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Counted my trowel strokes on a 900 brick wall and the number surprised me
Honestly I never thought about this until my foreman bet me lunch that I couldn't guess how many times I flick the trowel on a normal day. So I counted on a 900 brick job in Tucson, and it came out to about 2,700 strokes over roughly 7 hours. That's wild because it means my wrist does more reps than most guys do at the gym, and it explains why my elbow aches by Friday. Ngl it also made me think about how much of this job is muscle memory, since I wasn't even thinking about the count while laying. Anyone else ever actually tally their strokes or is that just me being bored on a slow wall?
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the_thomas2d ago
Read a study a while back where they put sensors on bricklayers and found the good ones make way fewer movements than new guys because they cut out all the wasted flicks. Same thing with your count, 2,700 sounds like a lot but a rookie on that same wall would probably double it just from bad habits. The muscle memory thing is real too, your body learns the right amount of mortar without your brain doing the math.
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