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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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
Then you have the second standard:
And the third:
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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