Country muscles vs. city muscles

When I am home in Toronto I lift weights.  I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes in a session lifting as hard as I can.  It leaves me with pain all through my upper body, and this is a good thing as I have developed an addiction to it.  When I don't have pain through my shoulders, arms, and chest I start to feel weird, like something is missing.  I need more suffering!

This has given me some pretty reasonable muscles.  However, now that I am up visiting my folks in Thunder Bay I am doing some very different exercise indeed.  Today I spent a good chunk of the day shovelling gravel to build a new lockstone patio.  This is the country boy kind of exercise I am used to from my youth!  It takes a long time, gets real things done, and doesn't seem to leave you with the same kind of muscles that city boy exercising does.

I get sore doing country boy exercise.  Right now I feel it in my traps and delts, (shoulders) and I certainly feel like I worked hard today.  I guess the real difference is consistency.  I might do a bunch of different work when I am out doing the whole country living thing, but I never consistently push a single muscle over and over to its limits.  I might work hard and get things done, but that lack of consistency means that I never got big, and never saw any changes.

It isn't just doing it every day either.  Country muscles do all kinds of things.  Painting, climbing, lifting beams, shovelling gravel, and carrying buckets.  Also there are lots of types of work that leave you tired at day end but don't actually push your limits in any way like mowing gigantic lawns and driving tractors around.

I spent my early life doing country boy exercises, and getting country boy muscles, which is to say, not much to look at.

I like city boy exercises.  I do wish they had the 'getting things done' aspect that country exercises do, but I really like the limited time frame of weight lifting and also the results.  I want to get it done quick, and I want to get big.

That means a gym instead of a yard.  I guess I am okay with that.