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.
Gym exercises really aren't "messy" like 4 bags of cement are. Dumbbells, cable machines, and barbells are perfectly symmetrical, it's arguably a sterile/clinical way to lift. Loads of little stabilizer muscles never get worked very much and will need time, practice, and recovery to get stronger. Just like with any other muscle.
A matter of hours or a couple days isn't nearly enough time for that sort of hypertrophy to happen.
The stabilizers don't get exercised near the same degree with 4 bags of concrete vs. Whatever people get in a gym setting. I switched from barbells to a heavy, loosely fitted sandbag, there is a HUGE difference. Every rep is a mini wrestling match.
It took me a WHILE to get used to it and I had to go down to less than half what I was deadlifting to start off.
With all due respect, you don't know what each individual person is doing when they are in the gym. You cannot possibly know if they have exercised any specific muscle in their body to the extent of someone who had lifted some bags of concrete.
Frankly, you asserted that these bodybuilders only needed a matter of hours to get fairly decent and only days to be indistinguishable from the labourer... I could throw back your argument at that point too, right?
Suddenly bringing up that I don’t know what each person has been doing feels like you don't realize that you're also making assertions and assumptions to come to your initial conclusion.
Except as someone who’s had experience with odd object lifting I'm telling you that you've oversimplified the process.
Frankly, you asserted that these bodybuilders only needed a matter of hours to get fairly decent and only days to be indistinguishable from the labourer
Couple days, absolutely not. Two weeks, maybe. Two months or more? Absolutely. What this worker is doing is months if not years of muscle memory, strength and coordination that you can't reproduce in a handful of days unless youre just a beast and can brute strength everything.
The clip is a few seconds long. It does not give you enough information to tell how good they are at those lifts, beyond that they can't do them at all right now.
After a few weeks I wouldn't expect them to be able to do the job all day to the level of someone with years of experience, but I would expect them to be able to get it done for the length of the video.
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.
In the USA people sometimes call it “old man” strength without realizing what it is. Spend all your time learning how to use every muscle you have to get the job done and you will outperform far “stronger” people well after you’ve physically peaked.
It’s like someone being a genius trying to outperform a smart person that uses Microsoft Excel all day in a Microsoft Excel task.
Doesn’t matter how smart/strong you are if a competent person has been doing it longer.
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.
Strongman, bodybuilders, climbers, and gymnasts are all in the same social circles. They all workout together and are all strong af, even without training the same things. Arnold Schwarzenegger practiced ballot for strength and flexibility.
Don’t even get me started on climbing. I boulder.
Realistically, >70% of the training involved are nearly identical. It's the 30% differences that leans athletes into their specializations.
People who go to the gym all know this. It’s non-gym goers that try to separate and categorize athletes.
You're 29 year old, 250+ pounds at 5'9 with a self proclaimed dad-bod. Your window for elite athleticism was the past 10 years. We can tell by your assumptions you were never an elite athlete. Stop pretending to know what you're talking about.
Yeah.. I'm not 5'9" lol I'm 6'1" read that again. Trained a lot since then and went down in weight. You don't know my story, my past or what I do now. Plz don't make assumptions on me. Covid was a difficult period here and I gained a lot of weight during that time.
But, we're not Tall ng about me here. We are talking about elite athletes.
Put a bodybuilder on gymnast rings or clombing routes and he won't be able to do much. Put a gymnast or a climber on a bench press and he will likely be able to do a pretty good weight. Same with a calistenics athlete. A bodybuilder will likely not be able to do a full planche, but the guy that can will have a good bench press weight
Looking at some videos of magnus mitbo comparing to other ahtletes, it sure seems to be that way. I know he's a freak of nature though.
Even though comparing bench press to climbing and gymnast rings is unfair because both of the latter are highly specialized, a huge portion of boulderers come from a bodybuilding background, me included.
Bench pressing is a common exercise and motion, it's a very heavy push up.
Asking anyone that isn't a gymnast to do rings is not fair. And even among gymnasts, it's not really fair unless they train for rings often.
Actually, this^ paragraph is the entire argument. That manual laborer does this day-in day-out for however many years. Let the bodybuilder do this full time for a week and he will be just as fluent. Your body does not change that much in a week, but you can pickup the muscle memory quickly
My point is only that if you are a bodybuilder that only trains very specific movements in specific positions. For example, bench press, row, squat, deadlift, biceps curl. Your strength might be very specific to those movements which are not super diverse.
So when you ask your body to do something less controlled, like pushing over a mantle in climbing, or lifting a big bag of sand that doesn't have good grip, it will feel very hard. They could also injure themselves since their soft tissues are not adapted at all and those take a lot longer to adapt than muscles.
Compared to someone who is used to apply force in a very wide array of positions, it will take them more time. Compared to the average person they will still be faster to adapt since they have very good conditioning
Glad we end up mostly agreeing. You're very right about the speed of adaptation.
Personally, in the same situation as the bodybuilders in the video, I most definitely would not try to 100% lift it. One of those bags could fold in half and fall on their foot. Or the bag itself could rip, and you'll find a bag in your hand and concrete on your feet.
Would also be trashy for ppl that workout all day to point a camera in a laborers face and flex on them. Better to have fun with them, let them show off their stuff, smiles all around, then go home and post a more wholesome video
Two dudes have a more well-rounded workout routine doesn't mean that most modern bodybuilders don't focus on isolated movements. Because they absolutely do, regardless of what CBum or Ronnie do
And Platz was a completely different beast. Trying to compare him and his workout routine to modern bodybuilders is just blatantly disingenuous
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.
This isnt really true, body builders train all muscles they just train them in a way to get larger. Moving that cement requires strength, yes, but what it really needs is grip strength in your forearms, your connective tissue (fascia, tendons, etc.) to be really built up and hardened, and proper technique for holding a really awkward load. All of that comes from doing something under load over and over and over again because your body wants to get extremely efficient at whatever it's doing, it doesn't really want to make large muscles because those require more resources. How body builders get big, aside from anabolics, is partly by not getting efficient at anything. They purposely switch up movements, rep ranges and loads. This is why body builders can literally tear their muscles off the bone when they work out too hard because their connective tissues are rarely built up enough to deal with the strain their muscles can put out (connective tissue takes a lot longer to adapt).
For example I've been lifting wood with my bare hands for years and you'd be surprised I could get a 300lb oak log on my shoulder and walk that fucker to the chipper NBD my dad who's a bodybuilder has issues lol
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.
That's true of strongemen and powerlifters but not as true of bodybuilders, from what I've seen. Bodybuilders often use grip assistance like wrist straps because their goal is to grow a specific muscle and they don't want their grip to give out before that muscle is exhausted. That's also part of why some bodybuilders will opt not to use deadlifts as part of their routine. They're great for overall strength, but not as great if you're trying to specifically target your back or your hamstrings. Other exercises can better target those muscles without the systemic fatigue or the grip limitation that deadlifts can pose.
A lot of strength disciplines will use straps, not just bodybuilders. Strongmen and oly lifters will often use straps for heavy pulls when needed to target a specific muscle without exhausting their grip.
Yes, I'm not trying to say that bodybuilders are the only ones who use straps. Just that grip is a bigger component of strongmen and powerlifting because their competition movements actually depend on it. Bodybuilding is focused on size and since grip is often the limiting factor for big lifts, they will use grip assistance to make sure they're maximizing the use of the bigger muscles to get the most size improvements.
Mate I'm a strongman competitor transitioning to bodybuilding so I'm well aware of how it works. I'm just stating strongman will use straps for their training and are even used in competition for the pulling events.
Honestly, just watch any of the biggest name bodybuilders when they post deadlifts or other pulling motions on their social media. Derek Lunsford, Chris Bumstead, Samson Dauda, etc. all have training clips on their instagrams where you see they use wrist straps for deadlifts, rows, RDLs, or other movements where grip would typically fail before the target muscle. You can also watch any of the big bodybuilding focused YouTubers like Jeff Nippard, Dr. Mike, Dr. Pak, Milo Wolf, Eric Janicki, or Eugene Teo to name a few, and see that all of them recommend using straps.
Bro you're just making stuff up. I watch most of their back/pull sessions and they rarely use it. They might be using it when the volume is too high and it will be a limiting factor, but they never use it solely because they would not be able to hold their 1RM.
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 gotcha, it could be read multiple ways. Thought you were saying I was just going around claiming everything is fake and that it doesn't matter if it's fake portraying itself as genuine.
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.
Most people don't need to do hard manual labor these days so they don't really need strength like this and hard manual labor comes often with low social status. It's sad but it's true. A bodybuilder don't train for strength but they're still stronger than 99% of the people in general. They have the time to train their bodies every day, have the money to spend it for gym, an expensive diet and steroids for example and mostly don't need to doing hard manual labor outside the gym. They make their money with different labor.
Be real, who is more impressive and gets more applause and respect? A bodybuilder who bench press 405 lbs on reps who has an intimidating muscular body to many people, a body a lot of men dream about to achieve, a body set you apart from all others and stands for physical superiority or a guy who carry cement bags from a to b for a living.
So it seems sadly to be more useful in life to be a guy who bench press 405 lbs. Lol
The majority of people in trades such as construction, plumbing, etc are doing what I would consider hard manual labor. Plumbers also make as much as a doctor.
But I also personally really dislike the look of bodybuilders, especially the effects of steroid use. It's a job that seems to have about as much use as a beauty pageant to me. So it's something I don't think we're likely to agree on because I just don't see an aesthetic or functional value. 🤷♀️
Depends. If you're in a position where you are exploited for labor, the labor. If you're in a place where you can focus on health, being able to bench 405 (assuming natural).
First, nobody is trying to say one or the other is better. Second, it depends on who you’re asking. Obviously being good at manual labor will be better for the guy who does it 40 hours a week. But for the guys who get paid to push weight and look big? Probably not as useful as being good at working out
Yea love his videos. But he’s a powerlifter. It’s a different style of training. Go to a powerlifting meet and you’ll see the most average looking people deadlifting, benching, and squatting immense weight. When they train they do low volume like heavy triples, doubles, singles and resting for a long time between sets. Whereas if you train for hypertrophy, you’re typically doing like 2-5 sets for 5-30 reps. Higher volumes, lower weight to stimulate muscle growth.
It's not the technique. Simply the fact that training for strength mean few reps and long breaks, while you build muscle with many reps and shorter breaks. Strength training only makes up a very small part of most bodybuilding routines.
I think if you put a body builder do calisthenics, he won't be able to perform well. Because calisthenics trains a whole wider range of muscle groups, when a body builder trains only very specific muscle groups with very specific exercises/machines.
Calisthenic being an example here because it trains a wide variety of muscles, just like manual labor usually does.
Point being: One seems to exercise a wide variety of muscles, including a lot of core muscles, body-building trains mainly the aesthetically visible ones.
Yeah strong, but it's size for glamour not real world strength. Have you ever seen worlds strongest man competition? The occasional body builder you get on there are just humiliated. The real strong guys do not look like them.
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u/hero-of-kvatch44 Feb 25 '25
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.