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Notes -
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.
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'.
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