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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.
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.
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