I’d been chopping and shoveling ice for most of my hours around the shop lately.
The other day I done it, I’ve now been paid to use a pickaxe. The pickaxe which went through that ice like butter. Spike. Rip. Way faster deicing, I simply needed a few shovelers behind me to clean up.
You ever look at old photos of coal miners, or lumberjacks?
Rarely you see a big stout individual, but most are wiry with giant forearms.
Swinging the pickaxe I was getting a crazy forearm pump on the bottom of them, and also getting winded.
I actually went home and took a long, roughly three hour, nap. I also was ravenously hungry, have been since.
I was pickaxing for minutes. Coal miners would be pickaxing for 8, 10, 12, even more hours a day.
Certain labor is just about impossible to eat and sleep enough to be anything but wiry, though I can easily see how this and similar manual labor made for hellishly robust and dangerous boxers in the past.
Whether sledgehammer, axe, pickaxe, or shovel, these types of labor are going to be building all the strength needed for wrestling and boxing on a very strong wiry frame.
100 or 150 years ago, with this type of work, I’d be 165lbs instead of 265lbs and my forearms would be even more developed than they are now as a fairly strong heavyweight.
It was mindblowing both how effective the pickaxe was at breaking the ice up, and how metabolically taxing it was.
Man needs to labor.
Persistence & Tenacity