unfair.

However, nature’s designs are rarely without sense. Once upon a time, we, the hairless bipedal homo sapiens, lived in Hobbesian state of constant war with our environment. Our lives, like the lives of most species existing within their natural rung of the food chain, were often short and full of traumatic violence. We died often, and to compensate developed a capacity to produce offspring year round.

Hunter gatherer groups were usually around 50 people, so childbearing women were incredibly important. It could only take a handful of deaths to wipe the group out genetically. In fact, some research into our DNA indicates that around 70,000 years ago, the human race was reduced to around 40 breeding pairs. We were incredibly, mind bogglingly close to ceasing to exist.

Clearly, the protection of the life creating half of our species was a high priority. Suitably, the energy most women’s bodies put towards developing the equipment to create and sustain life, men’s bodies put towards being physically powerful and resilient. Men’s bones are on average significantly thicker than women’s, and testosterone (the chemical that essentially makes and keeps us male) has a well documented effect of reducing aversion to risk and physical danger. To this day, if people are on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and the boat begins to sink, women and children are given first access to the lifeboats.

In most of modern America, a woman’s likelihood of getting attacked by a wild animal or perishing in a natural disaster is exponentially smaller than her chance of being attacked by another human. Interestingly enough, our biology may be starting to respond to this: testosterone rates in men for the last few decades have been plummeting in the western world. But the fact remains, that as Rachel McAdam’s character noted, whatever the cause, physical dimorphism between the sexes leaves one at the physical tyranny of the other. This difference between the sexes, once a protective mechanism, is immensely problematic for our society as a whole.

So if you are a girl, and you are looking to rectify the imbalance that nature has created, maybe serious grappling training is something you should look into. What is grappling? Martial arts can essentially be divided up into three areas: Striking, Grappling, and useless LARPing style nonsense. If you are hitting and/or kicking punching bags, you are striking. If you are wrestling on the ground and trying to pin or choke your opponent, you are grappling. If you are playing with medieval weaponry like nun-chucks or swords, you are LARPing (and you should probably stop and go home).

In my opinion, which is based on some experience training in combat sports, striking arts like boxing and muay thai are not as effective for women as self defense. Boxing and muay thai, while infinitely more effective than any other martial art whose training does not involve actually exchanging full force blows with a resisting opponent, require a level of physical explosiveness to be effective, especially against someone who is bigger and stronger, which is difficult for women to cultivate and then maintain without chemical aids.

My experience has been that the only women I met in boxing or muay thai who had sufficient skills to defeat a man had at least competed as an amateur in their respective sports (meaning they had dedicated at least 3-5 years of training 20+ hours a week.) Simply put, in order for most women to develop self defense skills through boxing or muay thai training, it would require not just enormous commitment of time, but a consistent intensity of physical conditioning to maintain the cardiovascular system necessary for a person to utilize striking techniques effectively. I am going to assume that most women do not want to spend the equivalent of a part time job training like a professional athlete in order to have a minimal feeling of self-security.

Striking arts are, philosophically, about defeating force with force. The concept is to strike at your opponent with the hard bony parts of your body, like your knuckles or your knees, shinbones and elbows, and hopefully stun them by rattling your opponents brain around their skull. This is not a sound tactic for most women when confronting men, because it means engaging your enemy in a battle that ultimately comes down to physical explosiveness, and bone density, two areas where he is likely naturally advantaged.

The answer? BJJ. If you are like most people, you have no idea what this is: BJJ is an acronym for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which is a system of groundfighting, or what most people call “wrestling.” Unlikely traditional collegiate wrestling, having ones back to the ground is not the end of the match, but a “tap” signals a surrender after being caught in a choke or an untenable position.

While boxing is a sport, and its techniques are designed to work against someone of equal size and relative skills, BJJ is very in touch with its roots as a self defense system. Boxing is designed as a duel between two trained fighters, BJJ is structured around the idea of allowing a smaller, weaker person who is educated in ground fighting to control a larger, stronger person.

The UFC, a combat sport promotion that you may know from its bombastic marketing campaigns, and growing presence on the TV’s of sports bars, was originally founded in the 1990s as a way to showcase the spectacle of members of the Brazilian Gracie family (The creators of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) defeating larger and stronger opponents by using leverage-utilizing groundfighting techniques to overcome discrepancies in physical strength.

Here is one such example of a tradition that the Gracie family has been engaged in since the turn of the century. Skip to 3:00 for the clever neutralization of the roided out Kimo’s strength advantage, or watch from the beginning for the hilariously cheesy early 1990’s style intros.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of videos like this, where a larger, stronger, untrained practitioner challenges a jiu jitsu practitioner. On nearly every occasion, the match ends with the larger challenger defeated by armbar (A limb lock that threatens the bones of the arm) or choke.

The fear of assault that many women describe living with is something I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. I’m around 200 lbs of more-or-less-mostly-not fat-and have been training in some kind of combat sport or another since I was 16, but I still worry about having to defend myself. Its a big part of why I continue to train, and plan on doing so for as long as I am able.

I know that my own fear of getting attacked motivates me immensely to train. Fear is a wonderful catalyst for self-improvement. If more women can overcome the unfamiliarity of the fight gym environment, and disregard the perceived stigma towards women working out in “ungirly” ways (Is this still a thing? Last time I checked it seemed like crossfit and a growing culture of booty appreciation had made deadlifts and squats cool for girls) they might find something useful.

For the most part, its a friendlier environment than you would expect. The coaches don’t lambaste you if you flail like a palsied child for the first few weeks or even months. You are not expected to be a badass when you walk in the door. The vibe tends to be positive, and the other practitioners are welcoming.

Given the proper training, it is more than possible for a girl to easily control and submit male attackers. Check out this video of a 16 year old girl toying with a series of male challengers.

The girl in the video has been training since she was a child. She competes regularly in grappling tournaments. In order to have the kind of control she has, where she is literally toying with the guys she is wrestling, you need to have sunk significant time into training. Dabbling a few times a month will not yield substantial results. Women who train to fight a male attacker need to compensate for a very large deficit in physical strength in order to develop reliable skills. The time this girl has spent developing these skills is probably equivalent to the amount of time some children have devoted to becoming very skilled at an instrument like the piano.

Its easy to tell that the girl in this video is incredibly skilled, and is by any measure, quite athletic. Her shoulder muscles are more developed than those of most of the boys she is wrestling. However, most women don’t need to be as good as her. She goes through a gaggle of high school wrestlers with the same amount of emotional stress and physical exertion as your average Ice Cream Shop employee after you ask for a triple scoop cone.

Most women just need the ability to hold off and then obtain control of a single larger and stronger attacker. It varies from person to person, depending on size, athleticism, and how easily they can assume a combative mentality, but typically it seems to take about 2 years of serious training (3-4 times a week, 1.5-2 hours a session) for women to develop their skills to the point of being able to reliable control and then take out an untrained man.

2 years of training is a serious time investment, but its not THAT serious. Many people regularly sink that much time into their Netflix accounts, and having watched every season of Breaking Bad in a 3 day span won’t help you nearly as much in a dark alley with a sketchy stranger. Random violence is scary for nearly every human being, regardless of gender or combat sport experience. Many people will go their entire lives without experiencing such an incident, but many will, and when that moment comes, man or woman, it is better to be ready.

Here’s some inspirational music to help you begin your training montage.