Before the industrial revolution, over 80% of the population were farmers. The average human had to do physical labor to survive. The average human could not help but to “bodybuild”.

Since then, humans have built machines to harness the power of nature and do the physical labor for them. What made the human civilization so powerful robbed individual humans of their own power, quite literally. The average pre-industrial human could generate a higher wattage than the average post-industrial human of today—they had to.

Before the industrial revolution, humanity’s total power output was bottlenecked by human physiology. Humanity has since moved up in the Kardashev scale. Paradoxically, the more power humanity can generate, the less physical exercise the average human can economically afford, and the weaker their body becomes.