Is it possible to be batman

Losing means death—or at least not being able to be Batman anymore. But another benchmark is having enough skill and experience to defend himself without killing anyone.

Because that's part of his credo. It would be much easier to fight somebody if you could incapacitate them with extreme force. Punching somebody in the throat could be a lethal blow. That's pretty easy to do. But if you're thinking about something that doesn't result in lethal force, that's more tricky.

It's really hard for people to get their heads around, I think. To be that good, to not actually lethally injure anyone, requires an extremely high level of skill that would take maybe 15 to 18 years to accumulate. Where does that number of 15 to 18 years come from? That comes from my own training in martial arts and seeing how long it takes people to respond to simple situations—let alone the complexities of smoke bombs going off and people having big Batsuits on.

No matter how much training you have, when we're subjected to a lot of psychological stress , we make a bunch more mistakes.

The police talk about this when they use things called reality-based training. It takes years and years and years and years to have the poise to be able to perform when somebody is attacking you for real.

What's a realistic training regimen? I didn't give a training manual in my book, but he'd want to do specialized weight training to build up an ability to work at a really high rate for maybe 30 seconds to a minute the maximum time period associated with his fights. One of the early comics shows him holding an enormous weight over his head.

That's not the right kind of adaptation toward punching and kicking. He's got to make sure he's doing all the skill training at the same time so that he's actually using the physical adaptations he's slowly gaining. In conventional martial arts, when people take weapons training, you're doing a kind of power-strength training. What effects would all that training have on Bruce Wayne's body?

I looked up what DC Comics and some other books said about Batman's physique. I settled on the estimate that Bruce Wayne started off at about six-foot-two and pounds. I gave him a body fat of 20 percent slightly below average and a body mass index of Let's say after 10 or 15 years, after he's become the Batman, he's weighing about pounds and has a body fat of 10 percent.

He's probably gained 40 pounds of muscle. His bones will actually be more dense, kind of the opposite of osteoporosis. Are we talking freakishly dense bones? The percentage change is actually quite small—maybe 10 percent.

In judo , where people do a lot of grappling and throwing, you're going to have more density in the long bones of the trunk. In karate and other martial arts where they're doing a lot of kicking, there's going to be a lot higher density in the legs.

Muay Thai kickboxing is a great example. They're always doing these low shin kicks. It's the only move he's ever had time to learn! The only time he wouldn't be training is when he was either actually fighting crime, or sleeping. Someone with that level of obsession would be the absolute worst person to spend literally any time with.

The other side of Batman is, of course, his public identity as Bruce Wayne. You'd think Bruce's billionaire-playboy side of the equation would make this whole Bat-situation suck a whole lot less.

Perhaps this would be true, if not for the more recent interpretations of the character that suggest that Bruce Wayne is actually the mask that Batman wears, and Batman is the default personality. The argument basically goes that "Bruce" died in that alley alongside his parents, and Batman was born as a way to protect himself and, eventually, the city he lives in, as he devotes his life to a war on crime. Consequently, Bruce Wayne must be most boring billionaire ever. He makes Mark Zuckerberg look like a rockstar by comparison.

This realization is better understood when you compare Wayne to other billionaire superheroes. Ted Kord, Oliver Queen, and Tony Stark all have a way better time fighting their personal demons, and their enemies, than Batman. Unless Batman is running with the Justice League B-Team, any one of his superfriends could kill him in an instant. Half of that crew can fly, one can breathe underwater, and another can run so fast that he skips across the surface.

Batman, meanwhile, has got a cool car, a helicopter, and a utility belt. That totally puts him on equal ground with a guy who can punch planets out of orbit, or a woman who can bench press a small island nation. The only thing that gets bruised more than Batman's face is his ego. Have you ever done something that's somewhat dumb and all of your friends go along with it, but super hesitantly?

You can tell that none of them actually want you to go through with it. In fact, some of them take you aside and tell you that what you're doing is dumb, dangerous and pointless.

In fact, some friends aren't even that civil. Some of them actively tell you you're an idiot, that what you're doing is going to get your dumb a killed. Well, guess what being Batman would be like. All of that! In fact, that's basically what being Batman already is! The people who know his identity — Alfred, Nightwing , Dr. Leslie Thompkins , his own mother — almost universally disapprove of what he does and how he does it.

And that's another rub: the people who are telling you to stop are the only friends you have. When literally everyone you surround yourself with is telling you that what you're doing is really dumb and unnecessary, maybe We get it: jumping off rooftops is fun, but also maybe don't?

Just donate to charity, Bruce. If you really want to jump off roofs, take up parkour in your spare time. It's safer and more acceptable. Zehr has combined his scientific knowledge of the human body, rehabilitation, and martial arts to explore the possibility of real people accomplishing the physical feats that Batman does in the comics, TV shows, and movies.

He shared with us what a person would need to do to become Batman, and what lessons we can all learn from the Batman stories.

Becoming Batman requires a great deal of training, of course, but Zehr acknowledges that there are some people who, just by virtue of their biology, will respond better to that training than others. Zehr points out that there is a genetic component to how readily people build muscle mass.

There is a movement, Zehr says, to better understand so-called sports injury genes, how the expression of certain genes contribute to our ability to avoid or recover from injury. One such gene is collagen 1A1, or COL1A1, which is, as the name suggests, linked to the production of the protein collagen.

The ability to keep yourself from becoming injured and heal from wounds relatively quickly is invaluable not just while becoming Batman, but also remaining Batman. When Zehr gives talks on the possibility of becoming a superhero, he asks the audience, by a show of hands, whether they would like to be Batman or Batgirl or Batwoman.

Roughly three-quarters of the attendees will raise their hands. But just how long would it take the Gotham Police Department to figure out the 'Dark Knight' is really billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne?

There's no question that if he were real, eventually Batman would be identified. This is likely why out of the 2, billionaires in the world, none of them are costumed crime-fighters. Should mysterious billionaire Elon Musk ever get any bright ideas about becoming the night guardian of a major American city, his wealth, privilege, and garage full of SpaceX technology could only get him so far before his inevitable unmasking. The first step in answering that question is realizing police wouldn't make the collar; it would likely be the FBI.

Phoenix Jones, whose real name is Ben Fodor, unmasked amid a crowd of reporters outside a courtroom back in , after police arrested him on four counts of assault while breaking up a nightclub fight. In his normal life Fodor is a skilled mixed martial artist--not quite at the god-tier level of Batman, but the RLSH has stopped both muggings and assaults while in his Phoenix Jones persona.

Throughout his career a CVS receipt-sized list of major Batman felonies has accrued, including copious amounts of assault, unlawful imprisonment, tampering with evidence, and pretty much every rule of the road in regards to the Batmobile.

What methods would law enforcement employ to unmask Batman? In the "Ask Science Fiction" section of Reddit , the question's received responses ranging from informative to hilarious.