Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jiggy2011 4286 days ago
You're comparing a trained athlete against a person who is untrained. It is not surprising that fitness related tasks are very amenable to training in a way that is not quite so clear with intelligence. A more interesting comparison would be between a sedentary Dieter Schmieter who worked as a computer programmer (or a Dieter Schmieter who had trained purely for strength) and a random member of the population who was trained by Dieter Schmieter's coach for 10 years.

Amongst the general untrained population you will see very large variance between performance on different fitness tests. Lots of broadly built overweight people who are very strong despite never having done any weight training but can't walk up a flight of stairs without breaking a sweat and skinny people who can run well without much training but barely lift anything. So I would doubt that there would be a strong general factor for physical tasks.