5 ms·

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

• ookblah 8mo ago
  imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
• q-base 8mo ago
  There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
• chrystalkey 8mo ago
  Well the answer here is: other factors. Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen. Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles. Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes. So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
• chistev 8mo ago
  > Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training. Really? That's not my observation.
  • dijit 8mo ago
    I have the same observation, and I’ve often been curious about it. I think truthfully, if we do anything for too long our bodies overoptimise for the task and we lose the benefits to fitness and other health issues also creep in. Young construction workers are often extremely strong and fit, but nearly all the 40+ ones I know have a huge gut and sound like wheezing ICE engines. There are a handful of exceptions of course, but as far as it goes the general rule is this. It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves. Too many variables.
    • vladvasiliu 8mo ago
      > It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves. Terrible food, too. I'm not in construction but I do have to tour worksites for my job somewhat regularly, and pretty much everybody is eating some combination of greasy kebabs and mcdonald's. I like me a juicy kebab as much as the next guy, but eating just that for days on end can't be good for you. Now they're certainly more active than a keyboard warrior like yours truly, but there seems to be a consensus around not being able to outrun / out-train a bad diet.
  • jamiecurle 8mo ago
    I wasn't in construction but I did spend three years working as an arborist / forester between 2022 and 2025 whilst taking a little break from tech after a long 20-year stint. I've been in good shape since I was 30 with strength training, cardio and even a little stint as a masters level competitive olympic weightlifter. A long way of saying, I know my body fairly well. Two years into climbing trees in domestic settings and hand cutting in timber plantations, even three days a week and my body was hammered. Now maybe that's because I was in the 46–50 year old range, but it was clear it wasn't a viable long-term strategy for me. Speaking about the people I now know in that industry, it's commonplace for "climbers" to be done by their mid-thirties. Shoulders all mashed up from climbing and carrying heavy loads. It's not pretty. On the positive side and injuries notwithstanding (I did get a shoulder issue just like everyone else) my bodyweight dropped 10kg and I did look (and feel) much nimbler. The core of the problem in this kind of work is that when the rubber hits the road "getting the job done" always comes before "correct techniques for doing X". And there's no liability claim to be had as at the start of each job you sign the risk assessment which states that you will get it done in a health-and-safety-compliant way. If you don't sign, you're not on the crew the next day and you're walking home from site. This is basically how it is in the UK for these kinds of jobs where salaries are between £24–34K annually.
• pengaru 8mo ago
  My father worked concrete construction and stayed relatively fit from all the activity, but his skin was trashed from all the UV and he smoked into his 50s. I've never met a person with more wrecked hands since. It was like shaking hands with 40grit paper. Construction workers are not known for taking care of themselves, and it's a notoriously machismo culture. Sun screen? ok dandy.
  • CalRobert 8mo ago
    After going bald I appreciated just how damn practical the sombrero is. Now I wear a wide brimmed hat (Tilly or Panama hat or big straw farmers hat or, if I’m feeling flamboyant, a sombrero) almost any time I’m outside. Goofy maybe, but I think my skin is better for it. I really wish hats were normalised again.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• altmanaltman 8mo ago
  Because their jobs are not "functional strength training" at all and you're discounting all the negatives that come from that kind of work. It's borderline insulting to their jobs to make that comparison, to be frank.
• kingstnap 8mo ago
  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.
  • sjducb 8mo ago
    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.
    • rmunn 8mo ago
      Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
      • ekianjo 8mo ago
        > such as better medical care Better food, comes first
        • rmunn 8mo ago
          Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up. Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty. There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them. Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.
• aucisson_masque 8mo ago
  Substance abuse and rest. If you lift weights Monday and Friday, you give your body time to recover and get stronger. People whose job is to lift weight, they don't lift things heavy enough and they don't give their body time to recover. They work everyday, whatever if their quads are hurting or not. It has very little benefits and only destroy the joints.
• globular-toast 8mo ago
  This is probably about extremes being bad. Having an extremely sedentary lifestyle is bad, but also having an extremely strenuous one is bad too. I used to lift weights regularly. I'd go to the gym three times a week for an hour or two at a time. I'm pretty strong naturally and thought my training was going quite well being able to bench 1.5x my bodyweight, squat and deadlift more than 2x etc. Then I paid some guys to move house for me. Actually, my job paid, I have still yet to pay for this service myself. They were lifting whole chests of drawers without even emptying them. It was crazy. I've since done plenty of this work myself (moved house three times by myself), but I do take the drawers out etc. Basically I work more intelligently and take more time. What the moving guys were doing is harder, less safe, and they are doing this day in, day out. Add to that poor diets (both seemed to be fuelled on crisps, Coke and fags) and the differences become more clear. So, like with anything, don't be too extreme. Too much heavy lifting will be just as bad for you as too little.
• gadders 8mo ago
  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.
  • scott_w 8mo ago
    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!
• NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
• emptyfile 8mo ago
  Sounds like you never properly understood what "back-breaking work" really means. Try doing bending down and picking heavy stuff up, for 8 hours a day, every working day.
• lawn 8mo ago
  Strength training demands proper rest. If you do too much training with too little rest you break down instead if building up. It's not weird. Medicin works the same way: too much will be very bad for you.
• acchow 8mo ago
  > I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc Similarly, people that run 45 minutes a day are in great shape. But if you run a half marathon every day, you will age quickly You’re exactly right, too much of a good thing. And for hard strength training, you can hit that tipping point very quickly. Probably within an hour a day if you’re going hard
  • dragonelite 8mo ago
    For strength you can do a workout within like 25~35min that is taking it slow like browsing socials during pauses. Talking about programs like rippetoe, 5x5, 531 etc. Unless you have elite genetics or are on juice you don't really need to go beyond those programs.
    • alistairSH 8mo ago
      This. I go beyond those programs (currently weight training 4/week with an upper/lower split) and it's still ~4 hours/week inclusive of some stretching at the end of each workout. Vs ~40 hours/week of whatever a tradesman does.
    • stuffn 8mo ago
      Unless of course you’re training practical, useful strength. Which requires intense bursts of weight training, and balance between tempo runs, rucks with 35-40% of body weight, and slow run/jogs. Weightlifting is a small part of a larger picture of strength and being able to put it to use. Cardio is the single most important thing you can train because without a gas tank you’re just a fat, slow, strong slob. You don’t need to be elite nor on juice to do this. All you need is a purpose. I do this all the time, am over 35, and not on juice. My fitness is great but no where near elite. Rippetoe is an obnoxious jackass and you can venture to his forums (cult) to see it. He’s great at making fat, out of shape, strongmen. He’s not great at producing a fighter, tradesman, or operator. When you want to know what works look to the people actually using their fitness not morons like him who proselytize and look like the hardest thing they do all day is eat a pack of bon Bons.
      • 8mo ago
• erfgh 8mo ago
  Unless you get all your information from movies construction work does not train strength that much.
• Tom1380 8mo ago
  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
• duskdozer 8mo ago
  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.
• lazide 8mo ago
  Construction workers don’t get rest days. Every one I know described the first two weeks as complete hell, until their bodies just stopped complaining. But it still takes it’s toll long term.
• Qem 8mo ago
  > it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population... When it's a work, you're expected to show up and do it consistently every day. So you can't afford alternate days to get adequate rest and recovery time. Your body is gradually wasted away by the job. When it's more of a leisure activity, you can afford just not to do it and rest, when you don't feel well, so the combination of workouts and recovery time can be net-positive, health-wise.
• burnt-resistor 8mo ago
  Many blue collar professions tend wear out one or more essential body parts in some manner regardless of cardio or strength fitness. Maybe some are differently "easier" than others like HVAC or electrical, but they still take a toll on knees, necks, and backs that can render one incapable to perform the tasks. Some guys last longer than others but there's usually a decision point of retirement balancing enjoyment vs. additional income vs. retirement health. My dad was a light duty mechanic with his own specialty shop until 1986. He blew out a cervical disc and exposed himself to a variety of carcinogenic chemicals, and that was the end of his career.
• d_runs_far 8mo ago
  Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc. I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects. Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch. They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.
  • cpursley 8mo ago
    They weren’t obese from the steak. It’s the beer and simple carbs.
• shipman05 8mo ago
  I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
  • sharadov 8mo ago
    It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job. Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped. Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.
• 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  Look at it this way. Construction workers aren't strength training they are wearing themselves out via hard work that requires strength. Not the same thing.