11 ms·

A castle built on sand. The only way to take the premise of this claim seriously is to ignore data for the past 100 years. When I was in the US military, we al

A castle built on sand. The only way to take the premise of this claim seriously is to ignore data for the past 100 years. When I was in the US military, we all complained about the Body Mass Index standards. They were based on the WWII era "normal". Men were smaller. Less muscle mass. Shorter. If the average fit American young man tried to fit into a pilot's cockpit from the 1950's, it would feel quite cramped. Like it was built for much small people. It was. We have certainly climbed the Kardashev scale since the 1950's. To what degree is a matter of contention. But, all would agree that we have moved up the scale. Muscle atrophy has not been correlated with the growth. The opposite seems true. The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924. In addition, it is likely that the romantic picture of the average laborer "bodybuilding" is fictive and ignores how muscle atrophy and hypertrophy works. Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. They are staying well within cardiovascular zones of muscle activation. Hence, bodybuilders as we know them are largely a modern phenomenon. And they are certainly WAY more muscular. Seems the model that underlies this claim is built on seemingly demonstrably false premises.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RankingMember 2y ago
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.
- bradarner 2y ago
  No, I do mean precisely the average muscle mass is higher. Granted we are dealing with statistics. There is inevitably a lot more context than just a myopic focus on this single fact. Dated but still relevant: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adults-1882-1986?t https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adult... This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.
  - johnyzee 2y ago
    They keep lowering the standards for acceptance into the military, because young people are becoming less and less fit. Just one link out of many (this is well known): https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-study-shows-77-of-young-americans-are-ineligible-military-service.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
    - grogenaut 2y ago
      Without a Waiver due to: * obesity (the topic) (11%) * drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%) * mental / physical health (7%) how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > drug use (marajuana in a country where it’s legal in 24 of 50 states) Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.) [0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.
      - 2y ago
loeg 2y ago
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924. (I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)
- bradarner 2y ago
  Agreed, I was debating whether or not this was relevant to mention. What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass. Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    I'm not gonna go try to find the numbers right now, but the Anglo speaking world is just ahead of the others. They are all trending the same way.
  - ido 2y ago
    While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.
    - loeg 2y ago
      These obesity drugs are already having a huge effect -- obesity is down in the US for the first time in a long time (2023). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2827712 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
nradov 2y ago
The major federal government food assistance programs came out of findings in WW2 that many potential recruits were literally malnourished and underweight. They had grown up poor and starving during the Great Depression. Beyond the human tragedy this was a national security issue. Some men were too small and weak to meet military standards.
- bradarner 2y ago
  Indeed. Which would seem to indicate that positive growth along the Kardashev scale will lead to hypertrophy not atrophy, as conjectured by the OP. One could hypothesize that growing control of energy is highly correlated with the ability to empower a population to increase in muscle mass. Of course, history would seem to indicate that there can also be a correlation to increased obesity.
  - kiba 2y ago
    Doubtful that the energy spent on building muscles is significant as there are also compensating factors that stabilize our metabolic expenditure.
voldacar 2y ago
It's worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of classical statues like Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, etc. indicates that there were at least some men walking around in antiquity with an amount of muscle mass that could only be developed by deliberate hypertrophy training of the whole body, as opposed to just getting muscle as a side effect of specific athletic training. It seems like these people were doing something quite similar to modern bodybuilding, goal-wise.
- tartoran 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece)
- mhb 2y ago
  Wendy, the bully whippet, would like a word: https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-famed-for-massive-muscles-has-died-4645620 https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-f...
- pitpatagain 2y ago
  Milo of Croton is often cited as the earliest recorded examples of a progressive resistance training program: "He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton
  - grogenaut 2y ago
    Full grown cow gemini says 1,400lbs. World squat record 1,311.8. Panathenaic Stadium, Athens was 850 feet long, further than a single squat. Either we've gotten weaker, or cows have gotten bigger.
    - __coaxialcabal 2y ago
brodouevencode 2y ago
Agreed. Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Y'all are talking about noise inside of stage 2 from the link. A lot of it just being due to economics.
  - samus 2y ago
    People not having time to train their bodies higher up the scale is also just due to economics.
    - maxerickson 2y ago
      Maybe? I feel like an awful lot of people today, especially in wealthy countries, have at least 7 hours a week of time that they do not carefully allocate. Many have much more than that.
      - brodouevencode 2y ago
        Wealthier people (presumably the ones who have more free time) in first world countries tend to be the healthier ones.
        maxerickson 2y ago
        Right, and that effect is comparably enormous when you look at the period when the steam engine was taking hold and today. We are unimaginably wealthy compared to then.
    - kragen 2y ago
      People do have time. Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day. There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day. I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine. I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about. So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.
h0l0cube 2y ago
The faulty premise I see here is that squishy bodies will even be relevant as we climb the scale. Exo-suits are already a thing that can make us stronger in spite of muscle atrophy. And further up the scale, in-silico intelligence will replace the need for a highly inefficient body to power our highly inefficient brains. We could even down-throttle our consciousness to make journeys to distant stars. The future will be so abstract to us that we can’t even fathom what humanity will have become.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  We already kind of have exoskeletons anyway: cars.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    I did say exo suits are already a thing, not sure how that negates the argument
antonygonsalves 2y ago
There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future. And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).
karaterobot 2y ago
> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924. What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
baranul 2y ago
"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap." Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".
datadeft 2y ago
Having growth hormones in your ultra processed food helps
begueradj 2y ago
Well, a popular French army soldier who trains the soldiers of the Foreign Legion said multiple times on his YouTube channel that a good soldier is "un chat soldat" (cat soldier): his weight must be between 60 and 70 kg only. A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency. Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).
- portaouflop 2y ago
  The efficiency of the Spartan army is a myth, in fact there were quite insignificant; they basically won a battle once and after that were wiped out
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
mharig 2y ago
[dead]
potato3732842 2y ago
>Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RankingMember 2y ago

> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.

bradarner 2y ago
No, I do mean precisely the average muscle mass is higher. Granted we are dealing with statistics. There is inevitably a lot more context than just a myopic focus on this single fact. Dated but still relevant: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adults-1882-1986?t https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adult... This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.
- johnyzee 2y ago
  They keep lowering the standards for acceptance into the military, because young people are becoming less and less fit. Just one link out of many (this is well known): https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-study-shows-77-of-young-americans-are-ineligible-military-service.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
  - grogenaut 2y ago
    Without a Waiver due to: * obesity (the topic) (11%) * drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%) * mental / physical health (7%) how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > drug use (marajuana in a country where it’s legal in 24 of 50 states) Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.) [0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.
    - 2y ago

loeg 2y ago

> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924. (I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)

bradarner 2y ago
Agreed, I was debating whether or not this was relevant to mention. What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass. Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  I'm not gonna go try to find the numbers right now, but the Anglo speaking world is just ahead of the others. They are all trending the same way.
- ido 2y ago
  While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.
  - loeg 2y ago
    These obesity drugs are already having a huge effect -- obesity is down in the US for the first time in a long time (2023). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2827712 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...

nradov 2y ago

The major federal government food assistance programs came out of findings in WW2 that many potential recruits were literally malnourished and underweight. They had grown up poor and starving during the Great Depression. Beyond the human tragedy this was a national security issue. Some men were too small and weak to meet military standards.

bradarner 2y ago
Indeed. Which would seem to indicate that positive growth along the Kardashev scale will lead to hypertrophy not atrophy, as conjectured by the OP. One could hypothesize that growing control of energy is highly correlated with the ability to empower a population to increase in muscle mass. Of course, history would seem to indicate that there can also be a correlation to increased obesity.
- kiba 2y ago
  Doubtful that the energy spent on building muscles is significant as there are also compensating factors that stabilize our metabolic expenditure.

voldacar 2y ago

It's worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of classical statues like Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, etc. indicates that there were at least some men walking around in antiquity with an amount of muscle mass that could only be developed by deliberate hypertrophy training of the whole body, as opposed to just getting muscle as a side effect of specific athletic training. It seems like these people were doing something quite similar to modern bodybuilding, goal-wise.

tartoran 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece)
mhb 2y ago
Wendy, the bully whippet, would like a word: https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-famed-for-massive-muscles-has-died-4645620 https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-f...
pitpatagain 2y ago
Milo of Croton is often cited as the earliest recorded examples of a progressive resistance training program: "He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton
- grogenaut 2y ago
  Full grown cow gemini says 1,400lbs. World squat record 1,311.8. Panathenaic Stadium, Athens was 850 feet long, further than a single squat. Either we've gotten weaker, or cows have gotten bigger.
  - __coaxialcabal 2y ago

brodouevencode 2y ago

Agreed. Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.

maxerickson 2y ago
Y'all are talking about noise inside of stage 2 from the link. A lot of it just being due to economics.
- samus 2y ago
  People not having time to train their bodies higher up the scale is also just due to economics.
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    Maybe? I feel like an awful lot of people today, especially in wealthy countries, have at least 7 hours a week of time that they do not carefully allocate. Many have much more than that.
    - brodouevencode 2y ago
      Wealthier people (presumably the ones who have more free time) in first world countries tend to be the healthier ones.
      - maxerickson 2y ago
        Right, and that effect is comparably enormous when you look at the period when the steam engine was taking hold and today. We are unimaginably wealthy compared to then.
  - kragen 2y ago
    People do have time. Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day. There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day. I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine. I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about. So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.

h0l0cube 2y ago

The faulty premise I see here is that squishy bodies will even be relevant as we climb the scale. Exo-suits are already a thing that can make us stronger in spite of muscle atrophy. And further up the scale, in-silico intelligence will replace the need for a highly inefficient body to power our highly inefficient brains. We could even down-throttle our consciousness to make journeys to distant stars. The future will be so abstract to us that we can’t even fathom what humanity will have become.

HPsquared 2y ago
We already kind of have exoskeletons anyway: cars.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  I did say exo suits are already a thing, not sure how that negates the argument

antonygonsalves 2y ago

There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future. And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).

karaterobot 2y ago

> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924. What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

baranul 2y ago

"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap." Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".

datadeft 2y ago

Having growth hormones in your ultra processed food helps

begueradj 2y ago

Well, a popular French army soldier who trains the soldiers of the Foreign Legion said multiple times on his YouTube channel that a good soldier is "un chat soldat" (cat soldier): his weight must be between 60 and 70 kg only. A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency. Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).

portaouflop 2y ago
The efficiency of the Spartan army is a myth, in fact there were quite insignificant; they basically won a battle once and after that were wiped out
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

mharig 2y ago

[dead]

potato3732842 2y ago

>Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.