Lemme tell you something about roughneck construction workers (if i may indulge myself for a moment).
A trained fighter has confidence particularly in his fighting skills, and he develops these through training. His physical rootedness, the anchor of his confidence, exists only insofar as he feels an advance in his abilities and skills as a fighter. And this only advances insofar as he trains. There is, therefore, a dependency on the feeling of improvement for there to be sustained confidence.
The roughneck construction worker, on the other hand, isn’t rooted in his confidence as a fighter but as a relentless laborer who trains daily by necessity. He would go into a fight feeling more solid than a fighter. A framer for 20 years or more, for example, will have forearms and especially hands that are like hydraulic vice grips. He’s not bragging, not overconfident, not overestimating… he feels this as certainly as he feels how simply he lifts a beam or grasps a hammer. He is confidence personified while the fighter has to gather and earn it through extra effort in training.
There’s brute obstinance ingrained in the will of the roughneck construction worker might be a way to put it. He knows only the force of labor, the digging in, the grit, etc.
You put two men of equal size in a ring, let one of them be a residential framer of 20 years and the other a [insert fancy style] fighter, unless that fighter subdues him immediately that framer is gonna make quick work out of em. Every time. He’s got too many years on the gun for this fighter to go the distance. These guys don’t quit, man. They start young and can hardly push up a rafter. In a year, their climbing walls and slinging plywood on roofs for eight hours straight. Worked with a mexican kid decades ago who had arms like wires and veins twisted into braids. He could run two bundles of shingles up a ladder faster than your fighter could come down that ladder empty-handed. Animals, bro. Different breed of man. Impervious to pain almost. There are no gyms and smoothie bars here.