In yesterday’s email about the undisputable power of weighted vests, I said:
“3. There is no better tool for building “Dad Strength”.
Dad Strength is the ability to move heavy objects like fridges, sofas, and children, seemingly without any difficulty whatsoever. Most men lack this nowadays. Yes, even those who are respectably strong in the gym – because they’re unable to express their strength outside of the carefully choreographed confines of their workouts. By contrast, weighted vests expose you to unpredictable, shifting loads in a safe and controlled manner – a necessary ingredient for building strength you can use in the real world.”
I feel I should expand upon this point.
We begin with a story:
The year is 2014, and Your Humble Narrator was working (what he thought was) his “dream job” as a paramedic in the Hazardous Area Response Team. Yes, it was every bit as cool as it sounds, but other factors – mainly the terrible pay and high cost of living – made it untenable.
Anyway.
Most weeks we’d get called out to help evacuate a patient from somewhere awkward like an attic room or deep in the countryside. This invariably involved a lot of lifting and shifting, which, given all the strength training I did in the gym, you’d expect me to be pretty good at.
Except, I wasn’t.
Yet we had guys in the team who hadn’t set foot in a gym in years – or ever – who took to this grunt work like ducks to water.
How could this be?
Why were these men so much stronger than me in this arena, even though I was capable of moving respectable numbers in the squat, bench press, overhead press, deadlift, and their variations?
Simple:
They had Dad Strength, and I did not.
See, they were all older than me by some considerable margin. Hence, they’d grown up in a time before technology took away much of the incidental physical activity that used to be part and parcel of daily life.
A lot of them were from relatively poor backgrounds, too. So they mainly maintained their own homes, vehicles, and so on rather than calling a tradesman for every little thing. And, from what they told me about what they got up to on their days off, the habit seemed to have stuck.
Now consider your typical weights workout.
Essentially all you’re doing is repeating the same movement patterns, for a predetermined number of times, using a carefully selected load, and paying very careful attention to your form while you go.
All in all, it’s a bit… sterile.
And that’s why conventional weightlifting – even done with discipline and intent – doesn’t carry over to those “Real World” activities every man ought to be able to do very easily as much as you might think it would.
However, one activity that certainly does have that all-important carryover is weighted vest work.
I discuss weighted vest work at length in February’s issue of The Phil Tyreman Letter, including two ways you can slot it in alongside your existing training. (If you need any help with this, just email me and I’ll sort you out, as “virtually unlimited” access to my labyrinthine brain is one of the benefits you’ll get as a subscriber).
A subscription is £100/month – or £3.29/day.
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https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman