An Excerpt From
Prologue
Croton, on the southeastern coast of present-day Italy. Sixth century BC.
In the grassy field, the man walked toward the grazing calf—and picked it up.
Small hooves swung, slightly, in the air. Then came back down flat on the dirt.
The rest of that day, and again the next, the calf kept grazing, filling up with grass. And the man walked across the field again, wrapped his arms around the calf again, hoisted it, and set it down again.
Every day he lifted the calf, until the calf became a bull, and the man grew so strong that his tale still survives: the myth of Milo, the strongman of Croton.
Milo was a real person, a six-time Olympic victor in wrestling, the most celebrated athlete of antiquity. The tale about him and the calf is fiction, but in modern times, some have made the story true.
Or as true as it can be.
——
One who makes the story true, in the mid-1930s AD, is a teenager in Birmingham, Alabama.
The young man, Thomas Lanier DeLorme, falls ill. Doctors diagnose him with rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease believed to weaken the heart, and they order him to rest. While spending four whole months in bed, to pass the time he reads a magazine, Strength and Health, full of facts about exercise and fables of strongmen such as Milo of Croton. Inspired, he gets well enough to wander local junkyards searching for machine parts; and from the junk, he builds himself a barbell; and by lifting it, he gradually builds up his strength.
The young man who grew strong by lifting weights becomes a doctor in the United States Army Medical Corps, and in 1944 he goes to work in a Chicago military hospital full of wounded soldiers. Orthopedic surgeons fix the soldiers’ injured legs, but after surgeries, healing is slow. Can Dr. DeLorme do something to help them heal faster? He has an idea. But it’s risky.
At a time when most mainstream doctors say weak muscles should never be challenged to work near their limit of strength, Thomas DeLorme bucks the system. For rehab after surgery, he prescribes strenuous weight training, based on a technique of testing “maximum exertion” or effort. And he prescribes weight-lifting exercises in a standard dosage, which after several years of experiment he will refine to this protocol: three sets of ten repetitions, four times a week, lifting weights heavy relative to a person’s maximal strength.
The prescription works. It works so well that strength, in much scientific literature, comes to be defined as maximal force exertion. Years later, after the whole U.S. Army hospital system has adopted his technique; after his prescription has been used to rehabilitate polio patients, and it proves to be safe, feasible, and effective for women and men, adolescents and adults; after the doctor has retired from the Army, he reflects on his revolutionary treatment, giving credit where it’s due.
Glancing back through time, DeLorme tips his cap to Milo. “For centuries it has been known that if a person lifts progressively larger loads,” he writes, “the muscles, in response to the work stimulus, will hypertrophy and increase in strength.”
Introduction
Lifting a calf, turning a page, and every other voluntary movement happens by means of muscle.
No matter how you think of yourself—strong or weak, large or small—you are substantially made of muscle. Most adults are made up of at least 30 percent muscle. Many of us are closer to 40 percent muscle, and a few of us exceed 50 percent. Muscle is also one of the body’s most plastic tissues, changing its size and properties based on people’s habits of diet and care, work and rest. Human skeletal muscle is a primary organ of metabolism, the chemical processes that sustain life. When a child is growing, when an adult is injured or sick, and as every body executes the constant processes of cellular wear and tear and repair, proteins in muscle do the work of generation, healing, and regeneration. Muscle contraction is the basis of an extensive signaling network in the body, too. Working muscles produce secretions called myokines that circulate to the brain, liver, heart, intestines, and other organ systems, regulating biological functions that make for thriving life.
From early adolescence onward, the kind of muscular work shown in the myth of Milo and prescribed by Thomas DeLorme can yield a wealth of benefits. Progressive resistance exercise can build confidence and reduce anxiety; improve bone density, blood pressure, aerobic fitness, body composition, metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, depression, and sleep; prevent and treat type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease; reduce the risk of several types of cancer; increase resistance to injury; and decrease the likelihood of falls and of osteoporotic fracture. In old age, muscle increasingly decides who can live independently, and who cannot. Your ability to stand and go where you want to go—your independence, autonomy, and agency—your effectiveness in the world—will depend on muscle, to the last day of your life.
In recent decades, we have all witnessed what can happen when people make a practice of lifting weights. The bodies of public figures in many fields have been transformed: Derek Jeter, Serena Williams, and Cristiano Ronaldo; Madonna, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift; Marc Jacobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Jeff Bezos; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama, and Volodymyr Zelensky. At the same time, a related change has happened in the general population. Signs of the change emerge from almost thirty years of data collected by the Centers for Disease Control between 1988 and 2017, in surveys that asked American adults what forms of physical activity or exercise they spent the most time doing. Among more than fifty types of activities tracked by these surveys over that whole period—from bowling to fishing to running—the one that grew most popular most quickly was lifting weights. The number of people who said they lifted weights more often than they did other types of exercise increased by more than 34 percent in those years.
But on the other hand, the absolute number of people who made lifting weights their main form of exercise remained low. That number grew barely more than one percent in thirty years—from 3.2 percent to 4.3 percent of the population. And national physical activity surveys in many countries find that vast majorities of people do little or no exercise of any kind that would strengthen their muscles.
The truth is, few of us take much active interest in our own muscles, except for the young and athletic, whose interest tends to be tied to relatively short-term payoffs: winning games, or dates, or clicks.
It can it be easy to lose sight of muscle’s importance in every stage and every function of the widest range of lives because muscle is easy to typecast. Just hearing the word muscle can trigger thoughts of bodybuilders, or combat-sport athletes like boxers and mixed martial artists, or elite soldiers in actual military combat, or influencers, models, and movie stars, exuding erotic privilege. For many people, the word muscle can sound inherently sinister, because muscle was glorified in pseudoscientific theories and ideologies that have been used to justify sexism, racism, colonialism, authoritarian rule, and mass atrocities.
Books that investigate muscle’s meanings to aesthetics, sex, violence, injustice, and oppression do valuable work. But this book does a different kind of work, focused on the long-term, existential significance of muscles in our lives: the unnerving fact that muscles—and our individual and collaborative abilities to exert muscular strength—modulate our power to act upon the world.
In 1937, Charles Scott Sherrington, the Nobel Prize-winning British neurophysiologist whose lifework was to map the nervous system’s amalgamation with the muscular system, reflected that “the importance of muscular contraction to us can be stated by saying that all man can do is to move things, and his muscular contraction is his sole means thereto.” If we updated the gendered language, a more accurate one-line summary of muscle’s central role in our lives would be hard to devise. And so, with a slight paraphrase—to open that statement wide, to invite everybody in—Sherrington’s words bear repeating: …all we can do is to move things, and our muscular contraction is our sole means thereto.
——
Try to imagine: How would muscle look different to you, if you had never heard of Arnold Schwarzenegger or The Rock?
Or if that’s not possible to imagine, try this instead: Think how the world could look different if, every time you heard someone say muscle, the first person you thought of was not some big guy who had taken steroids, but your grandmother.
Making that shift is one of the best things you can do for yourself and for the people you love. Status quo views of muscle, by contrast, keep people stuck in destructive zero-sum games, pitting aspects of ourselves against each other—the superficial and the serious, brain versus brawn—even though significant evidence shows these conflicts have no legitimate basis in biology.
The brain’s posterior cingulate cortex, the seat of empathy, self-awareness, and emotional memory—which is also the first part of the brain to atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease, even before people show any signs of memory loss—“actually increases in size when you do weight-lifting exercise,” according to one of the researchers who discovered this, at the University of Sydney in Australia.
For ages, though, most people have been raised on mind-body dualism, the notion that experience can be neatly divided into the physical and mental, or spiritual. Getting ourselves out of the rut requires some reflection.
Often attributed to René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mind-body dualism has ancient roots. By the fourth century BC, in Athens, Plato taught that a person’s body, or sōma, contains and is activated by an incorporeal faculty, a kind of spirit, or psychē, that is superior to the body. Plato said the body is like a tomb or prison for the soul.
Mind-body dualism became a tenet of scientific medicine and of the medical dogma that moderate care of each—cultivating a sound mind in a sound body—is the key to health. One of history’s most influential doctors, Galen of Pergamon, who lived in the Roman empire during the second century AD, was fanatic about moderation. Galen denounced athletics as bad for health because athletic competition involved striving for excellence, the opposite of moderation, for the sake of winning a prize.
Galen savaged those who disagreed with him, and he saved special venom for big men with lots of meat on their bones. Such athletes “do not even know that they have a soul,” he wrote. “For they are so busy accumulating a mass of flesh and blood that their soul is extinguished as if beneath a heap of filth, and they are incapable of thinking about anything clearly; instead they become mindless like the irrational animals.”
Ancient medicine’s antipathy to athletics developed in part because of muscle, Galen’s writings imply, and the prejudice endured. In World War II, it was an obstacle for Thomas DeLorme. When the doctor prescribed weight training to rehabilitate injured soldiers, medical colleagues disapproved. A few years later, DeLorme wrote that “the mere mention of large muscles provokes in most people, and especially those of the medical profession, a decided antipathy” because “almost everyone is bewildered and repulsed by the so-called body builder.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, when mainstream science showed that physical activity is imperative for everyone who wants to live a long and healthy life, positive messages about cardiovascular fitness were commonly joined with negative judgments about muscular fitness. One of the twentieth century’s most popular books about exercise, published in 1968, was Aerobics by Kenneth Cooper, then a thirty-seven-year-old United States military physician. Aerobics denigrated muscular fitness and said that lifting weights was “like putting a lovely new coat of paint on an automobile that really needs an engine overhaul.”
Cooper articulated a common prejudice against weight training, based on cardiac concerns, that evidence would later refute. By the time he turned seventy years old, the author of Aerobics was committed to a regimen of lifting weights.
Individuals can change more rapidly than institutions and cultures, however. Still today, the medical profession shows relatively little interest in muscle. There is no medical specialty for the treatment of muscle, few doctors routinely measure or assess patients’ muscle mass or strength, and few medical schools require their students to take any classes about any kind of exercise. Government, health insurance, and hospital policies in most countries make little to no provision for doctors to prescribe exercise to patients, especially in an ongoing way, even for conditions proven to be more effectively prevented or treated by exercise than by drugs or surgeries.
Athletics, on the other hand, especially since the 1970s, has become thoroughly, intensively muscle-conscious, as weight training has helped propel steady advancements of world-record-breaking performance. In sports from swimming to stock-car racing, lifting can make the difference between winning and losing.
Divergent views of muscle in medicine and athletics describe a contrast of values: steadiness versus striving. Doctors want patients to keep steady regimens, in line with ideals of stable, constant, balanced health. Coaches want athletes to strive for peak condition on competition day, to help them win the prize of victory.
From muscle’s point of view, it’s not possible to take sides in these disputes. To stay well, even at a baseline level, all the way through life, muscles need to have regular chances to really shine, to show how hard they’re able to work. They also need to rest and recover: Even the strongest muscles can’t be excellent all the time.
The mind-body problem is no problem for muscle—it is nonsense—because muscle stops working and fades out of existence without constant interaction with the neurological system. Mind and muscle are not enemies. They’re the best of friends.
——
A clearer view of muscle starts with considering some facts about how muscle works.
When your hand is hanging at your side and then you lift it, opposing muscles on your upper arm shorten and lengthen—contract and relax—to bend the elbow. Biceps contract, and triceps relax.
Reversing the motion, when you drop your hand back down, muscles reverse roles. Triceps contract, and biceps relax.
Lift your hand or drop it, and muscle shows what it is: a system of symmetries, managed by orchestrated tension.
As limbs rotate around joints, muscles activate and deactivate, contract and relax.
All physical activity is paradoxical, in this sense: Movement depends on what muscles don’t do, as much as it depends on what they do.
Both are necessary, each in its time—and the same is true of each side of the pairs of concepts shaping how we talk of muscles.
Start with nature versus nurture: Some people are stronger or more muscular than others; is the difference inborn, or does it depend on what people do? To the latter question: What do you do? Do you have to lift weights, or is walking enough exercise? Whatever kind of exercise you do, how should you do it? Should you move fast or slowly? Lift heavy weights or lighter ones? How much does the size of muscles matter? Is big always stronger than small?
Put like that, basic questions about muscle may sound like they have one right answer. Oppositions can polarize. But where muscle is concerned, few oppositions are true polarities. Look closely, and most prove to be paradoxes. Born and made, heavy and light, fast and slow, big and small: Those antagonists actually need each other.
This book, structured by such paradoxes, shows people navigating tensions and finding answers to vital questions about muscle, answers grounded in the central fact of muscle’s critical, universal importance to life, for individuals and societies.
Cultivating that kind of awareness of muscle can be a constant struggle for the cultural reasons already mentioned, and for a material reason, too: Modern life is designed to marginalize muscles. Driving to school or to work and then sitting in chairs for most of each day eliminate much of the need for many of us to engage large groups of muscles involved in locomotion and posture, including muscles in the hips, back, and trunk. Hunching and slouching aggravate imbalances of tension among muscles, imbalances that can develop into aches and pains, especially in the back, neck, and shoulders.
“You have to redistribute that tension,” says Charles Stocking, who spent four years after college moonlighting as a strength and conditioning coach for Olympic athletes, among others, while working toward his PhD in Classics—studying ancient Greek language and culture, with an emphasis on religious rituals of sacrifice. The focus of his research includes athletics, because some of the earliest Greek athletic contests were religious rituals.
Now on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment in classics and in kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement, Stocking still works out several times a week, mainly by lifting weights and running sprints. He is motivated in large part by a most practical goal: to minimize the damage caused by sitting at his desk all day, so as to prevent occasional back pain from becoming chronic. Relieving and preventing pain are essential to what Stocking calls a “process of continuous self-overcoming” that, in his experience, makes for a good life at home, at work, and with friends.
He lifts heavier weights today, in his forties, than he did in his twenties—and in those earlier days, in California, he set a junior state record in the squat. Stocking understands his own unusual strength to be highly contingent on help and knowledge he has received from friends, coaches, teachers, and others. But the roots of this understanding extend far deeper than his own personal history.
Stocking is an expert on the words that some of the earliest Greek poets used to describe strength. The poets often portrayed warriors and athletes not as having strength but as receiving strength. They did not consider strength mainly as an individual accomplishment based on individual effort. Their experience of strength, which depended partly on what a person did, and partly on what help and gifts the person received from the gods, can seem paradoxical to us. Stocking says: “The paradox is that an ancient warrior is defined by his force, but that force is contingent on the gods.”
He also studies the rivalry between ancient athletics and medicine. Athletics is older than scientific medicine; and the origins of athletic contests show that trainers and athletes, no less than doctors and patients, understood the ultimate concerns of their respective interactions to be matters of life and death. The belief was not merely philosophical or figurative. It was also physiological, and was in some ways physiologically sound by current scientific standards, according to Stocking’s close readings of ancient texts.
In his workouts and in his writing, Charles Stocking shows building muscle and strength in a fresh light. Athletic training marks the field of life’s possibilities because it gives people freedom, and nothing less: freedom to do the things we want to do in the world.
“The main thing it has done for me is that I don’t have a sense of limitations,” Jan Todd once said about weight training. It was 1978, and Todd was in her twenties, near the peak of a trailblazing pursuit of muscular strength. For a full decade, she was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the strongest woman in the world. Then she became a coach in the sport of powerlifting, and she led the United States national men’s team and the women’s team to their respective world championships. Now in her early seventies, she still lifts weights. She also sees exercise in broad historical perspective, in her work as an academic historian—she, too, is at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is chair of the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education and directs an archive of physical culture and sports, an archive housed in the University’s football stadium. The term physical culture, though seldom heard today, is a name for the multitude of practices by which people pursue health, strength, endurance, beauty, and athletic victory.
Lifting weights has helped Jan Todd, as an athlete and as a scholar, run the risk of setting goals beyond what few, if any, of her peers dared to aim for, goals she has consistently reached. In addition to her many world-record-setting lifts, Todd helped write the first scientific strength training guidelines for women. She recovered umpteen surprising lost chapters from the history of physical culture, including Victorian-era traditions of women practicing heavy resistance exercise; and she has led her profession as president of one of the world’s largest academic associations of sport historians.
Strength training, for her, has always been a practice in satisfying “a fascination in what is difficult,” as she once told Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Defying stereotypes, she has done the difficult work of showing that muscular strength and knowledge of strength training are essential to female health, and access to such knowledge and practice is essential to social equality and opportunity.
“As a woman,” Todd says, “if you feel physically stronger, you’re going to be less afraid, more willing to try new things, and have more of a sense—I think—of yourself as a whole person.”
For all kinds of people, from our first days to our last, muscle mass and muscular strength are crucial for well-being. For older people, it is never too late to start discovering how progressive resistance exercise can make life better, and for adolescents, it is never too early to build strength and muscle, with lifelong positive effects “from head to toe,” in the words of Maria Fiatarone Singh, who holds a professorship at Sydney Medical School and a chair of exercise and sport science at the University of Sydney.
Fiatarone Singh and a group of her colleagues were the ones who found that the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex, the seat of empathy, grows larger when people do weight-lifting exercise. The discovery amazed her, as did another scientist’s finding that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory, grows larger when people do aerobic exercise. These two different kinds of physical activity, producing two different sets of effects, illustrate a principle that structures her research: specificity of exercise adaptation.
Doing resistance exercise produces one set of results. Doing aerobic exercise produces another set of results. Their Venn diagram shows ample overlap of outcomes, but it also shows that exercise “requires a targeted prescription depending on what is the change that you’re looking for in either physiological capacity or disease risk,” says Maria Fiatarone Singh.
The principle of specificity means, as she often repeats, “It matters what you do.”
For more than thirty-five years, Fiatarone Singh has been one of the world’s leading researchers on exercise and health, “trying to figure out,” she says, “what is the right dose, what is the right modality, for a particular syndrome or disease that might occur across the lifespan.” Most of her research investigates how progressive resistance exercise may be used as medicine. She has shown that weight training can be an alternative treatment for some conditions, such as depression, and can be a supplementary treatment for others, such as type 2 diabetes.
Her work also verifies that progressive resistance exercise produces a spectrum of benefits that aerobic exercise alone does not provide, including increased muscle mass and bone density and reduced risk of falls. For such reasons, she says, “If you have to choose only one” form of exercise, “or if you can only do one—it should be progressive resistance training,” and she says this is especially true for older people.
“You can get away without lifting weights when you’re young,” she adds. “You can’t really get away with it when you’re older.” And when she says “lifting weights,” she means lifting weights. “Although body-weight training is appropriate when you are just beginning a program, or for small muscle groups such as the calves,” she says, “it is difficult to provide the continuous progression to heavier loads with body weight alone, particularly for the larger leg muscles—and that progression is necessary for optimum adaptation and clinical benefits.” Heavy weight training is the only type of exercise that can build strength and muscle for the oldest, frailest people, Fiatarone Singh established, when she became the first physician to train nonagenarians and centenarians using Thomas DeLorme’s classic strength training prescription.
The caveat, as always with strength training, is that heavy is a relative term. If the heaviest weight that you are able to lift is the weight of your own two arms, then you start by raising your arms. By starting where you are, wherever that may be, lifting weights can produce life-changing results.
In weight training, it’s absolutely critical to know what you’re doing: to learn to do each exercise as safely as possible by following proper forms of movement, along the lines of proven regimens like the one that Thomas DeLorme described. At the same time, lifting weights is a practice of constant experiment, a perpetual adventure of improvisation. For the past few years, Charles Stocking, Jan Todd, and Maria Fiatarone Singh have been my generous guides in this adventure, and they are about to become your guides, too.
This book tells their stories in detail, including some of the hopes, the losses, the fascinations, and the struggles that have shaped their pursuits of strength, because these stories are integral to their important scholarly and scientific work.
Taken together, all the stories in this book—about athletic and medical training techniques for building muscle and its attributes, including strength—show people reaching for one prize above all, a prize almost beyond naming. The prize is freedom to do what we want to do in life—freedom that assures our independence so as to fortify our interdependence. The prize is aptitude to do things that are difficult. The prize is capability to make yourself, and therefore also the world, into something different, and possibly even better, than what might otherwise have been.
The prize is life.