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?
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Notes -
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.
I would accept either "doesn't exist" or "is impossible to meaningfully describe" as a characterization of my views, here's my reasoning:
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.
Definitely not. Unlike in a lot of other areas of life there is actually quite a bit of transfer between different sports, especially in the endurance world. Alan Cousins actually (surprisingly to me) found that biking was 2/3 as effective as running at increasing running Vo2 max. This is insane and runs contrary to what I had been taught about specificity growing up, but makes sense from what we know about elite training (Cole Hocker who won the gold in the 1500 in Paris apparently bikes a shit ton), and from my own training (I am fastest at running when I supplement with monster bike time). Here's the Couzens post if you're interested: https://alancouzens.com/blog/specificity.html
Maybe not directly relevant to your post, but at least a tangent. Fitness from random things generally does carry over pretty well because it develops your core cardiovascular and muscular systems. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent "core" system with regards to intellectual pursuits so it's not surprising we don't see much transfer there.
I've seen that article (and e.g. https://www.slowtwitch.com/running/we-often-run-faster-off-tri-training/). Best I can tell, Couzens has appallingly bad epistemics, but I think he's pretty close to right on this point.
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