The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
There is not really any such thing as a 'toning' strategy. Though many people appreciate the toned look, which is to say, lithe and lean with only a bit of muscle, the fact is that a build like that is pretty easy to get without weights. To that end, doing easy sets where you come nowhere near failure would be quite effective because you wouldn't be stimulating any muscle growth.
There is an argument for doing sets with more reps. Anything from 5-30 reps is effective for stimulating muscle growth, and there is some evidence that on the higher end of that range, it's better for hypertrophy, while on the lower end of that range, it's better for strength, but the difference seems pretty small. However, this is assuming the same intensity - in other words, going to or close to failure. Though the exact mechanisms for muscle gain are not totally understood, one thing is clear - mechanical tension on the muscle itself is very important. If normally, you lifted 80kg on a particular lift for a set of ten, it's likely going to be very hard to stimulate growth going down to 40kg or 30kg. To take a real world example, it's not people who do a lot of steps that end up with big calves, it's people who have high bodyweight.
At the same time, a lot of people who are naturally muscular from heavy manual labor aren’t lifting ‘to failure’ when they’re stacking crates or moving machinery, they’re just doing a ‘lot of reps’.
manual labor does not make you much stronger, more like stronger people attracted to manual labor
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I don't know how true that is. I myself am a laborer, and I work alongside other laborers - they tend to be physically fit, but only to the extent that the job selects for physically active young men. We have slender twinks and dad bods, and the guys with great physiques all go to the gym on top of whatever we do at work. It's not that manual labour doesn't do anything - even jogging and stretching have been shown to work as muscle stimulus in people who are totally untrained, so any level of physical activity is better than nothing. But if you carry 10kg boxes around for work, your body will adapt, and eventually you will find it no longer works as stimulus even when you do it for forty hours a week. Endurance runners do not end up with big legs, sprint cyclists do, because they're pumping their legs hard to create a lot of force to accelerate quickly - thus, placing a lot of tension on their quads.
But, even supposing this was true, it's still totally impractical. Maybe a workout regimen that replicated this situation could work - but it would take forty hours a week!
yup...you cannot reliably predict how strong someone is or isn't by appearance except for very obvious cases
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Or at another limit, endurance runners do literally thousands of reps of swinging their arms per workout but I would still expect someone who does 100 chin-ups a week to have a bigger upper body.
Manual laborers do tend to have good general physical preparedness and work capacity, so I would expect someone who does manual labor to be able to make better gains if they do resistance train. Only because they can handle more tonnage (sets x reps x weight / week) and more effective volume (hard sets / week). I wouldn't expect that much more on a volume equated basis beyond the selection effect mentioned by @Mewis.
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