Some fitness styles are more practical than others

The other day I was talking to someone and fitness came up. He talked to me about how he only does military grade exercises. That's a funny statement that doesn't really mean anything at all so I asked him to elaborate.

What he meant by this is that he doesn't go to the gym to arbitrarily lift weights, or even to get involved in most of what they have to offer there. He is much more interested in calisthenics, cardio, and weight machines that replicate practical real-life situations.

I have absolutely no way of arguing with this because he is right. If you were going for real performance instead of vanity, his idea is a lot better than bodybuilding. So we talked about it a bit more and he mentioned a show called "Physical 100", a Korean show that I had never heard of. I went home and watched a few episodes of it and the outcome is pretty telling.

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In this show 100 very fit people are drawn from all aspects of physicality and put on a show to have a competition that is meant to look and feel a bit like "Squid Game" but of course, nobody dies.

In the show there are fitness instructors, professional bodybuilders, power-lifters, special forces, dancers, a baseball pitcher, a couple of MMA fighters, and of course a few fitness influencers.

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The very first challenge that they had on the show was quite amusing. All they had to do was hang onto an above set of bars and stay up there for as long as they could.

Care to venture a guess as to who the very first people were that couldn't hang on? It was the power-lifters and bodybuilders. There are a number of reasons why this would be the case but a big part of it is the fact that this level of bulk isn't very practical at all when it comes to actually doing real-life stuff. Someone who can lift an atlas stone is normally going to weigh so much themselves that their arms aren't actually capable of holding their own body weight in the air.

The soldiers, gymnasts, and mma fighters fared the best when it came to holding themselves suspended above the water the longest and none of them were anywhere near as chiseled as the bodybuilders were.

I admit that I work out for muscle bulk but I am also very aware that this is not practical strength. At 100 kg (or thereabouts) I can bench press around 250 (lbs) but I am barely capable of doing 10 chinups in a row. If you take a 70kg guy that can't even bench press half of what I can do and would likely lose to me in tug-of-war, he would be able to do a lot more than that if he practiced just for a little bit.

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Something else that happened later that was a bit silly and also kind of tragic was when one of the world's strongest women had to wrestle with an average size man for 3 minutes and whoever has the ball at the end of it is the winner. It was an extremely one-sided situation and kind of sad for the woman who at no point in time appeared to even have a little bit of control.

She looks like a beast, but biology makes it almost impossible for her to ever emerge victorious in this.

In fact, the only thing that the bodybuilders have been good at thus far is in the "chase the ball" routines and even then it is only if they get the ball first and then lie on top of it until time runs out. It's a cowardly way to achieve victory but it was established really early on that being a gym beefcake was not going to help anyone in this event.

The people who did the best actually had well-rounded and realistic strength achieved through "military style" exercises and cardio. The people who were doing the worst, tended to be the bodybuilders outside of a few events. In a couple of rather embarrassing showdowns, much smaller combatants simply got the ball and then quite easily avoided their very large opponents for 3 minutes in a reverse game of tag.

So yeah, I think there is a lot to what my friend was saying that day when he suggested that "military exercises" are the best ones because they involve situations that you actually might encounter in a real-life situation.

That being said I am not going to go join a Crossfit gym anytime soon because I don't want to be in a cult :)