Why do people say AppleJack is stronger than Rainbow Dash?

[St3venp 37]

In Season 1 Episode 13 Fall Weather Friends, we saw Rainbow beat Aj in an arm wrestle with ease, which means that her arms/hooves are stronger than Aj, sure AJ has stronger back hooves from apple bucking but doesn't mean she's stronger overall.

[GrimGrimoire 4,973]

Because she is an earth pony, and works on the farm pulling plows and such all day... most just see it as a sign she is a bit stronger than RD.

[Megas 27,886]

Because she's an earth pony who rely more on strength than pegasi....

 

Of course I do think the fandom undermines RD's strength....a lot

 

Fans often depict her in fan art to be laughably weak a lot in comparison to AJ...when the show's shown her to hold her own against AJ fairly well...multiple times in fact

[ggg-2 3,553]

Because Earth Ponies like AJ have been canonically confirmed to have more physical strength than the other two tribes.

[Jacob Is A Lemon 17]

The comparison is because Earth Ponies have physical strength but so do Wonderbolts-in-training, also applebucking doesn't use the front legs. Not impossible for Dash to have won

 

Also you can't really measure how strong you are because you can fly, which is why people just default to the whole natural magic malarkey that Earth Ponies have

Edited October 18, 2016 by Jacob Is A Lemon

[cmarston1 5,960]

Because she is an earth pony, and having them have more physical strength then the other races would be the only thing that would have them stand out.

[cider float 2,539]

She works on a farm bucking trees everyday opposed to Dash just sleeping on a cloud all day. 

[Brony Number 42 10,075]

For character balance, earth ponies need higher strength. But they can still fail their strength checks sometimes. Maybe AJ is at a low level.

[cider float 2,539]

I suppose in all fairness of the competition between Rainbow and Applejack they just had to give Rainbow some wins. I don't think the writers were thinking much about their strength distributions while making that episode though they did put consideration on how better Applejack is in bucking.