alt Hacker NewsYou're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights.
Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..
That's true of exercise in general. It's bullshit make-work we do to stay fit, because we've decoupled individual survival from hard physical labor, so it doesn't happen "by itself" anymore. A blessing and a curse.