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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Military Special Forces

It’s fairly common that “body builder” looking individuals don’t have the physical stamina nor strength to qualify to become special forces.

Theres one thing to look strong and another to be strong.

Another is Worlds Strongest Man.

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Bodybuilders are going to be freaking strong compared to the vast majority of the bell curve of people. And speaking from experience, that weight training can really increase cardio health too (I can't do much lower-body cardio because of disability, but get a lot out of upper-body workouts). It's just that they're doing what they do primarily for aesthetic reasons; the strength is more of a side-effect (and the drugs can be problematic as the article alludes to). There's also no correlation with martial arts skill really; that's an entirely other thing.

Bodybuilding can lift massive amounts of weight a large number of times. Cardio comes with that. Those muscles aren't made of air...

I'm 60+, spent most of my time outdoors (a few million+ SLOC of exploration geophysics sensing | analysis | GIS code written in field ) and have yet to meet a bodybuilder that can put in an 8 hour shift on a long handle shovel day in day out.

Wirey station hands can, skinny and|or fat farmers can, I still can and my father (still alive, born 1935) still can.

Sustained steady physical work is a thing that seems largely orthoganal to gym fit.

A lot of this is because being overly string is a disadvantage. Body builders can lift more weight, but that's a lot of extra muscle to move when lifting relatively light things hundreds or thousands of times. A body builder could literally be working twice as hard as a wiry person, by having to lift their own muscles.

The physiological property that is used as a proxy for cardiovascular fitness is usually the bodys maximum oxygen consumption.

Strength training apparently has only very very little effect on that. [1] [2] [3]

Generally, to increase the maximum oxygen consumption, one has to exercise at about 90% of the maximum heart rate. This usually doesn't happen during strength training.

[1] https://eurapa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s11556-013...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7453510/

[3] http://www.saskathletics.ca/images/pdfs/concurrent%20enduran...

From what I gather, you achieve a base level of VO2max with strength training that is better than sedentary people but worse than people who do regular cardio. So if your VO2max is initially low, strength training does have a significant effect on it. But if you want to increase it yet more, you have to do cardio (which you can do with weightlifting too btw!).

And yet it's hilarious to watch arm wrestling between a professional and a shredded gym rat twice the size of the arm-wrestling athlete.

I don't think muscle mass == muscle strength.

For the most part, it is. Arm wrestling is like 75% technique.

spec ops types often have to take steroids to keep their lean muscle mass up because operational tempo and training take such a heavy toll. most of them are fairly unimpressive looking -- met a few navy SEALs and they were shorter and goofier looking than you'd think. then you see them run a CQB course....

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