I thought Todd had a great comment the other week that I wanted to highlight. Here's part of it:
"Also, a max carcass or log or stone lift would likely be far less than a max barbell lift, because of the lack of handles and awkwardness of the weight. All in all, I expect that most of the work would be done in the carrying of the weight rather than the lifting. Why lift something if you don't have the strength to transport it?"
I think this represents a neat departure from traditional bodybuilding thinking. While lifting heavier and heavier weight can build more muscle, to what extent is this "natural"? If max lifts in nature were capped off by the need to carry and transport the item, should a person limit their heavy lifts to an amount they can actually move around? Of course this amount can increase with training, but there will be a natural limit.
My other thought on this was how do heavy lifts impact the skeleton and the joints. You see people squatting 500 or 600 pounds, and their muscles have built up to handle this load. But if this is beyong the "natural ceiling" of how much a person should be lifting (in other words, this represents loads heavier than those present during the millions of years of human evolution), what will be the long-term impact on the joints? While muscle have a certain degree of plasticity, I would imagine the spine and the joints have a much lesser capability of adaptation.
