Hacker News Reader

I can’t attest to the entire past, but my ancestors on both sides were farmers or construction workers. They were fit. Heck, my dad has a beer gut at 65 but still has arm muscles that’ll put me to shame — someone lifting weights once a week. I’ve had to do construction for a summer and everyone there was in good shape.

They don’t go to the gym, they don’t have the energy; the job shapes you. More or less the same for the farmers in the family.

Perhaps this was less so in the industrial era because of poor nutrition (source: Bill Bryson, hopefully well researched). Hunter gatherer cultures that we still study today have tremendous fitness (Daniel Lieberman).

My dad was a machinist, apprenticed in Germany after WW2. Always somewhat overweight (5'9", 225 lbs during his "peak" years), but he could lift guys up by their belt with one arm, and pick up and move 200+ lb metal billets when he got too impatient to wheel the crane over. Even at 85 now, he's probably stronger in his arms than most 60 year olds. But I'm also not saying ALL of his co-workers were that strong, either.

Takes mass to move mass. Most of the strongest people in the world look "fat" and usually have a hefty gut. Strong and jacked are orthogonal characteristics.

I know what you mean, but from a physics perspective, no, it just takes force to move mass. More mass will generate more downward force due to gravity, and more force in other directions due to momentum once it’s moving, but there’s more to generating force than just mass. I’m not a kinesiologist but I would think how much force muscles generate depends on the amount and size of the fibers (mass) but also on their contractive efficiency and the amount of energy they can obtain and employ to contract (not necessarily proportional to mass, involves cardiovascular fitness)

Very overweight people, ironically, have good muscle development -- if they are ambulatory. Having to move all of that weight around builds muscle.

Food is anabolic. It's significantly easier to build muscle if you're willing to also put on fat.

The fact that Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms for their athletes in no way makes it a "bit of a myth" that people used to get strong naturally by doing physical labor. For example, average grip strength of people under age 30 in the US has declined markedly just since 1985.

> The Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms, but no forklifts.

We may not have any evidence that they had forklifts but we also can't rule out the possibility entirely :)

> I think that's a bit of a myth.

Why do you think that? It's definitely true. You can observe it today if you want to visit a country where peasants are still common.

From Bret Devereaux's recent series on Greek hoplites:

> Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name

> but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory.

> Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy

> Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’

> And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.

( https://acoup.blog/2026/01/09/collections-hoplite-wars-part-... )

---

> Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators

In the original form of the Olympics, a Roman senator would have been ineligible to compete, since the Olympics was open only to Greeks.

Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett:

> The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

I think he was saying upper classes that didn't do much physical labor have existed since at least classical era and needed to do some kind of physical training to maintain strength?

> > Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators

> In the original form of the Olympics, a Roman senator would have been ineligible to compete, since the Olympics was open only to Greeks.

I did debate how to word that mixing of Greek and Roman things in the same sentence. I had emotional context I wanted to convey and considered a word like Decathlon there as more technically correct, but then fought the modern context that of the people that even know what the Decathlon is they know it in the context of it being a smaller event in the modern Olympics, from which perspective Olympics remains more technically correct as the modern English word for both.

As to the text you are quoting, I think it as much supports my claims as you think it doesn't. Ignoring the subject change from "weightlifting" (and sports more generally) to farming and soldiering, it mostly describes the general state of armies and feudalism in general through much of time: you have the rank and file from blue collar classes, and you have the officer corps from white collar classes. The wealthier class is fewer, but given more charge and importance. The lower class does more of the grunt work. The Romans had rich Officers and blue collar "enlisted".

The myth that I was referring to was that weightlifting is somehow a new invention because no one labors physically anymore. There have always been leisure classes that needed to lift weights as a hobby to get good at sports (and that class was also more often awarded medals in sports or important commands in armies, if we want to also connect to the blog post you quoted). As far as I'm aware there was never a period in recorded history where "everyone" was equally fit from physical labor and there was no such thing as training and gyms and needing leisure time to do that.

[Further tangent: Even "pre-history" and the modern (mis)conception of the "paleo ideal" idea of tribes of equally buff hunter-gatherers starts to fall apart when you ask questions about family units or what they think the "gatherer" side of the equation meant (and manage to divorce it from modern ideas of agriculture being highly intense labor) or what those societies would look like if more people lived to old age or how those societies survived things like the Ice Age (fattier and more hibernatory, because we are a mammalian species, we cannot escape that).]