This reminds me of a trip to Guilin when I was an athletic 22-year-old. We'd booked a hotel on top of a mountain that was only reachable by hiking up a trail. At the trailhead, a five-foot-tall grandma offered to carry my luggage to the top. I thought it was funny — and a bit insulting — so I refused. About a quarter of the way up, I gave up and let her take it. She carried it all the way up without breaking a sweat. It was more a feat of endurance than pure strength, but still incredibly impressive.
A couple years ago, I did a 90 mile hike in Scotland, which was mostly flat. My pack weighed just at 20-25lb (light but not ultralight - a lot of water weight). The trail was MOSTLY flat, with a couple steep trails to bypass forestry work, and crest over some steep hill.
I'm a large man, at the time I was pushing 250lb on a 5'8" frame, but I found my flat land endurance was basically unlimited at walking pace. My uphill endurance was limited so short bursts, and I had to regularly stop for a breather.
Once on flat ground, again, 20+ miles a day no issues.
After the detours, and some one-off side trails to see something, and walking from the trail to a town for food and/or sleep, my entire trek was 125mi over 5 days. And when I got home, I weighed 255lb. I gained 5lb while hiking somehow.
All that to say, uphill endurance is no joke, and it is hard to train, even maxed on a treadmill if you live on flat ground. Stair climbing (or machine) is the only thing I can think of.
Related, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
I was hiking in Nepal a couple years ago. I regularly saw porters carrying 85kg (187 lbs) of wood on there backs up the mountain trails (pic I took: https://imgur.com/a/ahJhoi9). I asked my Nepali guide how much he can carry, and he said "I can carry you!" I'm 195cm (6'5"), and weighed about 120kg (264 lbs) at the time, and this guy was maybe half my size. I told him to prove it, so he asked me to get on his back, which I did, and then he picked me up and started running. Crazy strong.
Altitude can be a huge limiting factor. I biked from Texas to Oregon, and the first days in the Rockies were brutal. It seemed I could barely travel 50 feet up hill without taking a break. I even considered turning around because it just felt impossible.
One thing I always found a bit of a puzzle: it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc, but I still find it curious. If it's generally said to be good for you, shouldn't the effects be a bit more robust than that?
Well the answer here is: other factors.
Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen.
Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles.
Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes.
So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job.
Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped.
Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.
> it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population...
When it's a work, you're expected to show up and do it consistently every day. So you can't afford alternate days to get adequate rest and recovery time. Your body is gradually wasted away by the job. When it's more of a leisure activity, you can afford just not to do it and rest, when you don't feel well, so the combination of workouts and recovery time can be net-positive, health-wise.
Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc.
I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects.
Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch.
They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.
You can have confounding effects. Specifically note Cochrane’s Aphorism.
"The correlation between any variable and smoking is likely to be higher than the correlation between that variable and the disease."
If you aren't controlling for substance uses (which anyone who has walked by a construction site would know.) You are going to misread an effect. Smoking in particular is actually just that bad for you.
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
Not being rich per se, but probably stress. The body has no innate knowledge of how wealthy you are, outside of some information stored in the neocortex about financial details (which has little influence on the overall functioning and regulation of the organism as a whole). But it does keep track of a very important signal, and that is neuroception, or safety, absence of threats. And being wealthy, absence of sources of stress, or ability to avoid them, brings about that state of feeling secure, safe, which affects every cell of the body and leads to a good regulation of the whole organism.
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.
However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.
Your scientific study does not support your claim (body keeps track of social status) and the other is a men's health magazine article. Hardly the cutting edge of science
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
Basically a good point.
Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though.
You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.
Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.
There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.
Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.
Nutrition too. Not to paint everyone in the construction industry with the same brush, but there’s often a lot of cheap, high calorie, fast food and sugary drinks on site and in work trucks. This is manageable for younger workers, but by a certain age, the job responsibilities become less physically demanding, the metabolism slows down, and the eating habits remain.
> I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc
Similarly, people that run 45 minutes a day are in great shape. But if you run a half marathon every day, you will age quickly
You’re exactly right, too much of a good thing. And for hard strength training, you can hit that tipping point very quickly. Probably within an hour a day if you’re going hard
This. I go beyond those programs (currently weight training 4/week with an upper/lower split) and it's still ~4 hours/week inclusive of some stretching at the end of each workout.
Unless of course you’re training practical, useful strength. Which requires intense bursts of weight training, and balance between tempo runs, rucks with 35-40% of body weight, and slow run/jogs. Weightlifting is a small part of a larger picture of strength and being able to put it to use. Cardio is the single most important thing you can train because without a gas tank you’re just a fat, slow, strong slob.
You don’t need to be elite nor on juice to do this. All you need is a purpose. I do this all the time, am over 35, and not on juice. My fitness is great but no where near elite.
Rippetoe is an obnoxious jackass and you can venture to his forums (cult) to see it. He’s great at making fat, out of shape, strongmen. He’s not great at producing a fighter, tradesman, or operator. When you want to know what works look to the people actually using their fitness not morons like him who proselytize and look like the hardest thing they do all day is eat a pack of bon Bons.
Strength on itself is already functional and useful. I kind of agree with you, its why i have been moving away from the strongmen stuff, more into kettlebells, calisthenics and walking during lunch and/or post dinner.
imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
If you lift weights Monday and Friday, you give your body time to recover and get stronger.
People whose job is to lift weight, they don't lift things heavy enough and they don't give their body time to recover. They work everyday, whatever if their quads are hurting or not. It has very little benefits and only destroy the joints.
There's often a machismo culture in jobs like that, in which people neglect things like PPE or safety procedures. Or of course, abusive employer-employee conditions in which workers are exposed to hazards without their knowledge or ability to mitigate it. Obviously, not everyone participates, but it's widespread enough I think it could explain this somewhat.
And, as others point out for manual workers, they don't fully recover. As it's their job, many professional athletes will perform while partially injured and exacerbate it. And it's not even professionals! One of the older men in my tri club has a permanent Achilles injury now in his 60s because of an injury sustained when he was younger. The doctor told him to rest for a month to let it properly heal. That weekend he was running a sub-30 10k at the local league competition!
Look at it this way.
Construction workers aren't strength training they are wearing themselves out via hard work that requires strength. Not the same thing.
I think it's because while on the job you cut corners and everything. You don't, and often can't, use proper technique. In the gym, barbells are perfectly symmetric and balanced. On the job, you might carry something that forces you into a horrible posture. That can't be good for you
My father worked concrete construction and stayed relatively fit from all the activity, but his skin was trashed from all the UV and he smoked into his 50s. I've never met a person with more wrecked hands since. It was like shaking hands with 40grit paper.
Construction workers are not known for taking care of themselves, and it's a notoriously machismo culture. Sun screen? ok dandy.
After going bald I appreciated just how damn practical the sombrero is. Now I wear a wide brimmed hat (Tilly or Panama hat or big straw farmers hat or, if I’m feeling flamboyant, a sombrero) almost any time I’m outside. Goofy maybe, but I think my skin is better for it.
There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
This is probably about extremes being bad. Having an extremely sedentary lifestyle is bad, but also having an extremely strenuous one is bad too.
I used to lift weights regularly. I'd go to the gym three times a week for an hour or two at a time. I'm pretty strong naturally and thought my training was going quite well being able to bench 1.5x my bodyweight, squat and deadlift more than 2x etc.
Then I paid some guys to move house for me. Actually, my job paid, I have still yet to pay for this service myself. They were lifting whole chests of drawers without even emptying them. It was crazy. I've since done plenty of this work myself (moved house three times by myself), but I do take the drawers out etc. Basically I work more intelligently and take more time.
What the moving guys were doing is harder, less safe, and they are doing this day in, day out. Add to that poor diets (both seemed to be fuelled on crisps, Coke and fags) and the differences become more clear.
So, like with anything, don't be too extreme. Too much heavy lifting will be just as bad for you as too little.
> Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
I wasn't in construction but I did spend three years working as an arborist / forester between 2022 and 2025 whilst taking a little break from tech after a long 20-year stint. I've been in good shape since I was 30 with strength training, cardio and even a little stint as a masters level competitive olympic weightlifter. A long way of saying, I know my body fairly well.
Two years into climbing trees in domestic settings and hand cutting in timber plantations, even three days a week and my body was hammered. Now maybe that's because I was in the 46–50 year old range, but it was clear it wasn't a viable long-term strategy for me. Speaking about the people I now know in that industry, it's commonplace for "climbers" to be done by their mid-thirties. Shoulders all mashed up from climbing and carrying heavy loads. It's not pretty.
On the positive side and injuries notwithstanding (I did get a shoulder issue just like everyone else) my bodyweight dropped 10kg and I did look (and feel) much nimbler. The core of the problem in this kind of work is that when the rubber hits the road "getting the job done" always comes before "correct techniques for doing X". And there's no liability claim to be had as at the start of each job you sign the risk assessment which states that you will get it done in a health-and-safety-compliant way. If you don't sign, you're not on the crew the next day and you're walking home from site. This is basically how it is in the UK for these kinds of jobs where salaries are between £24–34K annually.
I have the same observation, and I’ve often been curious about it.
I think truthfully, if we do anything for too long our bodies overoptimise for the task and we lose the benefits to fitness and other health issues also creep in.
Young construction workers are often extremely strong and fit, but nearly all the 40+ ones I know have a huge gut and sound like wheezing ICE engines.
There are a handful of exceptions of course, but as far as it goes the general rule is this.
It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
> It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
Terrible food, too. I'm not in construction but I do have to tour worksites for my job somewhat regularly, and pretty much everybody is eating some combination of greasy kebabs and mcdonald's.
I like me a juicy kebab as much as the next guy, but eating just that for days on end can't be good for you.
Now they're certainly more active than a keyboard warrior like yours truly, but there seems to be a consensus around not being able to outrun / out-train a bad diet.
Many blue collar professions tend wear out one or more essential body parts in some manner regardless of cardio or strength fitness. Maybe some are differently "easier" than others like HVAC or electrical, but they still take a toll on knees, necks, and backs that can render one incapable to perform the tasks. Some guys last longer than others but there's usually a decision point of retirement balancing enjoyment vs. additional income vs. retirement health.
My dad was a light duty mechanic with his own specialty shop until 1986. He blew out a cervical disc and exposed himself to a variety of carcinogenic chemicals, and that was the end of his career.
Because their jobs are not "functional strength training" at all and you're discounting all the negatives that come from that kind of work. It's borderline insulting to their jobs to make that comparison, to be frank.
This is very common in Indian villages too. As small kids we used to carry 30-40 kgs of green grass bundles on our heads in the mornings. Girls definitely carried more than their body weight. People carried a stack of pots on their heads with full of water. Carrying two equal weights hung from the two ends of a bamboo bar (kaavidi) on your shoulder is extremely common. There was even a folk story of a boy who carried his two parents on a kaavidi wherever he went.
But none of that farm work was seen as something special. It's just a routine thing. Media and academic research makes things look special and interesting. Samething goes for romanticism, mystery, fiction as well.
This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it).
But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa
I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.
Carrying things on your head/shoulders is surprisingly efficient. Many people can unrack a barbell with double their body weight and just stand there for a bit without having done any strength training at all. The trouble is getting the load into that convenient orientation. Taking something from the ground and putting it over your own head is where all the bad stuff happens. Once it's up there it's not as big a deal.
You can make yourself bulletproof to most forms of hard physical labor by practicing the clean & jerk. This movement is entirely about "get heavy thing off ground and above head" as efficiently and safely as possible. There are advanced movements that can be even more efficient but you trade some injury risk for screwing up. That is to say, the actual amount of wear on your body is even lower if you really know what you're doing.
Agree it’s efficient, don’t agree that an untrained person could unbrace double bodyweight.
I weigh 90kg and can squat ~190kg. Having that much on my back feels HEAVY. I think if you haven’t built up to it before you will not be able to do that
It will feel heavy, but you are not lifting it more than a few cm (and at the point where your body has the most leverage).
Remember the point is most humans couldn't get the weight there, but if somehow it already was they could hold it. That isn't a useful thing to do so we rarely test it.
I don't think you can unrack a 180kg barbell with your head and just stand there like that as a 90kg male, much less untrained. That is a humongous amount of weight.
I definitely don't think this is the case. For somebody who hasn't trained - they're not holding 180kg on their shoulders. I think two big reasons would be that they're not going to have core strength/training to support it, and they wouldn't even have the traps to support the bar on their upper back, it'd dig into them and cause immense pain and probably just roll as well.
For me, it actually seems fairly plausible. I was a fairly untrained 70kg forty-something when I went to the gym and very quickly found that as I did a bit of hiking, I could max out the standing calf raise machine at 155kg. This involves having a very padded 155kg on your shoulders while in a standing position. It felt to me like that was the most my shoulders and back could cope with, and it's more than double body weight.
It’s a huge difference having a loaded barbell which can move in every dimension on your shoulders versus a calf raise machine which is fixed in place and cannot move around!
I’ve squatted barbells since roughly 2006 and the feeling of having more than 100kg on your shoulders is very intense, even if you’ve trained up to it. It feels like it’s crushing your whole body and even breathing is hard.
The idea that an untrained person could put a 180kg barbell on their shoulders and be comfortable AND move around is laughable, they would collapse very quickly.
They wouldn't be able to unrack and stand there either. Just standing with a very heavy barbell is extremely difficult (assuming an untrained person).
Seriously, go and try it, load up 100KG or roughly 225lbs on a barbell and just stand there with it. If you're already a big/heavy/trained guy, put 180KG or 400lbs.
It will probably be quite a surprising experience for you.
And I will say, that even when I was training for heavy squatting, standing there with a very heavy barbell on your back isn't fun at all, you have to have a very tight core, tensed muscles, breathing is much harder. i.e. just standing there is hard work and you want to get your 5 squats done asap. Also, it just plain hurts your back as the metal bar on your spine is painful!
I once carried a log that weighed about double my body weight and carried it 100ft. My back has never been the same, I really don't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.
The idea discussed in the article was one of progressive overload; slowly make your body adapt to an ever increasing workload. Don't go straight for the 200kg deadlift when you are new to the gym, in other words.
I managed to carry my bodyweight in each hand for a strength event (100kg). I guess the total distance was 20m? I was OK afterwards, and I'm no freak of strength.
if you have the grip strength to hold that, you have solid core strength already.
And you are carrying in your hands, not balanced on your head-- which totally alters the stress on the spine.
So yes, cograts on your feat, that is a pretty cool level to hit, but it doesn't counter the basic advice of "grow into it" instead of "max from day one"
Also, you did this "once". If the accident rate is 1:100, doing it once without getting hurt is not very surprising.
Yes, I trained for it and did it maybe a couple of times in training and then at the event. If you want to do XXX kg every day, you need to make your max XXX+[20%+?].
Its not even something hard to come up with if you are active, understand you body and generally how workouts work on you.
I've trained in similar fashion for my trip to Aconcagua or Nepal, and never researched for that nor discussed with anybody. You carry big backpacks up there a lot, or smaller backpacks for 10-12h each day, every day in places where lack of oxygen makes you lose breath in 5-10 steps easily when walking uphill. It figures that when training for strength-endurance there needs to be a lot of repetitions with some added weight.
I just took some weights into backpack at building I was living back then, hiked those 8 floors on stairs, took elevator down, rinse and repeat many times. Or elliptic trainer with same backpack. Or other movements/machines (just don't run with that).
Why the elevator down though? One needs to train going down as much as going up, possibly even more (given my limited experiences hiking up / down some touristy mountains in the UK). I'd even argue going down is harder because you have to stop your own momentum all the time, vs up where maintaining it is beneficial.
The cartilage in your knees is a living tissue. Like muscle, it responds and adapts to stimulus. If descending stairs gives you knee pain that isn't from some past injury being aggravated, then train them.
You get people who go skiing or running for the first time in a while and they complain "Oh, my knees hurt, I'm too old for this". Nope. You're just out of condition. Use it or lose it.
Nice theory, now go ahead and do it for some time (meaning few decades) and then lets talk. Or talk to knee surgeons.
Or no, just listen to few folks who have something to sell like books or training regimens or guiding, or simply won genetic lottery in that very specific part of their bodies, since such advice definitely applies to everybody, at any age, at any situation.
The slovak version of an article contains different photos, and a video [0].
Also, check out the interview with nosič from poland [1] - he mentioned working there 18 years. Surely, surviving this long means that certain techniques are needed ;) When asked about back pain: "My back hurts when I sit at the computer"
hopefully in both Slovakia and Vietnam these will be replaced by cargo drones, after all Vietnamese farmers are already using them extensively, I saw great use of them in videos of saving people during the floods
I'm sure some application will be found for cargo drones, but they're limited in range, flight time, weather conditions, etc compared to people carrying stuff.
Nah thats also part of historical tradition (in Slovakia). Folks doing that could earn way more working regular jobs down in city (even say Poprad, closest one). Its their passion, hobby, and there is a lot of respect in community for them. Even normal hikers can take some smaller load up, its encouraged and appreciated. It doesn't have to be 2 full 50l alluminium barrels of beer or similar 120-150kg loads.
In alps for example all this is done by choppers these days, a tradition lost.
>But jumping straight into lifting heavy weights is not recommended. Instead, experts recommend focusing on technique and starting with loads that can be comfortably lifted before progressively increasing the training.
I'm not sure if its because I'm in the 'advanced' category of lifting, but I have recently been going against this common advice.
I recommend people get to heavy weights as quick as possible. Adding a minimum of 5lbs each time they lift, but more often 10+. At some point the weight becomes too heavy and you compensate with bad form. Wait wait wait before you downvote, I have a rational here:
Your auxiliary muscles that allowed you to do bad form are tired now. Lower the weight and 'clean them up' with good form.
I'm not alone in this mindset, but it goes against conventional wisdom.
People forget that muscles are being used even when we do bad form.
Have you ever tried to pull or push a wheeled cart up a large hill? Wheels are not super useful on steep terrain or unbroken ground and are often a liability without a bullet proof brake to stop it from trying to roll away when you stop. If the land isn't super rough or steep then wheels are great, but when it is you are going to have to work twice as hard.
This reminds me of a trip to Guilin when I was an athletic 22-year-old. We'd booked a hotel on top of a mountain that was only reachable by hiking up a trail. At the trailhead, a five-foot-tall grandma offered to carry my luggage to the top. I thought it was funny — and a bit insulting — so I refused. About a quarter of the way up, I gave up and let her take it. She carried it all the way up without breaking a sweat. It was more a feat of endurance than pure strength, but still incredibly impressive.
A couple years ago, I did a 90 mile hike in Scotland, which was mostly flat. My pack weighed just at 20-25lb (light but not ultralight - a lot of water weight). The trail was MOSTLY flat, with a couple steep trails to bypass forestry work, and crest over some steep hill.
I'm a large man, at the time I was pushing 250lb on a 5'8" frame, but I found my flat land endurance was basically unlimited at walking pace. My uphill endurance was limited so short bursts, and I had to regularly stop for a breather.
Once on flat ground, again, 20+ miles a day no issues.
After the detours, and some one-off side trails to see something, and walking from the trail to a town for food and/or sleep, my entire trek was 125mi over 5 days. And when I got home, I weighed 255lb. I gained 5lb while hiking somehow.
All that to say, uphill endurance is no joke, and it is hard to train, even maxed on a treadmill if you live on flat ground. Stair climbing (or machine) is the only thing I can think of.
Related, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
I was hiking in Nepal a couple years ago. I regularly saw porters carrying 85kg (187 lbs) of wood on there backs up the mountain trails (pic I took: https://imgur.com/a/ahJhoi9). I asked my Nepali guide how much he can carry, and he said "I can carry you!" I'm 195cm (6'5"), and weighed about 120kg (264 lbs) at the time, and this guy was maybe half my size. I told him to prove it, so he asked me to get on his back, which I did, and then he picked me up and started running. Crazy strong.
Altitude can be a huge limiting factor. I biked from Texas to Oregon, and the first days in the Rockies were brutal. It seemed I could barely travel 50 feet up hill without taking a break. I even considered turning around because it just felt impossible.
One thing I always found a bit of a puzzle: it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc, but I still find it curious. If it's generally said to be good for you, shouldn't the effects be a bit more robust than that?
Well the answer here is: other factors. Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen.
Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles. Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes. So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job.
Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped. Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.
> it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population...
When it's a work, you're expected to show up and do it consistently every day. So you can't afford alternate days to get adequate rest and recovery time. Your body is gradually wasted away by the job. When it's more of a leisure activity, you can afford just not to do it and rest, when you don't feel well, so the combination of workouts and recovery time can be net-positive, health-wise.
Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc.
I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects.
Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch.
They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.
They weren’t obese from the steak. It’s the beer and simple carbs.
You can have confounding effects. Specifically note Cochrane’s Aphorism.
"The correlation between any variable and smoking is likely to be higher than the correlation between that variable and the disease."
If you aren't controlling for substance uses (which anyone who has walked by a construction site would know.) You are going to misread an effect. Smoking in particular is actually just that bad for you.
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
Not being rich per se, but probably stress. The body has no innate knowledge of how wealthy you are, outside of some information stored in the neocortex about financial details (which has little influence on the overall functioning and regulation of the organism as a whole). But it does keep track of a very important signal, and that is neuroception, or safety, absence of threats. And being wealthy, absence of sources of stress, or ability to avoid them, brings about that state of feeling secure, safe, which affects every cell of the body and leads to a good regulation of the whole organism.
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.
However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/tre.372?msoc...
Your scientific study does not support your claim (body keeps track of social status) and the other is a men's health magazine article. Hardly the cutting edge of science
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
Basically a good point. Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though. You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.
Such a strange comment. Wealth has nothing to do with longevity and yet here's all the ways how wealth CAUSES longevity.
>Wealth per se
For example, if you have $10m but never go to the doctor, you won't benefit from the medical care discrepancy between wealthy and poor
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
But you won't have poverty related stress.
But you will have "hey man lend me 10000 my moms dying" stress
> such as better medical care
Better food, comes first
Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.
Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.
There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.
Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.
Nutrition too. Not to paint everyone in the construction industry with the same brush, but there’s often a lot of cheap, high calorie, fast food and sugary drinks on site and in work trucks. This is manageable for younger workers, but by a certain age, the job responsibilities become less physically demanding, the metabolism slows down, and the eating habits remain.
> I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc
Similarly, people that run 45 minutes a day are in great shape. But if you run a half marathon every day, you will age quickly
You’re exactly right, too much of a good thing. And for hard strength training, you can hit that tipping point very quickly. Probably within an hour a day if you’re going hard
For strength you can do a workout within like 25~35min that is taking it slow like browsing socials during pauses.
Talking about programs like rippetoe, 5x5, 531 etc. Unless you have elite genetics or are on juice you don't really need to go beyond those programs.
This. I go beyond those programs (currently weight training 4/week with an upper/lower split) and it's still ~4 hours/week inclusive of some stretching at the end of each workout.
Vs ~40 hours/week of whatever a tradesman does.
Unless of course you’re training practical, useful strength. Which requires intense bursts of weight training, and balance between tempo runs, rucks with 35-40% of body weight, and slow run/jogs. Weightlifting is a small part of a larger picture of strength and being able to put it to use. Cardio is the single most important thing you can train because without a gas tank you’re just a fat, slow, strong slob.
You don’t need to be elite nor on juice to do this. All you need is a purpose. I do this all the time, am over 35, and not on juice. My fitness is great but no where near elite.
Rippetoe is an obnoxious jackass and you can venture to his forums (cult) to see it. He’s great at making fat, out of shape, strongmen. He’s not great at producing a fighter, tradesman, or operator. When you want to know what works look to the people actually using their fitness not morons like him who proselytize and look like the hardest thing they do all day is eat a pack of bon Bons.
Strength on itself is already functional and useful. I kind of agree with you, its why i have been moving away from the strongmen stuff, more into kettlebells, calisthenics and walking during lunch and/or post dinner.
Rippetoe gives good advice on lifting form and programming especially for novices but I'd look wider for diet and nutrition advice.
imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
Substance abuse and rest.
If you lift weights Monday and Friday, you give your body time to recover and get stronger.
People whose job is to lift weight, they don't lift things heavy enough and they don't give their body time to recover. They work everyday, whatever if their quads are hurting or not. It has very little benefits and only destroy the joints.
There's often a machismo culture in jobs like that, in which people neglect things like PPE or safety procedures. Or of course, abusive employer-employee conditions in which workers are exposed to hazards without their knowledge or ability to mitigate it. Obviously, not everyone participates, but it's widespread enough I think it could explain this somewhat.
I think for a lot of manual labour, the tasks are repetitive and so they experience greater wear and tear.
TBH, a lot of pro-athletes have wear and tear injuries after they retire as well.
And, as others point out for manual workers, they don't fully recover. As it's their job, many professional athletes will perform while partially injured and exacerbate it. And it's not even professionals! One of the older men in my tri club has a permanent Achilles injury now in his 60s because of an injury sustained when he was younger. The doctor told him to rest for a month to let it properly heal. That weekend he was running a sub-30 10k at the local league competition!
Look at it this way. Construction workers aren't strength training they are wearing themselves out via hard work that requires strength. Not the same thing.
I think it's because while on the job you cut corners and everything. You don't, and often can't, use proper technique. In the gym, barbells are perfectly symmetric and balanced. On the job, you might carry something that forces you into a horrible posture. That can't be good for you
My father worked concrete construction and stayed relatively fit from all the activity, but his skin was trashed from all the UV and he smoked into his 50s. I've never met a person with more wrecked hands since. It was like shaking hands with 40grit paper.
Construction workers are not known for taking care of themselves, and it's a notoriously machismo culture. Sun screen? ok dandy.
After going bald I appreciated just how damn practical the sombrero is. Now I wear a wide brimmed hat (Tilly or Panama hat or big straw farmers hat or, if I’m feeling flamboyant, a sombrero) almost any time I’m outside. Goofy maybe, but I think my skin is better for it.
I really wish hats were normalised again.
There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
This is probably about extremes being bad. Having an extremely sedentary lifestyle is bad, but also having an extremely strenuous one is bad too.
I used to lift weights regularly. I'd go to the gym three times a week for an hour or two at a time. I'm pretty strong naturally and thought my training was going quite well being able to bench 1.5x my bodyweight, squat and deadlift more than 2x etc.
Then I paid some guys to move house for me. Actually, my job paid, I have still yet to pay for this service myself. They were lifting whole chests of drawers without even emptying them. It was crazy. I've since done plenty of this work myself (moved house three times by myself), but I do take the drawers out etc. Basically I work more intelligently and take more time.
What the moving guys were doing is harder, less safe, and they are doing this day in, day out. Add to that poor diets (both seemed to be fuelled on crisps, Coke and fags) and the differences become more clear.
So, like with anything, don't be too extreme. Too much heavy lifting will be just as bad for you as too little.
Strength training demands proper rest. If you do too much training with too little rest you break down instead if building up.
It's not weird. Medicin works the same way: too much will be very bad for you.
> Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
Really? That's not my observation.
I wasn't in construction but I did spend three years working as an arborist / forester between 2022 and 2025 whilst taking a little break from tech after a long 20-year stint. I've been in good shape since I was 30 with strength training, cardio and even a little stint as a masters level competitive olympic weightlifter. A long way of saying, I know my body fairly well.
Two years into climbing trees in domestic settings and hand cutting in timber plantations, even three days a week and my body was hammered. Now maybe that's because I was in the 46–50 year old range, but it was clear it wasn't a viable long-term strategy for me. Speaking about the people I now know in that industry, it's commonplace for "climbers" to be done by their mid-thirties. Shoulders all mashed up from climbing and carrying heavy loads. It's not pretty.
On the positive side and injuries notwithstanding (I did get a shoulder issue just like everyone else) my bodyweight dropped 10kg and I did look (and feel) much nimbler. The core of the problem in this kind of work is that when the rubber hits the road "getting the job done" always comes before "correct techniques for doing X". And there's no liability claim to be had as at the start of each job you sign the risk assessment which states that you will get it done in a health-and-safety-compliant way. If you don't sign, you're not on the crew the next day and you're walking home from site. This is basically how it is in the UK for these kinds of jobs where salaries are between £24–34K annually.
"when AI took my job I bought a chain saw"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/opinion/artificial-intell...
Sorry, don't have an archiv link.
You age much faster when older. Don't read too much into it
I have the same observation, and I’ve often been curious about it.
I think truthfully, if we do anything for too long our bodies overoptimise for the task and we lose the benefits to fitness and other health issues also creep in.
Young construction workers are often extremely strong and fit, but nearly all the 40+ ones I know have a huge gut and sound like wheezing ICE engines.
There are a handful of exceptions of course, but as far as it goes the general rule is this.
It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
Too many variables.
> It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
Terrible food, too. I'm not in construction but I do have to tour worksites for my job somewhat regularly, and pretty much everybody is eating some combination of greasy kebabs and mcdonald's.
I like me a juicy kebab as much as the next guy, but eating just that for days on end can't be good for you.
Now they're certainly more active than a keyboard warrior like yours truly, but there seems to be a consensus around not being able to outrun / out-train a bad diet.
Many blue collar professions tend wear out one or more essential body parts in some manner regardless of cardio or strength fitness. Maybe some are differently "easier" than others like HVAC or electrical, but they still take a toll on knees, necks, and backs that can render one incapable to perform the tasks. Some guys last longer than others but there's usually a decision point of retirement balancing enjoyment vs. additional income vs. retirement health.
My dad was a light duty mechanic with his own specialty shop until 1986. He blew out a cervical disc and exposed himself to a variety of carcinogenic chemicals, and that was the end of his career.
Unless you get all your information from movies construction work does not train strength that much.
Because their jobs are not "functional strength training" at all and you're discounting all the negatives that come from that kind of work. It's borderline insulting to their jobs to make that comparison, to be frank.
Construction workers don’t get rest days.
Every one I know described the first two weeks as complete hell, until their bodies just stopped complaining.
But it still takes it’s toll long term.
Sounds like you never properly understood what "back-breaking work" really means.
Try doing bending down and picking heavy stuff up, for 8 hours a day, every working day.
This is very common in Indian villages too. As small kids we used to carry 30-40 kgs of green grass bundles on our heads in the mornings. Girls definitely carried more than their body weight. People carried a stack of pots on their heads with full of water. Carrying two equal weights hung from the two ends of a bamboo bar (kaavidi) on your shoulder is extremely common. There was even a folk story of a boy who carried his two parents on a kaavidi wherever he went.
But none of that farm work was seen as something special. It's just a routine thing. Media and academic research makes things look special and interesting. Samething goes for romanticism, mystery, fiction as well.
>kaavidi
This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it).
But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa
I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.
Carrying things on your head/shoulders is surprisingly efficient. Many people can unrack a barbell with double their body weight and just stand there for a bit without having done any strength training at all. The trouble is getting the load into that convenient orientation. Taking something from the ground and putting it over your own head is where all the bad stuff happens. Once it's up there it's not as big a deal.
You can make yourself bulletproof to most forms of hard physical labor by practicing the clean & jerk. This movement is entirely about "get heavy thing off ground and above head" as efficiently and safely as possible. There are advanced movements that can be even more efficient but you trade some injury risk for screwing up. That is to say, the actual amount of wear on your body is even lower if you really know what you're doing.
Agree it’s efficient, don’t agree that an untrained person could unbrace double bodyweight.
I weigh 90kg and can squat ~190kg. Having that much on my back feels HEAVY. I think if you haven’t built up to it before you will not be able to do that
It will feel heavy, but you are not lifting it more than a few cm (and at the point where your body has the most leverage).
Remember the point is most humans couldn't get the weight there, but if somehow it already was they could hold it. That isn't a useful thing to do so we rarely test it.
I don't think you can unrack a 180kg barbell with your head and just stand there like that as a 90kg male, much less untrained. That is a humongous amount of weight.
Not your head. Your shoulders. As if you were going to do a barbell squat.
I definitely don't think this is the case. For somebody who hasn't trained - they're not holding 180kg on their shoulders. I think two big reasons would be that they're not going to have core strength/training to support it, and they wouldn't even have the traps to support the bar on their upper back, it'd dig into them and cause immense pain and probably just roll as well.
For me, it actually seems fairly plausible. I was a fairly untrained 70kg forty-something when I went to the gym and very quickly found that as I did a bit of hiking, I could max out the standing calf raise machine at 155kg. This involves having a very padded 155kg on your shoulders while in a standing position. It felt to me like that was the most my shoulders and back could cope with, and it's more than double body weight.
It’s a huge difference having a loaded barbell which can move in every dimension on your shoulders versus a calf raise machine which is fixed in place and cannot move around!
I’ve squatted barbells since roughly 2006 and the feeling of having more than 100kg on your shoulders is very intense, even if you’ve trained up to it. It feels like it’s crushing your whole body and even breathing is hard.
The idea that an untrained person could put a 180kg barbell on their shoulders and be comfortable AND move around is laughable, they would collapse very quickly.
The OP didn't say they could move around... they said "unrack and stand there".
They wouldn't be able to unrack and stand there either. Just standing with a very heavy barbell is extremely difficult (assuming an untrained person).
Seriously, go and try it, load up 100KG or roughly 225lbs on a barbell and just stand there with it. If you're already a big/heavy/trained guy, put 180KG or 400lbs.
It will probably be quite a surprising experience for you.
And I will say, that even when I was training for heavy squatting, standing there with a very heavy barbell on your back isn't fun at all, you have to have a very tight core, tensed muscles, breathing is much harder. i.e. just standing there is hard work and you want to get your 5 squats done asap. Also, it just plain hurts your back as the metal bar on your spine is painful!
I think people might be able to support more than they think, but I'd also be sceptical that they could unrack 2x bodyweight without _some_ training.
Could they use a machine to load up to that point? Cushioned and loaded in a way that doesn't use traps/a barbell? Maybe.
I say this as someone who deals regularly with weights around that level, at a similar weight.
Having said all that, I do 100% agree that loading your back and getting the weight there are two different things!
I once carried a log that weighed about double my body weight and carried it 100ft. My back has never been the same, I really don't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.
The idea discussed in the article was one of progressive overload; slowly make your body adapt to an ever increasing workload. Don't go straight for the 200kg deadlift when you are new to the gym, in other words.
I concur. A lapse in training and one careless fess-up is all that's needed for a lifetime injury.
I managed to carry my bodyweight in each hand for a strength event (100kg). I guess the total distance was 20m? I was OK afterwards, and I'm no freak of strength.
if you have the grip strength to hold that, you have solid core strength already.
And you are carrying in your hands, not balanced on your head-- which totally alters the stress on the spine.
So yes, cograts on your feat, that is a pretty cool level to hit, but it doesn't counter the basic advice of "grow into it" instead of "max from day one"
Also, you did this "once". If the accident rate is 1:100, doing it once without getting hurt is not very surprising.
Yes, I trained for it and did it maybe a couple of times in training and then at the event. If you want to do XXX kg every day, you need to make your max XXX+[20%+?].
> How to carry more than your own bodyweight.
Stand up and pick up literally any object or don't be naked. Simple.
Here's how to actually train for it.
https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mo...
Its not even something hard to come up with if you are active, understand you body and generally how workouts work on you.
I've trained in similar fashion for my trip to Aconcagua or Nepal, and never researched for that nor discussed with anybody. You carry big backpacks up there a lot, or smaller backpacks for 10-12h each day, every day in places where lack of oxygen makes you lose breath in 5-10 steps easily when walking uphill. It figures that when training for strength-endurance there needs to be a lot of repetitions with some added weight.
I just took some weights into backpack at building I was living back then, hiked those 8 floors on stairs, took elevator down, rinse and repeat many times. Or elliptic trainer with same backpack. Or other movements/machines (just don't run with that).
Why the elevator down though? One needs to train going down as much as going up, possibly even more (given my limited experiences hiking up / down some touristy mountains in the UK). I'd even argue going down is harder because you have to stop your own momentum all the time, vs up where maintaining it is beneficial.
Up is hard on the muscles, down on the knees.
The cartilage in your knees is a living tissue. Like muscle, it responds and adapts to stimulus. If descending stairs gives you knee pain that isn't from some past injury being aggravated, then train them.
You get people who go skiing or running for the first time in a while and they complain "Oh, my knees hurt, I'm too old for this". Nope. You're just out of condition. Use it or lose it.
Nice theory, now go ahead and do it for some time (meaning few decades) and then lets talk. Or talk to knee surgeons.
Or no, just listen to few folks who have something to sell like books or training regimens or guiding, or simply won genetic lottery in that very specific part of their bodies, since such advice definitely applies to everybody, at any age, at any situation.
Reminds me of slovakian mountain carriers https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/
The slovak version of an article contains different photos, and a video [0].
Also, check out the interview with nosič from poland [1] - he mentioned working there 18 years. Surely, surviving this long means that certain techniques are needed ;) When asked about back pain: "My back hurts when I sit at the computer"
[0]: https://regiontatry.sk/moje-tatry/tatranski-nosici-svetovy-u...
[1]: https://magazynnaszczycie.pl/artykul/chleb-uratowal-mi-zycie...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMxk-_kezxw
This is awesome, now I really want to try it and be rewarded with a mug of warm tea :D
hopefully in both Slovakia and Vietnam these will be replaced by cargo drones, after all Vietnamese farmers are already using them extensively, I saw great use of them in videos of saving people during the floods
I'm sure some application will be found for cargo drones, but they're limited in range, flight time, weather conditions, etc compared to people carrying stuff.
Nah thats also part of historical tradition (in Slovakia). Folks doing that could earn way more working regular jobs down in city (even say Poprad, closest one). Its their passion, hobby, and there is a lot of respect in community for them. Even normal hikers can take some smaller load up, its encouraged and appreciated. It doesn't have to be 2 full 50l alluminium barrels of beer or similar 120-150kg loads.
In alps for example all this is done by choppers these days, a tradition lost.
>But jumping straight into lifting heavy weights is not recommended. Instead, experts recommend focusing on technique and starting with loads that can be comfortably lifted before progressively increasing the training.
I'm not sure if its because I'm in the 'advanced' category of lifting, but I have recently been going against this common advice.
I recommend people get to heavy weights as quick as possible. Adding a minimum of 5lbs each time they lift, but more often 10+. At some point the weight becomes too heavy and you compensate with bad form. Wait wait wait before you downvote, I have a rational here:
Your auxiliary muscles that allowed you to do bad form are tired now. Lower the weight and 'clean them up' with good form.
I'm not alone in this mindset, but it goes against conventional wisdom.
People forget that muscles are being used even when we do bad form.
Just don't get injured. Pain = stop right away.
Invent the wheel.
Have you ever tried to pull or push a wheeled cart up a large hill? Wheels are not super useful on steep terrain or unbroken ground and are often a liability without a bullet proof brake to stop it from trying to roll away when you stop. If the land isn't super rough or steep then wheels are great, but when it is you are going to have to work twice as hard.
And be stuck only ever going where someone else has invented the road for you.
Big same. Now need big wheel.
Good luck using a wheel in uneven terrain. Why would you even leave a comment like this?
It works wonders downhill tbh
No, I don't think I will