Which is harder - a labour job or desk job?

[freedogger]

Originally Posted by Igottago

I am convinced that the way we work in most of the corporate world right now will be laughed at in 40-50 years.

Same with the physical labour side. Robots and what not.

[freedogger]

Originally Posted by Azure

Except it isn't. Doing all those things will certainly help, but it doesn't compare to being active and constantly moving around throughout the day.

I have such a job, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. You just feel so much better at the end of the day compared to sitting at a desk.

And overwhelming amount of people who have desk jobs have back problems. Maybe they still are functional, but to a large degree they don't have a good quality of life physically. Nevermind that many are overweight and get very little exercise.

You can keep from being overweight from eating right, but you can't fix the back problems that arise from sitting all day.

What is your job if you don't mind me asking?

Getting an hour and a half on a bike 3-5 days a week gives me a better feeling than 60 hours on a cut block. Treeplanting involved walking/climbing 17-20 km every day with 30-50 lbs of trees, bending over and putting trees in every 7 feet with your hands and scraping the ground away. Log peeling was about 6 hours a day and I was spent. My hands wouldn't be able to fully open the next morning. There are/were only a couple of hundred planters in their forties, only ever saw one over fifty out of about 10,000 that do it every year. Most older planters become truck driving foreman or checkers that just do a lot of walking.

I was involved in competitive skiing at the time. I would always test lower in speed, strength and flexibility after two months of tree planting. Endurance was about the same. Definitely had the signs of over training but I needed to make enough coin or I wouldn't be competing the next year.

I've seen a couple of people with back problems use adjustable desks so that they can stand for some or all of the day. I don't actually know a lot of co-workers with back problems at the office though.

[V]

I worked as a floor layer for 7 summers. That destroyed my body more than any amount of desk work could.

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by Igottago

Sitting behind a desk looking at a computer for 8+ hours a day, 5 days per week is unnatural, period.

Who does that? Can't sit for too long, have to get up and stretch. Go to the washroom, read the newspaper, get coffee. I always get up every hour to go chit-chat or flirt with the hot office boy for a few minutes.

A quickie in the fileroom stretches out the muscles too.

[NuclearFart]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

Who does that? Can't sit for too long, have to get up and stretch. Go to the washroom, read the newspaper, get coffee. I always get up every hour to go chit-chat or flirt with the hot office boy for a few minutes.

A quickie in the fileroom stretches out the muscles too.

That's one way to get some white on your collar...

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

Who does that? Can't sit for too long, have to get up and stretch. Go to the washroom, read the newspaper, get coffee. I always get up every hour to go chit-chat or flirt with the hot office boy for a few minutes.

A quickie in the fileroom stretches out the muscles too.

Where do you work? Are they hiring? Are there CCTV?

[GirlySports]

Come on, what CCTV? It's discreet! That's why it's in the fileroom!

[Mr.Coffee]

I feel that the thread topic was sufficiently addressed over the first few posts that basically stated both have their pros and cons.

New thread, if you could only choose 1 set, would you choose arms or legs?

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Azure

Except it isn't. Doing all those things will certainly help, but it doesn't compare to being active and constantly moving around throughout the day.

I have such a job, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. You just feel so much better at the end of the day compared to sitting at a desk.

And overwhelming amount of people who have desk jobs have back problems. Maybe they still are functional, but to a large degree they don't have a good quality of life physically. Nevermind that many are overweight and get very little exercise.

You can keep from being overweight from eating right, but you can't fix the back problems that arise from sitting all day.

Seconded, there was actually an article in Men's Health about that:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298...y-killing-you/

Do you lead an active lifestyle or a sedentary one? The question is simple, but the answer may not be as obvious as you think. Let's say, for example, you're a busy guy who works 60 hours a week at a desk job but who still manages to find time for five 45-minute bouts of exercise. Most experts would label you as active. (Put your body to the test: 10 standards to assess your fitness level.) But Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., has another name for you: couch potato. Perhaps "exercising couch potato" would be more accurate, but Hamilton, a physiologist and professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, would still classify you as sedentary. "People tend to view physical activity on a single continuum," he says. "On the far side, you have a person who exercises a lot; on the other, a person who doesn't exercise at all. However, they're not necessarily polar opposites."

[llama64]

I sit in-front of a computer screen for 8-10 hours a day developing software. I get very little exercise unless I make specific time for it and often can't stop thinking about work once my "shift" is done. Hell, I was up at 4am because I couldn't stop dreaming about stuff I need to do this week at work.

At times, when deadlines loom and things aren't working I start daydreaming of how awesome it would be to wake up at 6, work my day outside and then go home and not think about work anymore. Not having to wear "business casual" would be nice too.

Labour may be "harder", but what I do seems more stressful overall.

Talk to me again in January after a week of minus 40 though, I very much doubt I'll be dreaming of working outside then.

[united]

Having done both, I think the labour job is far more physically difficult but the desk job is far more mentally difficult.

A hybrid that incorporated a healthy balance of both types of work would be nice.

[OffsideSpecialist]

This summer I have a desk job, and although I really enjoy it, I feel quite mentally drained by the end of the week from just staring at a computer all day.

I am getting a degree in civil engineering, partially because I would love to have a job that involves a mixture of office work and field work, and I am certainly hoping for such a job in the future.

[Sainters7]

Seeing this thread again makes me very happy I'm in my final week of landscaping before schools get going. Never again.

That said, there is something very satisfying about physically busting your a$$ all day and seeing the finished product (deck, paving, lawn, etc), and nothing feels better than a cold beer after a day like that. You just don't get that feeling in office jobs. Still, small price to pay for not having a chewed up back by the time you're 40.

[HPLovecraft]

Originally Posted by Sainters7

Seeing this thread again makes me very happy I'm in my final week of landscaping before schools get going. Never again.

That said, there is something very satisfying about physically busting your a$$ all day and seeing the finished product (deck, paving, lawn, etc), and nothing feels better than a cold beer after a day like that. You just don't get that feeling in office jobs. Still, small price to pay for not having a chewed up back by the time you're 40.

Hate to break it to you, but you're still probably going to have back problems when you're 40 if you're working in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

[Berger_4_]

Originally Posted by llama64

I sit in-front of a computer screen for 8-10 hours a day developing software. I get very little exercise unless I make specific time for it and often can't stop thinking about work once my "shift" is done. Hell, I was up at 4am because I couldn't stop dreaming about stuff I need to do this week at work.

At times, when deadlines loom and things aren't working I start daydreaming of how awesome it would be to wake up at 6, work my day outside and then go home and not think about work anymore. Not having to wear "business casual" would be nice too.

Labour may be "harder", but what I do seems more stressful overall.

Talk to me again in January after a week of minus 40 though, I very much doubt I'll be dreaming of working outside then.

I dunno, all I can think of during a hitch is work it seems. I have rig-mares pretty regularly. From dreaming my only pair of rubber boots had holes in them, to forgetting to catch samples, to having a trip that goes on and on forever, they all suck.

[GirlySports]

Does your office-jobs company have an entire health and safety department?
They can teach you how to stretch and get up all your derriere so you don't get stiff for 8 hours.

Getting up and just walking around for a couple of minutes is important.

[Bootsy]

Currently I do a little bit of both in my job and have done strictly physical and strictly office in the past and find that the physical job is probably harder ( I wouldn't want to go back to doing it now!) the office job has more stress involved. But as said by many above it all depends on the job, I don't think you can just generalize.

[WhiteTiger]

This has me wondering about the correlation between job and choice of recreation activity. I went over to a friends place today. He's pretty much completely reno'ing his house himself, and wanted to show me some of the new changes.

He works as a sysadmin, in front of a computer all day. But when he was talking about all the reno's he was doing, I could tell how much he enjoyed it. That he went as quickly through the workday as he could so he could come home and continue working on his place.

I had a really long day. In addition to skipping lunch, I got to work a 'surprise, bonus' hour when a truck showed up at 10 minutes to quitting time that had to be unloaded. All I wanted to to do at the end of the day was get home and stop moving.

Thinking some about it, that's pretty much the pattern with a lot of the folks I know.