What is 'center of gravity' challenge? TikTok trend sees men falling flat on faces as women emerge winners
A brand new gender-based TikTok challenge seemingly enables women to ensure their male contenders fall flat on their faces while they themselves remain unscathed.
Often done between couples, the TikTok center of gravity challenge requires both participants to kneel on all fours. They are then required to remove their arms from the floor and cross them behind their backs, and the most probable outcome is that the women stay up while the men smash their faces into the ground.
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Of course, it may seem confusing at first. Several questions need to be answered: How do you perfectly execute the center of gravity trick? Why do men fall more often than women while performing the challenge?
"It’s very simple. Kneel on all fours, with your pelvis aligned with your knees. Then quickly remove your arms, putting them behind your back," Harry Ainsworth explained in The Tab. "From this point, you’ll either stay up and manage to balance (which is what happens with most women), or you’ll completely smash your face on the floor."
Ainsworth suggested finding some carpet or a pillow to use as a cushion underneath while attempting the challenge, especially if you're a man and want to avoid injury at all costs. Experts have suggested that discrepancy can be explained by the natural center of gravity difference between men and women. On a general scale, men are built longer and larger than women, and their proportions don't accommodate such a maneuver as compared to the anatomy of women.
Nonetheless, there are also a number of individual factors that come into play, such as core strength and length of limbs, and so it's quite possible that some women will fall and some men will stay up. Speaking to The Sun, scientist Jeremy Johnson explained that women have a center of mass more aligned with their hips which makes such challenges easier for them. “The center of mass for most girls is lower to the hips, while the center of mass in boys is much higher," he told the paper.
Earlier this month, we had reported how the "Silhouette Challenge" on TikTok that originally began to trend as a way to empower women to feel confident about their bodies had become a way for Internet creeps to sneak looks at naked women. The trend saw women upload pictures of themself in the nude or semi-nude and use a red filter to convert the picture into a silhouette, hence the name of the challenge.
The trend was supposed to just be silhouettes of women who would seem like the seductive woman featured in Bond film’s opening credits. But it soon emerged that a Reddit sub called 'r/SilhouetteUnfiltered' had several users posting unfiltered pictures of women after the red filter had been removed. It is only when the outrage against the trend and the video tutorials on Twitter had started was the page banned by Reddit.
Banned on February 1, the page now reads, "This community has been banned. This subreddit was banned due to a violation of Reddit’s rules against involuntary pornography." According to the New York Post, Twitter also banned accounts that had used unfiltered pictures from the challenge to shame the participants.