I have always been impressed at how builders around my house carry 50lb bags of concrete like it is a small child, one day we had a big delivery of concrete, and to go faster, one of the guys started to carry two bags in one go! That’s about 7 stones right there on his back. I am not even sure he was much heavier, as he was a tiny guy, and seemed buried under the bags of concrete. What impresses me even more is that after all the heavy lifting and construction work at my place for 8 hours, they go on to play football for a couple more hours, then fix their own houses, and so on. Looks like if you are a tradesperson, you already have some exercise built in your line of work, and in general, it is much more active than sitting in a cubicle five days a week.
If you have a look at this infographic, you’ll see that the average tradesman gets around 12 hours of physical activity at work, just by doing his job, and a close to 5 hours more playing sports. As a recovering couch potato, I can assure you that the more physical activity you get, the more you want to get. I used to be unable to run for more than 500 meters, now I can run 10k three times a week, and when I miss it, I really feel like I want to go and make up for it the next day. So it makes sense that if you get physical activity at work, you want to exercise some more on your free time.
And as a staggering 81% of tradespeople describe their lifestyle as healthy (leaving probably out the on call professions who eat anything in between houses and can be awaken in the middle of the night for any emergency), they must have super cheap insurance premiums!
