Posted by 1659447091 3 days ago
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.
E.g. upper body dominant sports, or activities not focused on endurance would not be as advantageous here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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...
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
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)
Better food, comes first
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.
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
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.
Vs ~40 hours/week of whatever a tradesman does.
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.
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.
TBH, a lot of pro-athletes have wear and tear injuries after they retire as well.
Construction workers are not known for taking care of themselves, and it's a notoriously machismo culture. Sun screen? ok dandy.
I really wish hats were normalised again.
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.
It's not weird. Medicin works the same way: too much will be very bad for you.
Really? That's not my observation.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/opinion/artificial-intell...
Sorry, don't have an archiv link.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try doing bending down and picking heavy stuff up, for 8 hours a day, every working day.
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.
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.
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
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’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.
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!
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!
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.
https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mo...
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).
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.
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.
Stand up and pick up literally any object or don't be naked. Simple.
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...
In alps for example all this is done by choppers these days, a tradition lost.
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.