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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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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