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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3059 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.

Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.

Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.

I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.

I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.

What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

Less effective doing what? Manual labor? Well, yes, you'd do best what you do a lot. And yes, the guy who spent years hitting, would hit better than the guy who spent years lifting metal things, but never actually hit anything. But yeah as others noted, if you work out, you'd get stronger and better in other things where strength matters, even if training for those things specifically would have made you even better.

Muscles for show are less effective at doing heavy manual labor tasks than muscles for doing heavy manual labor tasks, but they're much more effective than 'no muscles'.

I think it’s mainly the perceived capability to apply violence. You should generally prefer to fight a gymbro over a construction worker with less visible muscles if you had to choose

What construction trade? I'd fight a grizzly bear before an ironworker but two commercial painters before a coyote.

I guess this calls for a Thunderdome

Back when I did judo guys would often talk about 'old man strength', which was really just better technique from the guys who had been doing it for twenty years. They weren't strong, but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.

They weren't strong

Often, they were extremely strong a decade (or two) ago, and are now in a chill, but meticulously managed decline. Especially if they managed to avoid long injuries, their muscles might not be bulging anymore, and might be covered by a layer of fat, but the muscle mass is still mostly there. Advanced age and sinking testosterone levels makes building muscle much more difficult, but careful maintenance is doable.

It's even more apparent in the endurance sports. If you look at 10k/half marathon/marathon times of senior/grandmaster division runners, they often maintain impressive amateur times into their sixties. The real performance cliff only seems to come in the late sixties.

but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.

This is, of course, also true.

I have an old guy at my gym, 70's, was a Navy Frogman back in the day, then a roofer for years. Climbing ladders, hefting materials, swinging a hammer.

His grip strength is unbreakable. Might be combination of rough, callused hands adding friction and muscles that are extremely specialized as holding things tightly for long periods of time. And probably less concern about squishing things, so fewer mental blocks on squeezing tightly.

I dunno. Its not that he's stronger than a younger man is... but he's stronger than you expect and, as stated they have to utilize their leverage as best they can so if they bothered to develop technique, that will still work for them.

I think it's the nervous system flexibility / relaxation.

What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

In day to day life, much like discourse around "forms of intelligence:" if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all. Most discourse around "Gym Muscles" is pure cope, the person accused of having "gym muscles" is normally stronger than the accuser. A fat powerlifting champ mostly recognizes the bodybuilder curl-monkey as a fellow lifter and rarely needs to insult him, it's the newbie redditor #StrongLifts5x5 who wants to tear the other guy down to build himself up because he recognizes there isn't much to back up his own pride. ((Though, to be kind, the ego is so difficult to navigate in that early-intermediate level when one is dedicating all kinds of time to something that one is still factually bad at))

In the same way that when someone starts talking about "types of intelligence" I'm pretty sure they don't have any type of intelligence I'm interested in. If someone tells me they aren't "book smart" but they are "street smart" they typically aren't street smart either, at best they have some degree of low level native-guide knowledge that they value higher than it is. If someone tells me they don't test well, but they have great artistic intelligence, their creative output normally sucks. Etc.

Now, factually, at some level if you do all kinds of manual labor tasks you will be better relative to your muscle mass at all kinds of manual labor tasks than you will be at bench press, and if you bench press all the time you will better at bench press relative to your muscle mass than you will be at manual labor tasks. We perceive this as confusing because we think of labor as a "stupid" task, and sports and fitness as more intelligent tasks: anyone can use a shovel, but only some people can lift weights. When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.

So IDK, I'm a gym bro for life.

When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.

I think most of the gym strength vs labor strength comes down to this.

On a practical level, most construction workers will have the added advantage of having both much higher work capacity in the movements most relevant to their work - gym strength is not commonly built by doing hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun) - and by having already built the mental fortitude necessary to complete hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun).

if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all

The laborer will of course turn that around. The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.

The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.

It seems more or less pointlessly obfuscatory to use the word "strong" like this when you yourself invoked the more accurate "work capacity or mental fortitude" (and we might also or instead say endurance, heat tolerance, hand skin toughness, ....). People surely do love to define "true strength" as what they, themselves, are good at, even when it has very little to do with maximal force production.

We're probably getting into definitional problems here, Gym Muscles vs Strength vs Performance vs Whatever. So let's zoom back out to a general vision of Fitness. This is where I cite back to the original Crossfit What is Fitness? Essay laying out the ten general physical skills. While I haven't done crossfit in the sense of belonging to a box or doing WoDs in a long time, I still think the theoretical logic of crossfit's first standard is the best vision of fitness:

They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these 10 skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these 10 skills.

Then you have the second standard:

Picture a hopper loaded with an infinite number of physical challenges, where no selective mechanism is operative, and being asked to perform feats randomly drawn from the hopper. This model suggests that your fitness can be measured by your capacity to perform well at these tasks in relation to other individuals. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations.

And the third:

There are three metabolic pathways that provide the energy for all human action. These “metabolic engines” are known as the phosphagen (or phosphocreatine) pathway, the glycolytic (or lactate) pathway and the oxidative (or aerobic) pathway. Total fitness, the fitness that CrossFit promotes and develops, requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning or “cardio” that we do at CrossFit.

Anyway, with that theoretical framework in place, the question becomes more clear. What we're looking at here is a second standard problem, the infinite hopper. If you take a ditch digger and have him compete at ditch digging, he's going to do better at it than a computer programmer who powerlifts.* And in turn, the powerlifter will do better than the ditch digger at the power lifts. But how will each of them do across a wide variety of tasks? Who can help me move a piano? Who will be the better linebacker in a football game? Who is better in a fight (fitness wise, leaving aside propensity to violence etc)? Who would you rather have in a platoon of soldiers? Who can run, or walk, ten miles on foot faster?

And the answer, to me personally, is straightforward: the strongest guys I know are all concrete contractors, but they also all powerlift. So I kind of reject the premise: lifters aren't exclusively people who don't labor and laborers aren't exclusively people who don't lift. And anyway, we've gotten afield talking about "gym strength" versus OP's "gym muscles;" when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.

*I'm operating under the assumption that each task will be better for training at itself, though this isn't necessarily true. There are many cases where the best way to train for a task is not to do the thing itself, either exclusively or predominantly.

hopper

I would push back against this a bit. If a "hopper" scenario is what motivates you to go put in the work, fine, cool, whatever. But it sure seems to me that this scenario is just as contrived and fake as actual real competitive sports with standards established through a history of wide participation, particularly when you look at the multisport competitions that actually exist. To my ear, it vaguely rhymes with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance--"how would I train if I didn't know what I had to do?" Of course, there may be an answer to this question, but in a world where I do pretty much know what I have to do that answer shouldn't have much action-guiding force. Meanwhile, the cost of invoking a "hopper" scenario is that it invites mediocrities to be smug, cf my point above about established standards--"Mark Allen? what's his Fran time?"

when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.

Indeed. I class talk of "gym muscle" much the same as "I don't want to look like one of those gross bodybuilders", "lean, toned muscle", " Tyler Durden in Fight Club", "swimmer physique", etc. etc.

I think the hopper concept is a good way to approach the question of who is the fittest on a theoretical "neutral ground." Otherwise comparing across disciplines is all about home field advantage. Competitive high level CrossFit is a moderately interesting answer, though over time the moves have gotten more specialized and it's more about training for CrossFit than training for anything.

FWIW, the most interesting answer to "the fittest" in my mind is probably MMA competition, in that within a weight class the fighter is always operating at the frontier of trading off strength vs endurance while accounting for his opponent doing the same. Too much focus on maximum strength, you gas early if you don't finish your opponent early, like Shane Carwin taking on Brock Lesnar; but if your maximum strength level is too much lower than your opponent's he'll overpower you and finish you off before endurance ever comes into play, like Shane Carwin's opponents leading up to his title shot.

And I suppose part of the reason I find this balance compelling is because by high school I had to come to the conclusion I am an athletic mediocrity, I was never going to do anything good enough to be interesting in any particular field. So given that, I find it more personally satisfying to have good lifts and decent cardio, than to have slightly better mediocre lifts and no cardio or slightly better mediocre cardio and weak lifts.

FWIW, the most interesting answer to "the fittest" in my mind is probably MMA competition,

There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.

I am an athletic mediocrity

Oh, sure, me too, and ultimately pretty similar logic re:specialization, I just think the many variations on "but what's his Fran time?" (perhaps more prevalent: "I would never want to look like that") are generally contemptible.

More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other. I don't know how many people this will convince, but it certainly makes me look on the concept of "general fitness" with a good deal of suspicion.

There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.

Definitely, the skill training is a far bigger aspect of the sport, but if we're talking spherical cows here I think that given equal skill, optimizing for pure fitness MMA provides the best single-event test for general fitness, because it punishes any lack or specialization in a way that other sports don't. What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness." The specialized marathon runner can use more "sophisticated" methods because he has absolutely no need to optimize for upper body strength. The rock climber has no need to worry about his legs and may actively seek to shrink them. The MMA fighter must balance everything, any lack can be exploited, while maintaining a precise weight.

More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other.

Sure, and that's an important consideration, Pogacar doesn't stay up at night upset about his upper body strength. But it's also obviously the case that optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C; and in turn optimizing for B will produce different levels of A and B, and similarly for C to B and A. We can ask how good A practitioners are at B and C and vice versa, and call that a general level of fitness.

So hypothetically, let's say we can (for some reason) only recommend a single exercise goal to someone. A is pure cardio, training for a marathon. B is pure strength training, 1rm back squat. C is the 5 minute SFG I snatch test.

How would you describe the property of C: that it makes you better at B and A, relative to how much A makes you better at B and C or B makes you better at C and A? When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone? Because it does seem to me like such a property exists, that it is at least theoretically possible to describe (though easily goodhart'd by something like a Fran Time), and that it does matter to a lot of people, myself among them.

What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness."

Eh, I was thinking, like, shadowboxing with dumbbells, or anything involving Bosu balls or squishy foam mats or tsunami bars, for instance, none of which I would consider simple but balanced. Though, granted, it's not like I have a video montage of top MMA guys doing that stuff.

When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone?

I would accept either "doesn't exist" or "is impossible to meaningfully describe" as a characterization of my views, here's my reasoning:

optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C;

This is of course correct, but I think that people's actual selection of A, B, C, ..., ultimately boils down to some.combination of the following:

-"idk it just sounds cool", great, awesome, that's pretty much what it comes down to for me as well, but I don't think you can get from this to meaningful claims about generality.

-muh fizeek, to be answered by a dismissive Bronx cheer

-fighting/soldiering/moving house/farming/etc from someone who's not actually doing any of those things and has no plans to start, ditto

--fighting/soldiering/moving house/farming/etc from someone who is actually doing one of those things, but then you're just doing task-specific s&c, and it's not going to matter much in comparison to specific practice anyway.

Basically, I don't think there's a principled way to select a truly general A, B, C.

On a purely autobiographical level, I experienced noticeably better carryover to manual labor in the woods from training like a dentist with a half Ironman coming up than I did from various well-regarded "tactical" training systems. I suppose this isn't a terribly widespread experience, but then again I don't know how many people have tried both, and it certainly made me more skeptical of the idea that I had to think about some kind of balance or generality in my training for it to carry over to real-world tasks.

More comments

I endorse all of this

t. manual laborer

I think it’s true. The types of training designed to increase aesthetic mass are quite different than those for pure strength, like powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting. That said I think a person who seriously lifts for aesthetics is still going to be a lot stronger than they would have been if they didn’t train at all.

I agree it's generally underestimated how much strength comes from the efficient, coordinated recruitment of muscles. I remember when I first started playing tennis my right arm got noticeably hypertrophied relative to the left side, probably because I was compensating for awful technique by muscling through the swing. Over time, as I improved my technique and smoothed out my kinetic chain (engaging legs and hip rotation), my right arm actually shrank down and now the asymmetry is barely noticeable. I hit much harder now than I did back then. I do think that muscle groups tend to require some training to contract in a synchronous manner that gives more power for a given muscle fiber density.

I absolutely hypothesize it's this. I'm getting older now and while I still go to the gym the numbers are much lower than they used to be, I hear my younger friends brag and I mourn the old days.

Ask me to actually do something and I smoke them.

Presumably because I have a bigger frame, more practice, and more experience actually using my muscles in manual labor.

Aren't you a doctor? How do you do manual labor?

Unrelated but should still mention: not all specialities are sedentary/radiology, it's pretty common for proceduralists to actually do a decent amount (even if its just standing on your feet >16 hours a day) with Ortho at times being legitimately physically demanding (depending on what you do in Ortho).

My specific life course is highly identifiable which is one of the reasons why I've been vague about my specialty and background here but keep in mind that things like hobbies, pre or concurrent to medicine employment and family background can give people manual labor experience without the main career being one of those things.

To quote Heinlein - “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

If you aren't moving your body on a regular basis in some productive way you are leaving behind a ton of physical and mental health gains.

I believe that your assessment is correct.

To put it in slightly different terms when you workout you are training procedural memory in addition to physical strength. Procedural memory is knowing how to do learned tasks (like riding a bicycle) without conscious awareness. If you do isolation exercises the procedural memory being trained is mostly going to be tied to that specific exercise (e.g. you will learn the form for bicep curls without having to think about each time, but that memory won’t generalize to working with heavy objects).

When you do manual labor (and to some extent compound exercises) you are also training procedural memory on balancing different parts of the body that is more generalizable to many other situations.

Yes, I think your intuition is basically correct. Neuromuscular coordination and power across a variety of tasks is likely improved by doing a variety of tasks compared to specifically training at the tasks that are moving fixed, specific shapes with predefined appropriate motions. We can see something similar to this in endurance sports, where athletes become specialized at the specific thing they do to a much greater extent than sports that are seemingly similar at a glance - you're not going to see the differences between cross-country skiers, cyclists, and marathoners just from looking at their literal muscle mass and aerobic capacity, but they're differentially efficient at their sports of choice and require less energy to accomplish the same tasks. Compare all of these linear activities to the versatile endurance of a soccer player and they'll all seem mechanistic and rigid by comparison, because that's exactly what they've trained themselves to be. Similarly, the manual laborer that needs to carry shingles up to a roof and nail them down develops a more versatile set of muscle movements than the powerlifter.

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