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How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

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Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#51

Post by ekr »

sjducb wrote: post #42
kingstnap wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#52

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Markoff wrote: post #23
soanvig wrote: post #16

Reminds me of slovakian mountain carriers https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/

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.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#54

Post by erfgh »

c7b wrote: post #6

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),…

Unless you get all your information from movies construction work does not train strength that much.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#55

Post by balamatom »

zkmon wrote: post #17

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…

>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.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#57

Post by nottorp »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #50
kakacik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#58

Post by scott_w »

gadders wrote: post #31
c7b wrote: post #6

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),…

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!

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#59

Post by Tom1380 »

c7b wrote: post #6

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),…

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

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#60

Post by duskdozer »

c7b wrote: post #6

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),…

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.
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