144: The Fitness Lie Homesteaders Believe

There's a clip going around from a well-known homesteader implying that carrying heavy milk jugs is enough of a workout, and that you don't need to lift weights or do any structured training. I think that's worth pushing back on – not as body shaming or anything like that, but because the logic has a real flaw in it.

There's an important distinction between maintaining your current level of fitness and actually improving it. If you're already in the shape you want to be in, manual labor can absolutely be enough to hold that ground.

But if your body fat is high, your bone density is low, your inflammatory markers are elevated, or you're just not where you want to be metabolically, shoveling compost and hauling milk jugs isn't going to move the needle in any meaningful way.

After all, you can find plenty of hardworking manual laborers who are overweight. Whatever they're doing all day clearly isn't enough stimulus on its own.

In this episode, I explain why manual labor and structured resistance training are not the same thing, what it actually takes to cause muscle tissue to grow and bone density to improve, and why where you're starting from determines what kind of work you actually need to do.

The key variable is stimulus. If you're 18 and weigh nothing, almost any physical activity provides enough stimulus to get stronger. If you're 40 or 50 and you've been sedentary, carrying 25 pounds overhead a few times a day isn't going to challenge your body the way it needs to be challenged.

Case in point: I can farmer carry 200 pounds. I'm not saying everyone needs to be at that level, but if you are, there's a meaningful difference between that and a milk jug – and pretending otherwise doesn't serve anyone.

I also want to be clear about what I'm not saying. Not all women want to look like they train for powerlifting meets, and most women have higher body fat (for legitimate biological reasons). But there's a lot of ground between a six-pack and poor bone density and metabolic dysfunction, and that ground is worth fighting for regardless of your sex.

These days, I only get to the gym once or twice a week, and I rely on homestead work the rest of the time. And that's enough for me to maintain what I built over years of serious training.

But I can only maintain that because I built it first. If I'd started with a shovel and never picked up a barbell, I wouldn't have gains worth maintaining.

Thank you to this episode's sponsor, Peluva!

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