Ask a construction worker in their 50's how their body feels.

Respectfully, pedantically limiting the phrase "wearing out" to some subset of conditions that conveniently excludes accumulated injuries, the deterioration of cartilage, and other load/repetition-induced joint debilitation adds nothing to this conversation.

Not all injuries are at a gross level. Tendons and muscles get micro tears, cartilage gets worn down into mush, bones get tiny fractures. The human body repairs the best it can, but there’s a reason so many older tradesmen have bad backs, bad knees, degenerative arthritis and so on.

Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, scarred cuts, etc. Often never seen by a doc too and never healing properly.

Why do I not hear this happening with, say, the older set running triathlons?

As many others have mentioned, the conditions are far more controlled and consistent for athletes. On another level we're also talking about different socioeconomic classes. For obvious reasons it's much more common for upper class people to talk and think about their longterm health and take both preventative action and spend money and time going to the doctor/PT if something is causing them even minor pain.

Plumbers and electricians contort their body and are moving up and down into cavities of various sizes all day. It definitely takes a toll on you.

Can't be worse than yoga.

Edit: Downvote me all you like. I've done yoga, I've done plumbing, I've done electrical. Yoga takes the cake by a mile for most painful contorting.

And yet I know an 86 yo woman who has been doing yoga 3 time a week forever and is fit and sharp.

You've done some of the work, but do you know many middle-aged or older tradespeople? Their joints are shot and they have aches all over and they fuck up their back on the regular.

There's your speculation and incredulity, and then there's all the people I've talked to who do it. They disagree with you.

I fucked up my back regularly until I'd had enough and started doing a lot of back strengthening exercises, which virtually eliminated the problem. Been doing them ever since. The doc who helped me with this told me that back injuries come from weak backs. You have to specifically work on those muscles to avoid injury.

I found out when waterskiing that you don't get strong waterskiing, you get injured. You have to spend a lot of time in the gym so you don't get injured waterskiing.

Back when I was younger in Seattle, lumberjacking was still a thing. They told me that the limiting thing was injury. They'd work into their sixties. There aren't many jobs harder than lumberjacking. I wouldn't mess with any of them, either, they are freakin' strong and I'm sure they could cleave me from head to toe with a casual swing of the axe.

I'm not in the least surprised that people working in trades mess up their backs, nor do I doubt that they do. But injuring one's back is not the same as wearing it out.

What movements/exercises do you do for your back? I do weighted planks, squats and leg-raise-holds.

Huh? Yoga poses are purposeful, they're supposed to be beneficial. Contorting your body all sorts of odd ways while performing a trade is an entirely separate thing from a yoga pose.

Have you ever tried yoga? You might change your mind if you had. It's not a joke.

I've done it many times, even hot yoga. I also have extensive experience wiring up and decommissioning data centers, involving lots of odd contorting. Yoga felt a lot better for me than contorting my body in odd ways.

Agreed - when you're crawling through a tight attic, staying on the joists and avoiding HVAC ducts, going into weird poses to drive j-box mounting screws or something... it's not about staying in "correct" poses.

Yoga is not a joke. But like other exercises, there are "correct" forms so that you minimize bodily harm.

When you're doing an electrical job, you might have to put your body in strange contortions that don't follow any harm reducing "correct" forms.

If doing Yoga is causing damage to your body, it's because you are doing Yoga incorrectly.

1 hour of harder yoga != A 9 to 5 for years of 'easier' awards body positions while building or fixing something. Its cronic pain.

>I'm not sure how your body parts wear out.

Via cumulative tissue, bone, and sensory damage. Also known as workin' hard.

It’s not a good analogy. If I stress my bone hard, it strengthens. This is why someone that runs has heavier / stronger leg bones compares to a coucher.

On the car side, every time you bend a piece of metal it gets weaker. It cannot repair itself. It cannot get stronger from use.

No. Cumulative load wrecks you in the long run. Consider how many weightlifters end up with multiple back surgeries. They got stronger for awhile, then they couldn’t walk.

There are multiple things being lumped together. The body constantly heals itself, but doing blue collar work the issue is that the cumulative load regularly exceeds your recovery ability. Athletes can stay under the limit if they are careful.

Irrespective of job or sports people can randomly develop degenerative diseases as they age that can be exacerbated by work.

You are looking at the pointy end, people on roids and HGH that lift 8 hours a day.

Compare to someone that lifts for 1 hour 3x a week. He will have stronger bones and joints than either a desk potatoe (no stress = no buildup) or the tradesmen (too much stress without rest = failure)

I've been running for 40 years, and lifting for 15. Lifting has virtually eliminated my back pain. Strengthening the muscles helps a lot in preventing injury.

No, I'm not lifting 400 lbs. Weightlifters lift insane weights, does that compare to what physical laborers lift?

The problem is the conditions under which they lift. If you lift weights, you're probably watching your form and taking rests in between your sets. On a jobsite, you're being forced to bring those bricks or that heavy tool over ASAP, and nobody is going to let you get into proper deadlift form. While OSHA standards exist, most companies and techs are just skirting by because of the margins in the business. There's a lot of pressure to get things done fast so they'll fuck up form just to get things done that little bit faster.

I'm a cyclist and a lot of other cyclists are ex-runners whose joints are shot from running. They prefer to cycle because it's easier on the joints but it offers the same headspace as a long run. I also do some climbing and frequently hurt my joints (shoulder and elbow are frequent ones, wrist from time-to-time.) I have lots of friends who also climb who have had to take short or even long breaks from climbing due to the effects on their joints. Lifting on a jobsite is more dynamic than weightlifting and closer to climbing.

It's not about actually wearing out your joints (which can probably take crazy amounts of load and stress over years if you use correct form and rest appropriately), it's more accumulated injury from incentives to use bad form.

Thanks for the interesting take.

I've been running for 40 years. I suffered from knee and hip pain from it, until I read about the biomechanics of running. I ran doing the "heel strike", where the heel hits first. I could feel the shock in my knee and my hip with every stride.

I decided to switch to "ball strike" where I landed ball of the foot first and then rolled onto the foot. I did not feel the shock in my knee or hip after that. A couple weeks later, the joint pain began to subside, and for the last decade has not bothered me.

It takes a while to switch to ball strike, now it feels perfectly natural. Try this experiment. Run with your shoes on, and note your heel strike. Take your shoes off and run again - you'll run on the balls of your feet. This was the epiphany for me.

Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.

I agree that if you're still having trouble with running, biking is a great alternative.

With your back, take the time to do proper back strengthening exercises. They greatly helped reduce the rate and severity of my repeated back injuries. I strongly recommend talking to a doctor to get a regimen of these exercises. They paid off for me big time. More that once I thought oh crap, I hurt my back again. But nope! Woo-hoo!

I'm not at all suggesting that tradesmen don't get injured on the job and the accumulation of such can be crippling.

>Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.

Any good resources on this? Getting into running in my early 30s. Already switched to zero-drop, I think I'm ball-striking.

But do you run and lift for 40-60hrs a week for 40 years? If I did an hour or two of electrical work a day instead of 8 to 10 my knees would probably have lasted longer than 17 years.

Depends! People that train for Ironman average something like 20h a week over a year (some peak at closer to 40 during their race buildup)

But most of us are way less than that, more like 10 hours a week. And if you are careful your body rebuilds stronger each time.

My knees are not shot from running. In fact I’d wager they are in better health than a desk potatoe that never exercises.

How can you be so capable Walter, yet so oblivious to the fact that people who make their money with their bodies end up wearing that body out well before their life is over?

I'm reading his comments in this thread with increasing incredulity.

An intelligent man lacking empathy and the ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes.

people on this website have a dangerous mixture: high intelligence and ability for abstract thoughr

massibe ignorance of basics of life, and anything outside their bible

I really thought it was a 24 year old with no experience of the world writing that, till I clicked on the profile.

>Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out.

>Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that.

Isn't "[ruining] their bodies through accumulated injuries" the same thing as wearing their body out?

No, it isn't the same thing. Just like crashing your car isn't the same thing as wearing it out.

>Just like crashing your car isn't the same thing as wearing it out.

Not taking precautions, for instance, when driving over potholes can wear certain facets of the car down without doing significant immediate damage, the same way that taking certain falls or hits can wear a body down. You don't need a crash.

As you age your ability to recover from wear and tear decreases and even without catastrophic injury it will catch up to you eventually.

Jack Lalane worked out into his 90s. Death finally put a stop to it.

> How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?

Electrictions can work over their head with screw drivers for weeks at an end. There are plenty of bad working positions for their body.

I got sick of that myself and got an electric screwdriver, which helped a lot. Keep in mind that I did all the low voltage wiring in the house myself, it was a couple thousand feet of wire. A lot of it was overhead work - boring holes in the joists, etc. I wouldn't say it was pleasant, and lifting that heavy 90 degree Milwaukee drill was a chore.

But I did figure the electricians knew what they were doing, so I watched them. I bought the same tools they used, and went to work.

Programmers get RSI from typing too much. You think tradesman can't get worse?

I've got a friend who went into the trades instead of going to university, he (correctly) recognised that what he was passionate about wouldn't even pay for the degree (composing music) so he figured he'd do it on the side and do a trade to earn a living. Unfortunately due to a workplace accident he cut the tendons in his wrist with a box cutter, which means he can't now play the piano for any reasonable amount of time. So i guess it's less "the body wears out" but more "you accumulate a lot of small injuries that eventually prevent you from perfoming your trade"

Edit:typo

I'd buy the cumulative injury theme, but not the exercise part.

Football players bodies do wear out, but most just lose too much speed and athleticism before it truly happens.

Joe Thomas, one of the greatest left tackles of all time, retired because he was going to need a new knee. His back also had a lot of issues. Losing a bunch of weight has allowed him to put off some of the surgeries, but he said his knee was bone on bone by the end.

Athlete's bodies definitely wear out, some sports more so than others. Ask any retired gymnast how their body is doing.

Ultrasound technicians have a limit to how long they can work because of wear and tear (they hold the scanner a lot). Repetitive stuff isn't good.

And like lots of people have damaged their knees running. It isn't obscure.

>How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?

Climbing ladders. The knees go.