...I can say that the number of times that life tests me to use my strength are relatively few and far between, unless I deliberately seek them out. I'm sure it would be different if I lived on a farm, or did construction, or was a competitive athlete.
...So, what if I had stopped training with heavier weights earlier because I "wasn't seeing an improvement in unprogrammed activities"? I would never really know what strength or other capabilities I am capable of developing.
...StrongFirst's triad of kettlebell, barbell, and bodyweight provides plenty of opportunity for it. I'm heading into a couple of months of bodyweight and kettlebell snatch training, after over a year of almost exclusively barbell, and it's fun to discover what it has brought me.
I think you're missing the point in this context. If you aren't ever testing against anything but the lifts/activities you use for training (or
very similar), then you're getting nearly 100% strength transfer. You're already doing what will work best. The more dissimilar your effort is to how you train, the greater the surplus of strength you will need.
So I'm not suggesting to
not train with heavy weights etc, I am saying use a suite of exercises that more closely approximates your test or most common uses
and lift them heavy so you operate with less slop - a better ratio of usable strength to surplus. Really aside from lifting sports or personal satisfaction, the weights one can lift in the gym are not meaningful except as a rough measure of how well your basic methods are working - I don't think that's a controversial statement.
This is where you have to be honest with yourself about why you train and whether it helps where it needs to. I get tested infrequently but solidly where I work, and many of these activities I've been doing for a number of years, so I know what sort of carryover I get or not. If I wasn't tested like this, I'd just compare to my lifts at 100% transfer or nearly so, and everything makes sense.
When you do some other activity and realize adding 30% to your working loads hasn't made your life one iota easier, you can either accept that with a shrug, assume you need to increase loading even more or change things around so you get better payoff for your effort. I'm pursuing the latter, not just because as I age it is more difficult to increase surplus, but also to make my training time as effective as possible.