Comment by bob1029
21 days ago
Carrying things on your head/shoulders is surprisingly efficient. Many people can unrack a barbell with double their body weight and just stand there for a bit without having done any strength training at all. The trouble is getting the load into that convenient orientation. Taking something from the ground and putting it over your own head is where all the bad stuff happens. Once it's up there it's not as big a deal.
You can make yourself bulletproof to most forms of hard physical labor by practicing the clean & jerk. This movement is entirely about "get heavy thing off ground and above head" as efficiently and safely as possible. There are advanced movements that can be even more efficient but you trade some injury risk for screwing up. That is to say, the actual amount of wear on your body is even lower if you really know what you're doing.
I don't think you can unrack a 180kg barbell with your head and just stand there like that as a 90kg male, much less untrained. That is a humongous amount of weight.
Not your head. Your shoulders. As if you were going to do a barbell squat.
I definitely don't think this is the case. For somebody who hasn't trained - they're not holding 180kg on their shoulders. I think two big reasons would be that they're not going to have core strength/training to support it, and they wouldn't even have the traps to support the bar on their upper back, it'd dig into them and cause immense pain and probably just roll as well.
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Agree it’s efficient, don’t agree that an untrained person could unbrace double bodyweight.
I weigh 90kg and can squat ~190kg. Having that much on my back feels HEAVY. I think if you haven’t built up to it before you will not be able to do that
It will feel heavy, but you are not lifting it more than a few cm (and at the point where your body has the most leverage).
Remember the point is most humans couldn't get the weight there, but if somehow it already was they could hold it. That isn't a useful thing to do so we rarely test it.