Not handicap/disabled people, but just people who very weak/ completely nonathletic.
Opening jars.
opening jars … heck until I was 25 I had to have a device that helped me open 2 liter pop bottles …when I was a kid I couldn’t lift a car door handle mom had to get the push button and pull handle models
of course I have a moderate form of cerebral palsy so …
How small is a small person?
opening bags of potato chips
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Carrying gallon jugs of milk, carrying cat litter.
Filling a water softener tank with salt.
Getting back up, following a fall. I’ve been inactive since May, 2015, and my muscles have atrophied. Lately I fell on the ground behind my house, and it took me over an hour to crawl back inside.
Climbing stairs.
Bullies kicking sand in our faces.
I know you excluded the disabled but I wanted to comment on this. If you are disabled and use a wheelchair and you are physically weak, doing everyday basic tasks like transferring in and out of the wheelchair can mean big struggles. So in a sense, as far as quality of life, it’s more important for the disabled to have adequate physical strength (for the areas of the body that can be exercised, of course) than able-bodied people.
My mother started using a wheelchair a few years ago. At first, she was able to get in and out of the chair with some assistance, but now, due to her refusal to do any physical therapy, she is unable to offer any assistance, and her caretakers need to use a lift to get her in and out of the chair.
Perfect example (sorry about your mother tho).
Dating…
My anecdotal experience of before fitness and after gaining fitness is my own personal reference.
I’m an aunt to two little girls and while I am fairly muscular and I do exercise regularly … I have found that carrying kids while walking or even just holding them and standing for a while is tiring if it is not something you do regularly. Even holding my cousin’s infant for a while was hard on my back and arms. I can stand around all day with no problem but add a random sack of potatoes to the equation suddenly makes it harder.
So, I’m going to say that occasional child-holding is hard for a weak non-parent.
If you’re the parent and have been lifting and carrying your kid(s) every day as they grow really targets the muscles that give you the ability to keep doing it day after day. Even if you’re particular weak otherwise.
Carrying around my “portable” 35-lb massage table. Wraunches out my back even if I just try to pick it up.
Even giving a 50-minute (let alone 80-minute) professional-style massage is exhausting. (ETA: It’s been several years since I even tried this.)
Pushing sailplanes onto or off the runway. (Someone else almost always does it, while I just walk the wing-tip. Today I helped push a few times, and I’m all stiff and sore now.) Even worse when I do this while wearing a 17-lb parachute.
Operating the dive brakes while landing a glider. Seriously, I haven’t soloed after almost a year of this, and this is one significant reason why. On this particular glider, operating the dive brakes is a lot like alligator wrestling.
From my experiences with my wife, who isn’t disabled, but just is not in good shape, and particularly lacks upper-body strength:
- Bringing in groceries from the car (especially those damned packages of cat litter)
- She tends to overpack her suitcases when she travels, and it always falls to me to actually pick up the suitcases and move them around (particularly up and down stairs)
- Shoveling snow
- She doesn’t like to drive my car (a Mustang with manual transmission) because she has a hard time pressing the (fairly tight) clutch pedal to the floor.
In the past couple years, there are things that are getting harder and harder for me. It is not so much physical weakness as arthritis in my thumbs and wrists that make it painful to exert much force with my hands.
Opening jars is one thing. A most surprising thing occurred a few days ago. I found it very hard to insert or remove one of those small memory cards from my camera and my computer. I just could not exert enough force for either action. Eventually, I did with the help of a pencil eraser.
But general strength is also declining. Schlepping my wife’s 50 lb suitcase up and down stairs is getting harder. The four mile walk to my office which once took an hour and a quarter can now take up to 2 hours. Also, it is getting harder and harder to get out of a low chair. And I just cannot walk down any length of stairs without a railing. When I went to a ballgame in Seattle a month ago, I had to hold on to my son’s shoulder to get down to my seat. That ought to be against building code (the stadium is 18 years old).
Lumberjacking.