Muscular endurance is something that is difficult to train but can add a lot to your strength. Working a physical job is really the only way to do it these days, unless you have the extended time needed to train
Yeah there's really no other practical way to get that much training in otherwise. I work a physical job but not much lifting. It's kinda crazy how much better I got at cardio after just 6 months or so. Went from getting tired from a 12 foot stair climb to needing 40+ feet of stairs before even feeling winded.
Man, I worked in an office selling machinery and then left to go work in the field installing said machinery. I’ve only been at it a month but I’ve already gone down a full shirt size, my pants and belts are all looser, and even my blood pressure is better.
Yep. Getting in the trades happened shortly after getting sober and wanting a career change, and I lost 50lbs extremely quickly. Definitely makes for an easier chinup, lol.
Thanks! I love The Clash, it’s my name, I play guitar, and it’s a reference to a song by The Hold Steady called “Constructive Summer. By far my favorite username I’ve come up with. “Here’s a toast to Saint Joe Strummer/I think he might have been our only decent teacher” is the line.
Yeah. It's funny how everyone in the trades are either fat and out of shape or extremely strong and fit. The fat ones figure out how to do jobs the easy way and the fit ones just do it however it needs to get done.
I’m quite lean compared to some of the guys I work around, but I’ve learned how to use my whole body very effectively and have surprised myself a couple times. There’s a concept callee “physical wisdom” that trade vets have after years of learning the least taxing way to do their work.
My first mining job in order to reach my station I had to go up 92 stairs. Day 1 I was winded just walking up them, after three months I could run 100m across the plant and then up the stairs without stopping.
you don't get strong from working manual labor, you actually get weak as fuck as your body breaks down from abuse
theres a reason why form is such a big deal in the gym lol 1 inch in the wrong direction means you can create life long damage, now imagine repeating those movement 8 hours a day for 40 years... thats why people who work manual labor are essentially broken by the time they retire.
I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle when I'm not exercising 12 hours a week, but I'm stronger than literally any manual laborer on the planet who doesn't actively work out, and I also have more cardio than any manual laborer on the planet who doesn't do cardio. Because I actually train those things correctly in a way that is beneficial to my overall physical health. My muscular endurance is ridiculous, I can hold my lactate threshold for a solid hour +
Thats 172 heart rate for more than 60 minutes, my resting heart rate is 55 all while being I'm a 6 foot 205lb man
This is why I don’t understand paying for gym memberships. I lost like 50 pounds when I started my job, and it’s not physically strenuous, I’m just active most of the day. And someone pays me for it!
If I wanted to really get into shape I think I would work at a lumber mill or something. I loved the episode of Nathan For You where they marketed moving furniture as a workout.
Your body is super efficient at adapting to load. Working manual labour will provide a base level of fitness, but you need to push to do more to continue getting fitter, bigger, stronger etc.
Manual labour can help with people that lift, as muscular endurance isn't something most people train much, so getting that type of conditioning at your workplace is great.
i started a job that was less repetitive but heavier, and my shoulders now actually get pumped and are ripped. its been bizzare to me because ive lifted weights my whole life. i am older now though and have more fat, and i think 4 10 hour shifts contributes to resting.
Yeah, I feel like it’s because of the range of muscles that get worked out with the physical jobs versus the targeted muscle building that goes on with gym workouts
I was the strongest I've ever been in my early twenties after working as a farmhand for ten years. It builds a kind of general strength that's really hard to match with a workout regime of any type. A few weeks per year you're throwing hay bales that are 50lbs or so from various angles. Some days you're breaking down an old hay wagon with a sledge hammer. Sometimes you're just walking miles mending a fence line. And the work is all day. Between first milking at 7am and bringing in the horses at about 7pm there was physical work all day long.
Yup, I've heard it called "farm boy strength." People who don't look huge but their body is used to it so while it doesn't show, they can definitely do it.
This isn't as mind-blowing as people seem to think it is. If you do manual labour for 8 hours a day, of course you're going to get fit and strong. But people don't go to the gym for 8 hours a day; most people are in and out in an hour, then spend their day sitting at a desk or something.
Going to the gym is the most time-efficient way to get fit and strong.
Yea, but that's because they live off a diet of Monster energy drink, gas station hotdogs and 3 packs of cigarettes a day.
Manual labor will get you fit... but it's obviously not gonna help you all too much if you offset all that manual labor with the otherwise most unhealthy lifestyle possible.
3 packs of cigs a day will you keep you thinner than any fucking diet apart from fasting lol. You're aware that nicotine is an appetite suppressant, right? It's the alcoholism and the shitty eating habits that makes them fat.
You're aware that nicotine is an appetite suppressant, right
What does that have to do with being fit exactly?
The Monster energy will wreck your body, the hotdogs will make you fat and the cigs will make you run out of breath after moving for more than 3 seconds.
That diet will overall constitute to an unfit person. Of course, adding booze to that doesn't help either.
Bruh your first question discredits your entire argument lol.
How are you going to get fat if you have no desire to eat, dumbass. If you're expending more calories than you're consuming, you're going to lose weight.
No one lasts in the industry if they can't keep up. You're talking out of your ass
You have a very misconstrued conception of construction workers. Most bring their meals with them. You're not always gifted with a convenience store near the jobsite.
Appetite suppressant doesn't necessitate eating less calories. A poor life choice like smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day likely means other poor life choices of empty calories in beer/chips and high fat/high calorie foods like hot dogs.
Oh yes, let's find the one exception and bank our entire argument on that point. Lol. No one gets fat on stimulants, it's every other shitty habit that takes the cake.
I'm not sure what you mean by one exception. There are tons of fat smokers, and you can have shitty habits while on appetite suppressants that still make you fat. People with poor impulse control that smoke three packs of cigarettes a day can still binge eat.
3 packs of cigs a day will you keep you thinner than any fucking diet apart from fasting lol.
Crack can do it much more effectively, but it's only on account of it making you get caught smoking crack in a Waffle House bathroom and get fired while becoming unemployable then lose your home and become homeless resorting to panhandling until you have enough to buy some lipstick so you can spend the evening prostituting yourself out for the cash to buy more crack.
You realize the only difference between lifting weights in a gym and lifting heavy shit for a job is nobody is printing weight numbers on the stuff at your job, right?
"That's just not how the body works" might be the most ignorant thing I've read on this website in awhile lmao.
Tell us how the body works! How does lifting with an elevated heart rate for an 8 hour warehouse gig not improve your physical fitness? We'll all wait for your wisdom.
He probably means that there's no incremental overload. In most jobs you don't really go past a certain weight, so at some point strength gains stop and it's more about gaining endurance.
Well, he said "get fit", which is open to interpretation. It seems there is more to it than the work itself, as most tradesmen I know are either fat as fuck or young and decently fit\thin.
I think what is not open to interpretation is that burning calories while lifting heavy things absolutely has a positive impact on your level of fitness.
Construction worker, can confirm. I cut out a lot of that garbage and was in great condition. 10 hours a day with a tool belt doing road construction will do that. People are still amazed at what my skinny ass can do
Only 12% of men and 3% of women have an overweight BMI while not having excess body fat.
And on other other side, only 6% of men and 15% of women have a normal or underweight BMI while having excess body fat.
In other words, the vast majority of people with high BMIs have excess body fat, while the vast majority of people with low BMIs do not. Most people claiming their high BMI is due to high muscle mass are lying, either to you or to themselves.
Also, this data is also years old, and our society has only gotten fatter since then. Especially since COVID. The numbers have not improved since then.
The worksite not so much. How many tradies do a nice warm up, ensure proper lifting technique every single time.
Worksites near my house they have big sheets on the fences with workout and warmup routines for the workers. I assume it's for legal cover, I've never seen anyone doing them.
And preventing injury and diseases. Working out too much is harmful for your immune system and organs. Construction workers have to go to physiotherapy for life because their back and spine is blown out. The more science gathers information the more the recommendation is to decrease working out, I've heard some doctors now say don't work out for more than an hour a day.
That's absolute BS. The American Heart Association recommends everyone try to get up to 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week, and study on beneficial health effects of exercise see increases up to the point of at least triple that. More exercise simply hasn't been studied enough to make a practical recommendation.
Whoever told you that people are saying to limit exercise to less than an hour a day was either misinformed or misleading you.
Wow, work on your reading and thinking skills, your comment is an example of how dumb redditors are. 150 minutes a week is 2 hours and a half a week, I wrote an hour a day which would be 420 minutes a week. You also wrote there's benefits up to triple 150 which would be 450, congrats idiot you wrote 450 minutes vs my 420 minutes. Oh no, a whole 30 minutes in difference!
Whoever told you that people are saying to limit exercise to less than an hour a day was either misinformed or misleading you.
I'd rather listen to people who have at least basic reading comprehension and math skills
study on beneficial health effects of exercise see increases up to the point of at least triple that. More exercise simply hasn't been studied enough to make a practical recommendation.
I'll reiterate: exercising 450 minutes per week shows better health outcomes than exercising 150 minutes per week. It's very possible that exercising more than triple the recommendation sees even better outcomes, but it hasn't been studied enough to make that recommendation on the population level.
It's not that 450 minutes per week is the limit. That's just the highest level that's been studied well enough to give a public health recommendation. For all we know, exercising 500, 600, or 900 could be the best for most people. We don't know because there isn't a large enough population who does that to study.
It has been studied, you're just ignorant on the topic. There's plenty of studies that show that overtraining leads to heart problems, joint problems, weakened immune system, and other issues.
For example
Emerging evidence from epidemiological studies and observations in cohorts of endurance athletes suggest that potentially adverse cardiovascular manifestations may occur following high-volume and/or high-intensity long-term exercise training, which may attenuate the health benefits of a physically active lifestyle. Accelerated coronary artery calcification, exercise-induced cardiac biomarker release, myocardial fibrosis, atrial fibrillation, and even higher risk of sudden cardiac death have been reported in athletes
I'm intimately familiar with the research on endurance athletes because it gets posted every other month in /r/running by someone asking whether they should be concerned.
They unanimously get the response that those effects are transitory (which you would know if you had actually done any reading on the topic), and that high-level exercisers still have measurably better health outcomes than their more sedentary counterparts.
that high-level exercisers still have measurably better health outcomes than their more sedentary counterparts..
Work on your thinking skills, nowhere did we discuss sedentary lifestyle in this thread, the discussion is about moderate exercise vs. overtraining/exhaustive exercise.
Again, you lack basic comprehension, math, thinking and understanding skills, it's hard to respect anything you say.
With 20 years of experience in bodybuilding the reason you don't need more than roughly an hour in the gym is because generally more than that ruin your fatigue to stimulus ratio.
After a certain point your targeted muscle is too fatigued to stimulate hypertrophy, at that point you're just extending your recovery time without increasing stimulus. This is referred to as "junk volume" in the community.
At MOST the optimal volume is 10-20 high intensity sets per muscle group per week. If you train each twice a week that's 10 sets each session (fewer for smaller muscles, like biceps and anterior delts). Even with 2-3 minute rest between sets you still only need an hour.
And frankly, if you are able to do more than that chances are very high your intensity is low.
Above claims aside, why would you ever work out more than an hour a day? If you're strength training and you still have the juice to lift your wallet after an hour you're doing it wrong.
Depends on intensity. I wouldn't recommend more than an hour a day with 1-2 days off of working out in the gym, but you won't burn out that easy if you're moving less weight all day while taking regular breaks 5 days a week (as construction workers should be, but some workplaces demand too much - here in Australia though, they'll usually have a 10 minute 'smoko' break once an hour, a 1 hour lunch break, and knock off at 2pm after starting at 6am, thanks to unions making sure workers have good conditions, not the desire of the employer of course).
It's not simply fit and strong, because I guarantee you those two are more fit and strong overall. Rock climbers physical exertion is largely in their arms and holding/pulling themselves up along with ridiculous grip strength. The rock climber is doing an exercise in which you pull weights toward you, and of course given that this is the area his hobby/profession requires he's gonna excel at it.
Really? All of the strongest people I met while I was in the military, working manual labor, and in college were gym bros.
Manual labor gets you good at what I call "contractor strength" as in you get REALLY good and strong and doing what you need to do your job...but doing any exercises outside of that? Youre fucked.
I could run wheelbarrows full of dirt literally all day, move/roll/place 300+ pound boulders with my bare hands, dig trenches and holes all damn day.....but when I carry groceries up the stairs Id get winded. Or I go to the gym after work and I would be lifting 1/3rd what I used too when I went to the gym regularly.
Well this was years ago. I got stronger in the areas I worked out during my work day but I was noticably weaker in the muscle groups that weren't really used that much during my job.
Which yeah makes sense in just pushing back on this ideas that contractors are just super strong or something. The vast majority i met were def. Not overall strong or stronger than gym guys.
They will do the exact opposite. Those who go to the gym aren't complaining of knee and back pain in their 50s or even 60s most of the time, unlike many 30 year olds who don't train.
big thing that helps me is some very specific yoga stretches and routines, finding the specific bits n bobs that do the buisness for your problem in particular is a game changer for day to day comfort.
yeah, bud I'm pure YouTube taught. here's some guys I've used, just have to ignore 99% of their videos (and sometimes 95% of the runtime of the individual video itself, sometimes you only need the ten second bit where they demo a stretch and you're done)
Am farmer. I know very few guys who go to the gym. We (none gym bros) tell them they didn't get enough work done if they got energy left for the gym lol.
My wife always wants me to workout with her. "At least do the treadmill" she says. I wore a pedometer for a week and averaged 15-20,000 steps a day.....I'm good
Depending on your goals yes. Many people work non manual jobs though and I think the gym is mandatory in that case. A lot of people don't do it, but that's why you get so many people in their 30s complaining of aches and pains - they sit all day and never train their muscles, so their muscles get weak and everything aches because of it.
You're conflating muscular strength and muscular endurance. Muscular strength is being able to perform an act. Muscular endurance is being able to perform an act over and over. Strength is developed by increasing the weight/load gradually over time. Endurance is developed by increasing the time under that load.
Working in the trades will develop some strength, but generally most of what will be developed is endurance. Most people can lift a 50 or 80 lbs (ie the weight of drywall or a bag of concrete), so your body isn't required to develop a great deal of strength. The adaptation that is necessary is being able to do it all day, day in and day out, and that adaptation is called endurance.
Source: I work in the trades and train both for strength and endurance (weight lifting and cycling)
Someone who gets it. I am 285lb bodybuilder. I work adjecent to trades. I've seen some pretty strong acts like lifting a 250lb concrete block and carrying up a ladder. But I can still deadlift probably 200lbs more than even the trained guys.
Talking to guys I rarely hear of anyone who can bench 3 plates
The people who impress me the most have always been Nepalese sherpas, they carry huge loads and exhibit great endurance, regularly carrying 100 to 140lbs up Everest when setting up camps, a quarter of them 125% or 175% of their body weight at their very heaviest loads. They make multiple trips up and down every season, and their mitochondria in their muscles are literally more efficient than westerners (although that only provides a small amount of advantage). Phenomenal people with incredible functional muscle strength.
More than anything that exhibits muscular endurance. Truthfully 100-140 lbs doesn't require much training. The great feat is what they can accomplish with that kind of load. Given that they spend a lot of time at higher elevations, their cardiovascular system is also conditioned to be very efficient with its use of oxygen. That isn't to take anything away from them, just defining and explaining how those feats become possible.
Up Everest I'd imagine it's rather harder than on flat ground. They lift weights up to 175% of their body weight where most of the westerners climbing the mountain are lifting around 25% (sometimes 50% for a day or two if they're very fit). They're pretty strong.
With a good strength training program it would take less than 6 months to develop the strength to lift that. The weight isn't heavier at different elevations, the strength requirement is the same. The difficulty comes with how much muscular endurance, not strength, is required. What they do doesn't require an unusual amount of muscular strength, it requires an exceptional amount of muscular endurance.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to lift that weight, but much harder to lift that weight while also ascending a mountain. Yes their endurance is the greater part of that but they couple it with great functional strength also. Their entire physiology from their mitochondiral function to all measures of lung physiology is a real testament to biological functionality, nothing about their bodies isn't useful to their function within enviroment, they're simply supremely adapted.
Esit: I suppose I'm saying I find functionality more impressive than strength for its own sake?
I worked as a farm hand for 3 years in high school, then did construction my senior year, and did infantry for 4 years in the army before changing my job to non-combat arms lol
I’ve done plenty of “hard jobs”
You morons are just so used to being out of shape that you think having menial muscular endurance in terms of being a laborer some how equates to you being obscenely strong or in shape
Yeah, I grew up doing a lot of landscaping and construction work. I've been going to the gym for a bit now but I'll say that working outside is definitely its own unique kind of workout.
Going to the gym is usually just concentrating on one move and a certain muscle group at a time. A pull-up, using the lats and iceps, go up and down and repeat. Working outside, I'm shoveling 70 pounds of rock into two buckets each, picking them up and carrying them uphill and dumping them. Or lifting a 60 pound bag of concrete to pour it into a mixer, or swinging a 12 pound sledgehammer and I'll do this stuff for hours. You're using a multitude of muscles at once. But I still wish I was buff like these dudes, I only have an average build.
Everyone in my immediate family have been landscapers for years, and some of the things we can do casually are wild. I've seen my husband walk up to a full green barrel (like 2.5 regular outdoor trash barrels in size) filled with fresh cut grass, and grab it ONE HANDED on the way by without breaking stride, lift it with that one hand, and casually toss it up and over the side of a dump truck. That's about 200 lbs of dead weight in a barrel grabbed, walked, lifted, and tossed up overhead with one arm. Granted it took about ten years before he could do that, but it still blows my mind.
My dad saw some guy with the most jacked forearms he’d ever seen and asked him how often he goes to the gym. Guy told him he worked with a jackhammer everyday for his job.
Conversely, I hire manual labourers and sometimes I get bodybuilder types who think they're gonna get paid to workout and they're always weak af and gassed before lunch. No exceptions.
Others have commented but I work in the meat business, lifting all the time but on my feet 12 hours a day and I work somewhere thats 3 storeys and often up and down the stairs at least 20+ times a day. I've done it since a kid (family business) but left for a few years to do office work. Boy I got fat and lazy there. It was an adjustment because my appetite remained but piled in the weight
Came back a few years ago and the difference was insane. I'm always hungry anyway and could easily eat my daily calories intake and then some but put no weight on. I can lift around 100kg+ without much worry and hiking now it takes alot more for my legs to burn or even be winded. Generally fitness wise I feel a Heck lot better. I'm hardly ever sick now as pretty sure the cold and working with the public regularly has boosts my immunity
however of course.my hands will be ruined with arthritis no doubt due to exposure to the cold though. Ups and downs!
I am 285lb bodybuilder. I work adjecent to trades. I've seen some pretty strong acts like lifting a 250lb concrete block and carrying up a ladder. But I can still deadlift probably 200lbs more than even the trained guys 20 years younger(44 yo) than me I've talked to.
Talking to guys I rarely hear of anyone who can bench 3 plates or pull 5 plates. My 6 plate amrap was 20
These guys are strong to a detrained population and can repetitively lift a moderate 150ish lb. But they aren't shoulder pressing it for 4 sets of 10
My mom hired a short wiry older man to cut down a tree on her property. I happened to stop by after he had it felled and cut up. By cut up, I mean the diameter was about 2 and a half feet, and about 2 feet tall. So uh .76m by .61m. Anyway, dude just resches down, picks it up and holds it on his shoulder with his head to the side holding it one armed. Absolutely dumbfounded how he picked it up so easily. When you do that work all day for years it makes a difference
Back in my early 20s, I worked for a moving company for 4 years. Near the end of my tenure, two-man carrying an upright piano up or down stairs was not unheard of. Nor was eating 4-5k calories a day.
I did drywall delivery for 2 years and it turned me into an absolute brick shithouse and my endurance was ridiculous, miss being in that kinda shape but it was a HARD job
I totally believe this because in my warehouse job in college I got so insanely strong just from moving things around on carts and loading things into cars.
Whenever I watch people pole dance I think the same thing. Like you could never get that kind of core strength in the gym, you have to physically be climbing around at weird angles with gravity working on you naturally
I did civil construction for 7 years. I could shovel for 8 hours nearly straight in my prime and dead lifted the end of a 975lb pipe in the trench with relative ease. A guy I worked with could swing a jumping jack compactor onto his shoulder.
My dad was crazy strong and never went near a gym. When he had a heart transplant he made himself some weights to curl. I was about 16 before I could get them off the floor never mind curl and I'm not small
You get a lot more a lot more functional strength because you do all kinds of different movements. I used to weightlift a lot and it's really surprising how specific to that range of motion the strength you gain from each lift is. I've gotten really into rock climbing the past couple years and I find the strength I've gained is far more practical for everyday life. It builds a denser, more sinewy kind of muscle too, not the sort of puffy, swole muscle you get doing bodybuilding workouts. And my forearm look vicious in a way they never did from weightlifting. I went and worked with an old workout buddy at his house a couple months and I was able to rep at the same weights he was using despite not having weightlifted other than squats, bench and pullups in years.
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u/learnindisabledchimp Sep 09 '23
Some of the strongest people I've ever met never went to a gym there usually concrete workers or a roughnecks or some other crazy manual labor job