These body builders probably are strong though. Have you seen someone their size lift? They can move a ton of weight in the gym for reps. I think it’s more of a difference in technique rather than a disparity in strength. Let’s see the worker try and bench 405lb. Or maybe the worker trains powerlifting, who knows.
Also having the muscles work together for a specific move. Core strength is probably ignored by most bodybuilders in favor of working in isolation. A worker uses his whole body to move that shit constantly.
Strength can be very movement-specific in the sense both neural adaptation and fascia gets reinforced in the movements someone does a lot.
Fascia is very little talked about in these cases of muscular differences, but it's a criss-cross network of collagen that runs through the muscles that gives additional it additional structure on trained movements.
Also having the muscles work together for a specific move.
This is key, and it's also a lot less magical than a lot of people think. Those body builders are struggling in that video, but give them even an hour to get used to the feel of the bags and how to balance one on top of the others, and they would do much, much better.
Give them a day or two and they would do it so well that you wouldn't be able to tell from that short clip that they hadn't been doing it all there life.
When people say "strength" they usually aren't very clear if they mean the raw strength in your muscles, or the ability to actually get a strength-based task done.
The thing with lifting is that you need to be able to do a bunch of stuff like estimating the weight of the thing you are lifting before you actually lift it, know how to get under the centre of gravity, get a proper grip, make sure the object follows a relatively direct path upwards, all sorts of stuff is going to make the difference between succeeding and failing.
Some of this is difficult to learn, and some of it is actually quite easy. You could fail spectacularly at a lift the first time you try it, take a few minutes to assess where you went wrong and then nail it.
Yeah, this is all very obvious stuff, but for some reason people want to turn it into some kind of scene from a kung-fu film. Like the humble, regular workers must have some kind of ki or magical ligament power.
You know what, you are probably right. I wanted to put it down to people finding a complicated answer more interesting than a simple one, but yeah the popularity of this video is probably down to a lot of people just wanting to believe that they are actually stronger than the guys who just pump their pecs to look good for the girls.
I do strength training. I got into it because I wanted to improve my performance in judo and freestyle wrestling, I understand the difference between having big muscles and having functional strength. Those guys with big muscles - they are usually very strong. Not as strong as a dedicated strength competitor, but fairly fucking strong compared to the average guy.
It’s a trend here in Reddit which is why I recognize it so easily now. Any bodybuilder is basically just an inflatable tube man according to redditors.
Like you said, a strong man will be stronger in general than a bodybuilder at anything except for very specific movements. But a bodybuilder will still beat out 99.9% of the populace in strength.
This is the reason I stopped training with weights except deadlift. The rest of my strengths comes from working in machine assembling, gardening, digging and calisthenics
Yeah I talked to some movers and they said the same thing. Bodybuilders are good if it's very specific movements, as soon as the technique changes they cant do shit because it requires a muscle group that hasnt been hyper focused
As someone who’s done moving I think just getting used to balancing awkward objects and techniques is most of it. A bodybuilder who does moving for a month or two will do well.
This is definitely a big part of it. I work in a bakery and regularly have to lift and move heavy items. Cases of dough, trash, bags of flour, etc. I have definitely developed arm strength as well as core strength.
I’m not strong enough to lift bags of cement like that though.
I’m basically repeatedly lifting between 30 to 50lbs of weight.
I was a former bodybuilding coach and have done a ton of manual labor.
Bodybuilders are certainly strong as fuck. I was in the top .4% for deadlift by bodyweight. It was a little over 3x my bodyweight.
Bodybuilders have different goals than manual labors.
BBers work for size and strength maximization, symmetry, and joint damage minimization.
Laborers work to complete a job ASAP. Joint health deterioration and pain are notorious.
Familiarity is also monumental. Knowing where to grip is crucial. We've all carried material that cannot support itself and crumbles or breaks. For the bodybuilder in this situation, he is unfamiliar with the material, handling it, which muscles to engage, the form, etc. It's a high risk of injury for the bodybuilder to try to lift that with all his strength
Just guessing that those are 50lb bags of concrete, so 200lbs Those bodybuilders could put that weight on their shoulders and do squats all day. That labourer would likely be done after a few. Same for deadlifting that weight.
Viewers also need to remember they are influencers travelling and making content. They aren't going to trash random people working to show off. No one wants to watch someone that's in the gym all day prove they are stronger than some dude working. That's rude and trashy. They'll talk them up, let them out-lift them, have a great time, go home, post a video, and collect dollars.
Also, if I'm going to risk hurting myself on a lift, I'm doing it in the gym, not carrying random shit
They aren’t going to trash random people working to show off
Also, I haven’t been at the gym enough in awhile, but in my experience, most bodybuilders are decent folks. I won’t say like paragons of virtue or anything but most of them are helpful and humble.
The most improvement I had in my lifting form was from a hulk of a guy asking if I wanted some tips and then spending like 20 minutes basically personal training me.
This is so nuanced reply. My dad/friends/whoever not bodybuilders always quip that "Look at this guy, lifting 1 ton of bag on his back, why you can't" I honestly gave up explaining why and let them be they and let them be me, I just don't give a f**k anymore I guess.
It’s funny seeing how many angry comments replying to you don’t understand how much stabilizer muscle strength and the development of mind/body connection for different movements matters
It was super obvious during the overhead hold, to do that with a loose bag of cement takes significantly more stabilizer muscle strength than it does overall lifting capacity. Even when the worker was carrying the bags he wasn’t bending his arms, he was practically locked out whereas the BBers were using their muscles inefficiently
Oh well, couch potatoes not understanding weight lifting and BBing is par for the course
The training bodybuilders do isolates specific muscle groups.
To an extent, yes. But all body builders use compound "practical strength" exercises that engage multiple muscle groups.
The big lifts are overhead shoulder presses, bench presses, dead lifts, barbell rows, and squats. I don't know of a single body builder or strength trainer who doesn't incorporate these into their routine. Yes, they also do very isolated exercises, but the basis of strength and body building are these big compound lifts.
In fact if you want to develop a nice mix of strength and size without spending too long in the gym, just do those lifts I mentioned, and progressively increase the weight little by little over time. You'll develop some serious functional strength, your muscles will get bigger, and you're in and out of the gym in like 35 minutes.
Lifting a hod full of cement and running it up a 12 foot ladder 25 or 30 times a day, 5 days a week is not the same as hitting the weights 3 times a week
Right, but you left out they also do tons of training that works multiple muscle groups at the same time, squats, shoulder press, etc. all of which have functional crossovers to manual labor
Yep, the gym is not real world strength. Sure those specific muscle groups are strong, but they won't have any of the muscle memory or strength in the stabilizer muscles to perform these kinds of tasks. A bench press will build up certain muscles, but you're doing it with your back braced and limited movement in any other direction and when you don't have the coordination to do that same movement with an unbalanced weight in a different posture then all those muscle groups used to stabilize in lateral directions and resist the torque on your body holding a weight away from you will show their limits and lack of training. It's like putting a turbo on a car and getting double the horsepower but you don't have the tires to get the power to the ground.
I think in this case it’s more to do with their sheer size. The bags are much further from their center of mass than the worker because they’re just too damn big
What bodybuilder doesn't have compound movements like squats, bench press, dead lifts, bent over rows etc at the core of their workout?
Isolation exercises are like for arms and maybe some shoulder work. It's incredibly inefficient to attempt to do hypertrophy training WITHOUT compound exercises.
The only real difference between hypertrophy and strength workouts will be hypertrophy will have higher volume with greater reps per sets....that's about it. The exercises will be mostly the same. You even mentioned Zerchers, Zerchers are a great alternative to back squats and fit perfectly inside of a hypertrophy program.
You also say Zerchers requires more grip strength...have you ever done any Zercher lift ever? You literally are not gripping the bar.
I compete in strongman but in my experience body builders are generally stronger than people think. They also train compound movements. Not zercher deadlift or log press level of compound but bench and squat for sure.
I think the reality is people are strong at what they train. Give those bodybuilders 10 weeks of strongman training and they will move more backs than those workers.
There is a skill element to front carries as much as any other lift and often it's a question of adaptation. Their body simply doesn't know how to perform that movement (carrying a heavy awkward thing in front of them) the same way someone who regularly does it.
Bodybuilders their size deadlift up to like 700 pounds, grip is one of their strengths usually. This is purely technique and very specific muscles for it.
Absolutely. I'm an amateur bodybuilder and I can bench 315 for 3, yet my friend who is a construction worker and doesn't lift (similar height and weight) beats me on the grip strength tester.
Motivated me to start grip training though. I hope to beat him on grip strength before the end of the year, lmao.
Exactly. Who's going to be better at moving bags of cement? The guy who does it every single day? Or the people who hardly, if ever, even work with cement at all?
You talking about the guy that dresses like a janitor and makes it really obvious it's a prank at the same gym over and over? Yeah, that's all staged and the dude is actually a professional powerlifter.
There'd a youtube video that's bodybuilders vs construction workers and the construction workers beat them in pretty much everything. They had a huge construction worker who out-benched them and they even accused him of being a ringer and was like....I wish. I've been up here working since 5am.
Yep, if the 300lb tub of lard pretends that fat=strong and lean=weak they can delude themselves into thinking they’re like Brian Shaw, as opposed to being obese and weak
Yeah everytime I see a post here comparing the two they always shun on the bodybuilder saying that all those muscles don’t build strength but in reality it does it just that people are so use to seeing strong man or strength athletes that they can’t comprehend that building more muscles makes you stronger in general
Yea, I dont doubt some farmer bucking hay all day can whip body builders in an Atlas stone challenge or something but benching? I doubt construction has you using your chest all day, I wouldnt be surprised if they had stronger back/shoulders/forearms though.
What? I'm just saying the video this person was talking about was fake and everyone in the video was a bodybuilder. People who work labor all day don't get a bunch of extra muscle like the guys in the video they are referring to. It was just clickbait bullshit. You can't eat enough while working all day to gain a bunch of muscle.
I know. And I added to your response, that not only is it fake as you said, but it's not even clear why people like the guy you responded to want to believe the fake so badly.
I think I know this video. Two of the construction workers were trained guys and destroyed The bodybuilders. The dude who done the deadlifts was a real beast who trained 100% for years and been on steroids too. The bench press guy was a power lifter I guess. The other contruction workers all lose their challenges against the bodybuilders.
Bodybuilders certainly move more weight than a normal person, but the general idea is to isolate specific muscles and muscle groups by doing many reps at a lower weight.
Just pointing it out that powerlifters, olympic-style, and strongman competitors are the actual Very Strong People, and not bodybuilders
High doubt. They might have bot trained any compound movements and any of the stabilizing muscles needed to carry that. Big show off muscles aren't the same as the ones you need for regular weight carries you do day today day.
It's the difference between working out big muscles in isolation vs, working them as groups. Of course if you do a compound movement like moving big heavy concrete sacks, you would work out thr big muscle groups and any stabilizing muscles used.
I was going to say something similar. In manual labor your body adjusts and you learn techniques to do things in an efficient manner. Totally different disciplines. Like when I was handling 35 to 45,000 lbs a day on a daily basis I gained a lot of strength for a while. Then I got COVID and I was in my late 50's my strength and endurance went away. It's very frustrating that it went so fast like in less than a month that was a little hard to deal with mentally.
It's partly technique but the biggest thing is the specific set of muscles used to lift the bags of concrete that are over developed after performing the same laboris motions for years. It's equivalent to spending hours in the gym every day for years and performing one exercise.
It's a combination of their muscle group focuses being narrower and their muscles not being trained for that specific act. There's a lot of minor muscles that tend to be overlooked, but are, in fact, crucial to leveraging our strength at certain angles. Having too big of a muscle group can also cause surrounding muscles to atrophy, so you trade strength flow for bulk at some point.
I think it has to do with balance and grip. I’ve lifted things as a woman, men have failed to do but I think it’s because all my strength comes from farm work. I know how to balance awkward stuff that can flop to the side. Weights and dumbbells don’t shift or wobble like grain or bales of hay.
This is the right answer I believe. It's generally not that hard to look at a person's physique and estimate how much they can lift on a certain excersize. To think that that size does not inform you about strength at all is nonsense.
Static lifting and all that does not compare to people working intensive manual labor jobs. One has muscles made to look big and handle static loads, the other has them for what we were meant to use them for : flexibile, maneuverable and compact. Most military personnel don't look like a steroid costumer gorilla and manage intensive PT courses and put people flat on their asses in a fight.
In my opinion while gym can be good for your health if you do no other sports gym muscles are not real life muscles .....A car mechanic or rock climber would laugh his ass off at your upper body strength and grip strenght when you gotta do other tasks than lift some plates . They work with multiple groups at once while the lifter has trained only for isolated group usage .
They're only strong when form is able to be reached and utilizing certain areas. Put them to work using multiple body zones and they struggle to lift things and you get what's in the video. I worked with a bodybuilder and the dude couldn't move multiple 60 pound objects from point A to point B without stopping after each one, then a dude half his size or less ran laps around him. It's only useful when you're in the gym. Same thing with the worlds strongest man types.
It also has to do with stabilizer muscles. It's true the bodybuilders are huge, and with specific movements can generate vastly more power. But they typically use machines or barbell movements that target a specific muscles in a particular way. If you're a guy moving bags of concrete, your range of motion will be all over the place compared to a gym machine. If the weight moves slightly to one side or the other there are a bunch of muscles in your core, back, and shoulders that will activate to keep it centered. Rotating with the bags will cause the same phenomena. If you're doing this all day those stabilizing muscles will get super strong. Compare this to a bicep curl or seated rowing machine where all the motion is along a single plane and the machine is what stabilizes the movement and the difference makes sense.
This is why I think free weights are better than machines. Powerlifts with a barbell also are pretty pretty good because even though they're specific movements it's you stabilizing everything. Kettlebells are probably the best for hitting the stabilizers well.
The difference isn't necessarily sport specific technique, like you're suggesting. The difference is in how the muscles are built. The laborer has to move these cement bags daily, building more dense muscle fibers without as much hypertrophy. The bodybuilder specifically trains to get bigger muscles, but they aren't as strong.
There's a video of I think Larry Wheels and Jujimufu with a rock climber who can do lat pulls at like 400lbs, a weight that both powerbuilders struggled with. Dude has tight, ape-like muscle fibers, the other two guys just have bigger muscle fibers.
Being big and being a body builder are not the same. Far from it. They are definitely stronger than the average person, but not nearly as much as someone dedicated. Like hell, that one guy who could only lift three bags? he looks to be about three times my size, I'm a skinny as funky, lanky dude with multiple vitamin deficiencies, and I can lift two bags like that. Granted, not for long, but my point stands. Having large muscles does not make you strong. Body builders train to be big and nothing else. The people you see lift things are likely people who actually TRAINED to do that, people who actually prioritized strength over size.
Techniques are part of it, but it's also just stabilizer muscles never being worked to that high degree.
I made the switch from barbells to heavy, loosely packed sandbags and I was stuck at a 120lbs for what seemed like forever, even though I could do conventional deadlift much more. Apparently this is fairly common. Technique was there, but just didn't feel "strong". Each rep was like a mini wrestling bout with the weight shifting and sagging randomly.
I think it's both technique and stabilizing muscles. You really can't work those effectively you do awkward lifts. Look at his technique at the start, his hands are center of the bag, and he rests the mass on one leg at the same time. The others grab the corners.
Yeah it's always funny to see dudes on Reddit calling bodybuilders weak. Like... They're still lifting huge amounts of weights for hours a day every day hahaha
Yeah, lifting things one direction for short bursts isn't useful, which is why bodybuilding is seen as a joke among people who do manual labor for a living.
The strength being built by someone doing manual labor strengthens muscle groups that are useful in everyday work. That strength is transferable to others kinds of work and overall makes that person not only strong, but useful.
Bodybuilding works the muscles to do bodybuilding, which has almost no practical use in a working field.
Strong yes, but I think you're putting body builders in the same category as strongmen and powerlifters. Bodybuilding is focused on the aesthetics, not the strength. Obviously, they're still strong, but not when compared to how they look. You could probably argue that they are weaker on a muscle-to-strength ratio, would be an interesting study at least.
I think hand strength is also under estimated i work in the trades and was packing paving stones the big 2x2 ones with my friends and despite being much bigger than me I was comfortably packing a paver in each hand wile they couldn't.
Big muscles are still strong muscles. You're just not gonna have a lot of general strength and beat someone whose developed a lot of strength and technique at a particular task.
Right, but your grip strength will likely not be as good as that of a similar sized construction worker - unless you've been doing grip training as well.
Similar sized construction worker to bodybuilder does not exist unless they use steroids or also workout and yes, training your forearms directly is a must as a bodybuilder because it directly impacts literally 90% of lifts you do. Find me a dude who can do reverse wrist curls on cables with full stack on commercial gym cables (which is 110lbs) per arm, and I will find you someone who has high chance of being as strong as construction worker while putting in microscopic fraction of effort to achieve it.
Type out your comment, I briefly saw it, LMAO. It does not matter if you can match it, what matters is that it takes a bodybuilder around 3 minutes max per session to train forearms fully. Assuming you have 3x frequency per week, it ends up being like 7.2 hours per year. So you break your back, get riddled with injuries, sit in cold and hot weather just to barely (if at all) beat someone who spent less than a workday working on that muscle.
I mistook it for a reply to another comment I made.
I was just stating my observation that people doing manual labour often have similar grip strength to people doing bodybuilding without specifically focusing on forearms (which few do).
The laborer doesn't have general strength either. He has strength for lifting heavy things. That isn't going to be strength in everything, just like a bodybuilder that's really strong in specific lifts isn't strong in everything.
Jesus that's twice in just a few days where I've seen Limmy being quoted for this exact thing. The fact that vid is 12 years old and still being quoted is testament to his brilliant comedy.
Like other people mentioned, it isn't mutually exclusive though. I guarantee those bodybuilders are stronger than 99% of the population, and pro powerlifters with have more muscle size than 99% of the population (in their weight class). But you'll be best at what you specialize in.
And bodybuilding puts on strength differently, especially with modern training methodology. Progressive overloading by adding 5 lbs to your 3 set 12-15 rep squat program each week is different than adding 5 lbs to a powerlifting workout where you hit a heavy single near your 1RM.
Same reason the worker isn't "small", everyone in this video is in sicker shape than 99% of people on Reddit.
I mean, the force that can be transferred through a muscle is proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it's objectively true to say that a bigger muscle is "stronger." But "strength" as in the ability to complete a task with a heavy object has components other than muscular throughput, like technique and neurological adaptations.
If you made someone that had worked out before but hadn't done free weight squats, do free weight squats for 2 months, they would be able to squat significantly more at the end -- but it wouldn't really be due to muscle gains, it would be almost all due to technique and neural improvements.
If you let the big guys in this video practice picking up cement bags for two months, they'd be able to pick up 4 bags too. Similarly, if you took the smaller dude in the video and made him bigger, he'd make 4 bags look even easier.
the force that can be transferred through a muscle is proportional to its cross-sectional area
Is that true? If you compare a pro-athlete (in a sport like gymnastics, rowing, etc...) to a guy who has spent a year or so lifting weights at the gym, they'll be about the same size but the pro-athlete will be a LOT stronger. Like x2 or x3.
I would think this "proportional" thing applies by and large as a rule of thumb (like if you pick two random persons in the street, or two guys doing the same sport). But that it ceases to be true when you compare somebody who trains specifically for body shape against somebody who trains specifically for strength, and especially when you compare a bodybuilder trying to maximize size with no regards for strength against a martial artist or rock climber trying to maximize strength while minimizing weight.
Again not saying the bodybuilders here are not strong, just that there's a reason why pro weightlifters don't look like this (and it's not JUST doping regulations).
No. This is really just a physics question. Many papers and books have been written about this. Force is proportional to cross sectional area, work is proportional to volume. This is one of the reasons that small animals are able to jump so high relative to their size -- their volume shrinks much faster than the cross sectional area of their muscles. A squirrel, a dog, and a horse all jump about the same height, for example. But muscle fibers have to be ACTIVATED to produce their maximum potential force output, and you can increase total fiber recruitment through training and neurological adaptation, independent of muscle fiber size. In fact, studies show that this neural adaptation is really important for strength-related tasks, and is very task-specific. If you practice squatting, you will be able to squat heavier even if your muscles don't grow. As your muscles grow, you'll also be able to squat even heavier. If you move to a different leg related task, your leg size will help you compared to someone that is smaller, but you will still need to adapt to the new exercise, and before you do that, you might be outperformed by someone who is very practiced. But once you are similarly practiced, the larger person will have an advantage again.
In practice, if you compared a gymnast to a bodybuilder, they would each perform better in the task they trained at, without much cross over. The gymnast isn't going to bench 400 unless they also lift regularly with heavy weights as part of their programs (also, have you SEEN a male gymnast? They're not small). And a bodybuilder isn't going to do a ring routine. But to act like size doesn't help with strength is just misunderstanding biophysics. Ants are relatively strong, but ants don't move boulders -- bears do. World's strongest man is over 400 lbs. NFL players in "strength" positions are all 250+ pounds. Size undeniably helps.
Those pro athletes? They pretty much all have gym strength training in their workload. Many of them spend more time in the gym than your example "guy who has spent a year or so lifting weights," depending on the sport and whether they're currently in-season.
Pro athletes are also genetically-gifted individuals who almost always have a greater aptitude for strength than your average person, because that's what is demanded of them by their sport.
The reason they all look different is because a person only has so much work capacity, and they must pick based on what gets them the best results in the thing that is their ultimate goal.
Muscle size is indeed one of the most important foundations of strength, but it is also very physically taxing to maximize "hypertrophy." That's the goal of bodybuilding, so that's enough for them. There would be no point in trying to maximize other components of strength unless it opened up the pathway for them to get even bigger muscles.
For other pro athletes, the goal is to gain strength, mobility, speed, power, etc. that will help them get the best results in their actual sport. It turns out the best way to do those things doesn't require a whole lot of direct focus on hypertrophy.
For example, if your goal is to have the strongest legs so you can jump higher, push people harder, or whatever, then you're going to squat, and you're going to squat heavy. You're going to measure yourself by your progress in squatting heavier and heavier weight.
If your goal is to have the biggest legs, you'll squat heavy, but your training will be dominated by sets with more reps where your goal is to fatigue your legs until they run out of juice. You can't do that the same way at heavier weights because you'll start to fail reps before your muscles get to that stage of fatigue.
Under the hood, training for pure strength includes more work by the central nervous system [CNS], which is the thing that fires the muscles you got, and can be trained just as much as the muscle tissue itself.
There is also specificity: in weight training like bodybuilding or a sport like powerlifting, you train very specific patterns in very controlled ways, none of which are quite like, say, picking up bags of cement. Give this same task to a strongman, however, and you'll probably find they are outperform the manual worker because this is much more similar to items on the strongman program.
A wide variation in the ratio of strength to muscle cross-sectional area was observed. This variability may be a result of anatomical differences between subjects or may result from differences in the proportions of different fibre types in the muscles. The variation between subjects is such that strength is not a useful predictive index of muscle cross-sectional area.
Summing up, muscle volume and strength are correlated but other factors are also important, meaning you can have large differences of strength at a given volume. By switching from a training program that focuses on hypertrophy to one that focuses on maximizing the strength/weight ratio, you could even gain strength while losing muscle volume (and vice versa).
When I asked whether it was true I was expecting someone to provide a reliable source, not for some random person to offer their personal opinion. What does that contribute to the discussion?? In the end I had to do the searching myself
I'm not a random person offering my personal opinion. I have decades of experience including at the pro level.
I never said other factors aren't also important, and you're drawing invalid conclusions with respect to your original context: "when you compare somebody who trains specifically for body shape against somebody who trains specifically for strength."
There are endless studies showing that muscle cross-sectional area [CSA] is a direct component of the ability to produce force, and even that the ability to produce force is only part of the ability to perform a particular task. Nobody believes it's the only determining factor, and in fact that was my point. When I said pro athletes are genetically gifted, one of those gifts I was referring to do was their anthropometric advantages, such as superior muscle insertions and proportions of the right type of muscle fibers for their chosen sport.
You're fooling yourself a little bit about losing muscle volume, because that happens on a much, much smaller scale (you'll search a long, long time before you'll find a single athlete who reports any notable loss in muscle mass from switching to a program that focuses on strength after having done hypertrophy). The only thing you're showing properly is the reason why hypertrophy does not have a very high training priority most of the time for most athletes, although it is also very common to incorporate periods of hypertrophy because muscle CSA remains a basic component in the ability to produce force.
And if you need a source because you assume people are talking out of their asses when they're actually telling you some of the most basic, widely-accepted truths in the strength and conditioning world, here you go: Cross-sectional area and muscular strength: a brief review - PubMed
Is that the full story though? I’ve been working a manual labor job for a year now and I feel like my muscles aren’t “bigger” but they gotten harder or tighter. Is that not a factor in strength? The “leanness” of the muscle?
Uh.. they are strong, sorry but if these dudes went like head to head on a bench press or some conventional exercise the body builders would absolutely smash these guys on any lift
And I'm not even into the roided looks, but factually these dudes are freakishly strong on weights, because that's what their bodies are trained for. The cement guy is trained for being great at moving bags of cement, he's got more technique and conditioned muscles for it so makes sense to me
I had it explained it to me like this a while ago: In the gym, you are generally isolating muscles or small muscle groups and working them out. In real life, manual labor, you are working out multiple muscles or muscle groups at the same time to achieve tasks like lifting bags of cement or whatever. So if your only exercise is in the gym, your body never really learns how to use muscle groups in sync leading to big guys like this, unable to do what dudes at where I work do every day because they don't feel like making extra trips lol.
The bodybuilders Muscles are strong but that muscle is built with "fast" training, those Muscles are building through multiple ranges of motion quickly. Laborers are usually holding that weight in a static position for extended periods of time, building more strength at that specific position.
In short I think the most significant difference is going to be the Tendon strength built by laborers. Same reason Bodybuilders aren't necessarily going to be better arm wrestlers or rock climbers...static holds/contractions build a different kind of strength.
They are very strong compared to average people. All other things being equal, a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. But there are other adaptations that go into strength too, so obviously they won’t be as strong at a particular movement as someone who specifically trains that movement all the time.
But people act like their muscles are just fake and full of air like SpongeBob’s anchor arms, which is ridiculous.
The real answer is caring cement bags around engages a lot of muscles. Some of them aren't even noticeable. Body building doesn't engage those muscles. So while the body builders have built up most of the muscles used, they are missing a few key smaller ones for that specific task.
This is all form and technique. They're way stronger, they just don't have any experience. It's like you take a guitarist who is way better than me and ask them to play one of my songs. I can do it better than they can on their first attempt, no matter how good they are. They don't know the song and I do.
But they are strong, they are probably benching 200kg and definitely deadlifting 300. But they are not moving cement whole day for years, so they probably will be worse than person who does lol.
hilarious that anyone would think these bodybuilders are not strong. they are insanely strong.
they don't pick up cement bags every day, which is why they can only lift 3x the amount of a normal human. if they practice this for a day or two you wouldn't need this video.
Big muscles by definition are strong muscles but strength is task specific.
How you train matters, without the proper conditioning your strength can't be properly utilized. The bodybuilders in this video are far from weak but they don't have the same conditioning and experience as the worker.
This is why you see videos of olympians and other professional athletes doing unconventional or non traditional weightlifting exercises. They're training for a highly specific task.
I think it's more the bodybuilders who thinks this way from what I've seen. "My muscles are big, how am I not as strong as this weedy little guy?"
Not all of them of course but you see it a lot in those Anatoly videos. He wears clothes to cover up his build, making him look unassuming. They all start squeezing at his arms etc
Bodybuilding type of muscle hypertrophy where muscles are trained in isolation does not translate to functional strength because functional strength requires the training of the entire muscle chain in tandem and not in isolation.
You probably build more functional strength by doing turkish get up's than bench pressing.
That's pretty under studied. I'll say that's possible in some extremes. I don't believe it would be a huge difference visually, definitely not as in this video.
This video comes down to not even motor engagement, it's arm length which the first lifter struggles and hand placement which the second one struggled with.
Muscle big does mean muscle strong. Every thing else is neural or structural, like in this video the reason it's so much easier for the worker os because his long ass arms make it easy for him to get under the bags when holding them.
But the body builders can 100% generate more force.
Yeah, I work in a physical job, I'm 100% not a strong person but I'm tall so I have long arms and it's a cheat code to lifting most stuff. The longer your arms, the easier to lift, the longer your legs the easier to push.
yeah definitely an angle thing. I push a lot of like flat trolley things about waist height piled up with crap so you can like lean in to it more. I actually work with a lot of incredibly short people and they have a difficult time with it.
Muscles can be built for specific reasons, if you are strongman u can carry this cement easy, if you are builder u will be good in a jym not with cement, if you do marathons u will run like a wild animal would on that distance. I have a water build (was professional water polo player) do 100 pull ups or do 450 pound deadlift, enter the water all of those muscles are useless.
and they ARE strong, just in very specific movements that don't always translate to real life. Get both of them in a gym doing curls and the result would probably be different.
I bet that if you had strongmen in there it'd look a lot different because they train to do that sort of thing all the time. Those body builders are thinking they don't want to throw their back out over this which is an extremely sane decision.
Most of it comes down to adaptations within the nervous system btw. Nerves are what's triggering and coordinating muscular movement. Not only intramuscular (coordinating all the fibers of one muscle) but also intermuscular (coordinating multiple muscles for complex lifts).
Anyone who look at a body builder and say "they aren't strong is 100% delusional and have never lifted". Some of these guys bench discord mods for reps.
1.2k
u/Eydor Feb 25 '25
I think most people wonder "if muscle big, then why not strong?".