Why is physically exerting yourself to the point of exhaustion at the gym good for you but various jobs involving manual labor seem to cause permanent damage in the long term?
In: Biology
Unless you’re a professional athlete, chances are even if you consider yourself a “gym rat,” you’re spending no more than 2-3 hours in the gym, and not going every single day. Even if you don’t have a trainer telling you what to do, while you’re in the gym, the common exercises you end up doing have evolved over decades by people finding out for themselves what ends up injuring them and what doesn’t. You’re doing a variety of different exercises that work a variety of different parts of your body. Despite chatting with friends or checking out the cardio girls, you’re primarily concentrating on working out, so you’re less likely to make mistakes. Also, if something starts to feel funny while you’re on the gym floor, you can simply call it a day, let it recover and come back.
Let’s compare this to a typical manual labor job. You’re working 8+ hour days, and even if you aren’t actually exerting yourself for all of that, you’re still going to exceed the 2-3 hours most serious gym-goers are going to top out at. This means that your body has less time to recover, meaning that damage can compound from day to day. You are going to be doing mostly the same thing all day. Whether it’s shoveling, hammering, stacking boxes, or anything else, you’re mostly going to be using the same joints and the same muscles, further hampering your body’s ability to recover from damage. Making all this worse, while you’re on the job, you’ve probably got a lot more on your mind than simply the physical activity you’re performing. If you’re moving boxes, you aren’t thinking about lifting each box as well as you can. You’re thinking about how your boss only gave you one day for a two day job, how annoying the clients are, or any number of other little things that will be on anybody’s mind at work. If your back starts to feel funny, you don’t want to tell your boss, because he might see it as a sign of weakness and start giving you fewer hours when you need money.
So, it’s a combination of duration, variety, and concentration that make the difference between a manual labor job and hitting the gym. Also it’s important to note that if you do enough of anything, even if you do it “right,” you can damage your body. Professional athletes still get injuries related to repeated strain even with the world’s leading experts on sports medicine trying to prevent it. There’s a reason why pitchers don’t usually pitch an entire game, and why even roided-up no test bodybuilders still usually take at least some rest days.
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