Our muscles power us — from the tissue that pumps blood from our heart to the tiny fibers that give us goosebumps. How exactly do muscles work — and how can we best strengthen them?
Guests
Bonnie Tsui, journalist and author. Author of “On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters.”
Also Featured
Jan Todd, former champion powerlifter. Chair of the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Bonnie Tsui joins us today. Welcome to the show, Bonnie.
BONNIE TSUI: Hi, Meghna. How are you?
CHAKRABARTI: I am very delighted to have you here. I’d love to start off with a fun little question. What are the smallest and weirdest muscles in the human body?
TSUI: Okay, so the smallest, some of the smallest and weirdest muscles in the human body include my personal favorites, the muscles that give us goosebumps.
Okay. So they are called the Arrector pili, and they are these tiny little muscle fibers that attach to the ends of our hair follicles. And think about when we get cold, right? So all of these little fibers contract to keep us warm, to warm up our body. And, but they’re also the muscles that are the muscles of fear.
So you think about a porcupine spine going up when it’s scared and to make it appear larger. Those are hairs and also, they are the muscles that, you know, contract when we feel extreme emotion. So think about when we feel awe or we’re listening to just a beautiful, stunning piece of music, or looking out into the vast ocean and just feeling the smallness of our personal existence in the larger, expanse of the world.
And I love, and I’m actually getting goosebumps talking about this because I think really, I have learned to voluntarily control and conjure up these muscles because I think that they are so wonderful in telling us how we’re doing, how we’re feeling.
And they’re very existential and I love that they are so surprising. Because they’re not what we think about when we think about muscle.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, as you’re talking Bonnie, I find myself looking at my arm and wondering what’s about to happen. So folks might be wondering what an odd question to start off an episode of On Point, but it is not. Because Bonnie is actually the author of a terrific book called On Muscle: The Stuff that Moves Us and Why it Matters. And it’s fascinating, because Bonnie, your book is one of those that takes this item that unless maybe we’re in the gym or we’ve been injured, we almost never think anything about, but it is essential to literally how we move about in the world, how we experience the world.
That I learned so much in reading the book. But let me not, I don’t want to leave the goosebump muscles just yet. There’s one of these muscles around every hair follicle.
TSUI: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. And so it is, this is, I think about it as like a sort of collective intelligence, like muscle has its own intelligence in ways that we don’t even think about.
Muscle has its own intelligence in ways that we don’t even think about.
And I love that about it. I love that it’s such a rich topic to explore because it’s something that we, like you said, we think we understand, but do we really?
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I didn’t, until I read your book. Like I said, I usually only think of my muscles when I’m in the gym and wondering why things are still so hard or I get injured.
But before we get to all the wonderful history and science of human musculature, I would actually love to hear you talk with us about your early life and how your family, and particularly your father, was a really big influence in your lifelong interest in the human body.
TSUI: Yeah, sure. My dad was and is an artist and a martial artist, and so when we were growing up in New York, we grew up, my brother and I grew up in his downstairs studio in our house. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, and we were born and raised in New York, in his downstairs studio.
And but he had this really wonderful fascination with the human body and a life of physicality, that I think was really unique to him as a visual artist. He worked as a freelance commercial artist for 20 years in New York and he won an Emmy for his work. He did all like these book covers and movie posters and advertisements, and also the posters advertising the Olympic Games.
And he, I had a poster of an ice skater hanging in my room from those Olympics. And it was just, we were brought up like doing karate with him in the downstairs studio, front kick, sidekick, roundhouse kick. And we would also go on runs after dinner with him.
And we were taught from a young age to value the body, not just for form, but for function. And I think that really influences how I inhabit the world today. And also, because my brother and I, we’re just a year apart. A year and eight days apart. And so we, he treated us the same.
Like we were sparring partners, sparring buddies from when we were little. We’d be like dangling from his biceps like baby monkeys and we would be doing pushups with him. And there’s this really wonderful photo polaroid that mom took of us when we were in diapers. And my dad’s in his swimsuit and we’re in our diapers and we’re doing this like superman pose.
Because the movie had recently come out and just that was, he would say to me, make me a muscle when he walked by, when I was like doing my homework in the kitchen or something.
CHAKRABARTI: So you’re like pumping your guns then. (LAUGHS)
TSUI: Yeah. And it was just like, I did it like as a reflex, and he would just squeeze my muscle and then he would just laugh and then he would show me his muscle.
And then I think it just was, you think about that phrase, make me a muscle. And it really is the phrase that opens the book. Because not just because it’s something that my dad said to me all the time, but because you think about it as, it is both itself, right? Muscle is this tangible stuff that moves us through the world, and it’s also bigger than itself.
When you’re asking someone to make you a muscle, you’re asking them to demonstrate something that is not just physical. It is something about their character and who they want to be in the world. And muscle being itself and also more than itself is really what this book is about.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. One more thing about your father. He made, he drew some of the posters for the 1984 Olympic Games.
TSUI: That’s right. He was an illustrator. And so at that time, in the ’80s, you’d have, it was like the heyday of illustration, so you’d have people drawing or painting everything from like advertisements.
I remember my dad was doing ads for the Bobbsey Twin books or something like that. Or Choose Your Own Adventure. … We read these books voraciously as Kids. He did one called Chinese Dragons that he put himself and my brother on the cover.
CHAKRABARTI: You’re kidding.
TSUI: I will send it to you after.
CHAKRABARTI: I used to sit in the library as a kid in front of the Choose Your Own Adventure shelf and essentially just go through them one at a time. I know I’ve read that one.
TSUI: So this one was great because it was, he was this chinese warlord and he was like standing on, with this like imperious pose and my brother is like the teenage supplicant, oh, please spare us or let me go with you and fight the war. It’s great. I will send it to you.
CHAKRABARTI: That would be amazing. Thank you. The reason why I wanted to ask about that, those Olympic games posters, is because, in a sense, like all of these worlds come together. Because in illustrating what we, I guess, as a species, consider the height of what the human body can do, right? The potential of finely trained muscle. I just thought that felt a little meaningful to me.
Because you also opened your book with an illustration that you made of what? The shoulder. And the bicep. And the forearm as well.
TSUI: Yeah. I think about, and certainly in writing this book, all of these threads came together in such a beautiful way, understanding that seeing my dad portray what I really think about as our modern gods on earth, right? When we watch the Olympics, we are awed by the incredible range of ability and shapes and sizes and what we are capable of on a really fundamental level.
And that all of these, I think what we all love about watching the Olympics when it comes around is that it’s not just the sports that we’re accustomed to seeing. It’s all the things we never see. And these people have trained, really their whole lives for this moment.
Doing something that so many of us, we understand on a very visceral level how incredible it is, and it’s all these different things, like hammer throw, defeats of strength, but also of just agility and flexibility and beauty, and it’s just all these different kinds. Endurance. And I think again, like these attributes of muscle, which are not just attributes of the muscle itself, but of character. Of like this larger sense of personhood. And I think that’s a philosophy of muscle that I really enjoyed probing it.
CHAKRABARTI: One of my favorite Olympic sports to watch happens to be in the winter games.
And it’s the biathlon, right? The skiing and the shooting.
TSUI: Oh my gosh. Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: And it suddenly occurred to me that, okay, first of all, they just have incredible endurance for all the skiing. But these are marksmen and markswomen who have trained themselves to be able to shoot incredibly accurately.
And I think many of them do it in between the beats of their heart. So their bodies are completely still.
TSUI: And you have to, and think about going all out skiing. And then your heart is racing and then you have to immediately quiet yourself and be so still, and then it’s this really micro control and accuracy as you mentioned, and the shooting between the heartbeats.
Yeah, exactly. It’s so dialed in. It’s so locked in. It’s an amazing feat of control.
CHAKRABARTI: Which happens to the heart, also happens to be, what? One of the, if not the biggest muscles in the body.
TSUI: It is a muscle that, it’s hard to measure like strength and endurance, like across all muscles.
But the heart definitely is one that endures and just is like, through your lifetime, it’s there and it like all these beats every single minute, hour, day, year, you know, of your life. And it’s just, it adds up to the really, to think of your life as a collection of heartbeats is just, it’s really, like I said, muscles are a really interesting way of measuring our mortality.
But I think in a really incredible way.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: We asked On Point listeners about sort of their relationships with their bodies when it comes to muscles and maybe the benefits they get from strength training.
And here’s what you told us.
(MONTAGE)
WAYNE: I have to say that I’ve become a devoted gym rat.
DEB: After about 10 minutes, start breathing deeper. My body gets warmer. I start to feel more alert, more awake.
PAT: Squats, lunges, biceps, triceps.
BETH: I feel my body has gotten stronger.
KEVIN: I’ve probably gained about 15 pounds, mostly lean. I’d like to think so anyway.
PAM: I have dropped dress sizes.
CHRIS: Being stronger, feeling stronger. My wife is 13 years younger than I. Gotta be able to fend off those young bucks.
SARAH: I don’t fear falling. I have got great balance and stability.
ANTHONY: Used to have knee pain and I used to have shoulder pain. Now I literally have no pain.
LISA: Weightlifting for me has been a stress reliever.
Weightlifting for me has been a stress reliever.
Lisa, On Point listener
MONICA: It’s built my confidence.
PAM: The endorphins that it produces is fabulous.
KEVIN: I feel much better mood wise.
ANTHONY: It’s almost like my brain is balanced.
DEB: You get this little positive mental boost.
MARNAY: If I can do hard things in the gym, I can apply those same principles outside of the gym. I consider it a form of therapy.
If I can do hard things in the gym, I can apply those same principles outside of the gym. I consider it a form of therapy.
Marnay, On Point listener
KEVIN: My job often requires me to evaluate and think about many things. And weight training is amazingly simple.
LISA: It’s fun. It’s a community of people. I love to lift with women who are stronger than me, who will push me.
CHRIS: Every trip back from the grocery store is a challenge: Can I get all the bags in one go? And I’m happy to report thus far I’m undefeated.
CHAKRABARTI: Those were On Point listeners Wayne in Portland, Maine; Deb and Pat in Portland, Oregon; Beth in Needham, Massachusetts; Kevin in Ames, Iowa; Pam in Bar Harbor, Maine; Chris in Ashburn, Virginia; Sarah in Charlottesville, Virginia; Anthony in Fresno, California; Lisa and Monica in Denver, Colorado; Kevin in Honolulu, Hawaii; and Marnay in Atlanta, Georgia.
That was just a couple, the sum of the feedback that we got Bonnie, about people and how they feel in body and mind when they train their muscles. I do want to get into sort of actually like physically what’s in muscles itself in just a moment. But I am very taken by how many people said it’s not just that they feel physically stronger when they’re strength training, it’s the profound impact that it has on their brain.
You heard people say, I feel more balanced. It’s a mental boost. It’s just like a fabulous experience. You write in the book that our brains and our muscles are in fact in constant communication with each other. Even if we think a lot of our muscular movement is quite unconscious.
TSUI: First of all, I just loved listening to all those voices talk about not just what their muscles allow them to do, but you’re right, how it makes them feel about themselves. And it’s just so fantastic. I love that the last caller was talking about being undefeated in the grocery run.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)
TSUI: That is an achievement. But yes, like I think one of the things that I learned from researching and writing the book, which I don’t think I really thought about. I just mostly thought about skeletal muscle as it is exactly that. It moves your bones around and responds to like where you want, your brain is telling you that you want to go, but muscle is also an endocrine tissue.
CHAKRABARTI: I did not know that. I had no clue.
TSUI: Yes. I think just explicitly, understanding that and thinking, oh, our muscles are releasing biochemical messengers that go all around our body to talk to other ones. Most of us understand what endocrine tissue is, and we often think about hormones and it’s certain organs talking to other ones, but our muscle is also an endocrine tissue.
And so that means that when we move, when we move our muscles and especially when we exercise, your body on exercise changes you even after a few minutes. And I love this idea of all these conversations that are happening, from muscles to brain and to other systems.
Your body on exercise changes you even after a few minutes.
Ramping up your metabolism, your tissue healing, your immune cells and regulating your mood, right? Yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: And but can I ask you Bonnie? Yeah. So when I think of the sort of neurological enhancement that comes from exercise or the first thing that comes to mind is like dopamine, but that’s actually within the brain.
You just said that musculature is actually, is also producing some kind of hormone or chemical that goes throughout the body? What is that?
TSUI: It’s sending, so myokines are the chemical messengers that are sent out from your muscles, but your muscles then, those myokines then travel to the brain, say, and tell it to then respond by releasing dopamine and cannabinoids and all that.
Like around your body. And so all, it’s like a complex dance of chemical messengers and notes that is happening, between all of the different systems in your body. And so it’s a really, I think that’s why I find it so interesting that muscle is so intricately involved with all kinds of processes in our bodies, not just for, I’m going to go get a can off the high shelf, or something like that.
It is so involved with metabolism and mood and controlling inflammation and really it is not an over-exaggeration to say that investing in your muscular health is investing in cognitive health, cardiovascular health, immune health, like your overall health.
Investing in your muscular health is investing in cognitive health, cardiovascular health, immune health … your overall health.
And I think that’s why so many doctors are telling patients now that strength training is that single most important exercise to do as you age.
CHAKRABARTI: Ah, you’re jumping to where I want to go in a few minutes here. But I do want to know, like these myokines. Are they released just upon any movement of the muscle, or do you have to put your muscles under stress in order to get the greatest benefit from these proteins that are released when the muscles are moving?
TSUI: I think whenever you’re moving, there is activity happening. Because that’s just what does happen. But the more you move, the more intense your movement. And because exercise does get your system up, the more activity and conversation is happening between your muscles and the rest of your body.
And that is really good for you.
CHAKRABARTI: And we should say that this remains true no matter how old you are or how abled you are.
TSUI: Yes. Right.
CHAKRABARTI: Because it’s any muscle group in the body.
TSUI: That’s right. And so I think, I just had this, I was giving a talk recently and I had this gentleman come up and he was like, I’m 65 years old.
I just started exercising. I’ve never exercised in my life. Is it too late for me? And I said, I am so happy to tell you, unequivocally, it is not too late and talk to me in a month. He’s just started working with the strength trainer and he was, that he will feel different. He will feel transformed, he will feel changed, because that’s what muscle does.
And muscle is really such a remarkably adaptable tissue. It’s changing all the time, and I think that ability to change, that we are all capable of change, it translates to rest to the rest of your life.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I have always been the kind of person where it came to cardio, I would really only do it willingly if I was chasing a ball, like on a soccer field.
TSUI: Because it’s fun. It’s a game. Yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: Sorry to my poor heart, just not a fan of doing cardio exercises, even though it’s a muscle exercise. I’ll grant you that. But strength training I’ve always loved, in part because, I don’t know if this happens with everyone, but for me, I actually feel not just mentally, but physically a very quick benefit, like the feedback from it. In terms of my sense of improvement in my capabilities in the gym to me has always been much, much faster than slogging away on the elliptical for weeks on end.
TSUI: Yeah, I think that’s such a great point you make. Because when we’re strength training it’s like daily incremental change that adds up really quickly actually.
And so you do feel differently day to day of what you feel comfortable lifting, what feels easy, what feels challenging, and it’s like a daily check-in with yourself that is very grounding. And I think that’s why these studies with people who are coping with PTSD, actually strength training, weightlifting, has been shown to be a really positive module for treating, for helping to treat people who are suffering from PTSD.
Because it helps, you feel so out of control, right? Like when you have encountered some really traumatic experience. And it is a way to really ground people in their bodies, which is a very, it can be a very difficult thing to do and also to reclaim a sense of agency.
And that is very essential to mental health. And also, to just feeling like you’re a capable person in the world.
CHAKRABARTI: Especially also true for when people become elderly, because the body starts becoming an unfamiliar place.
TSUI: That’s right. That’s a really good way of putting it.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Because you’re just constantly in fear of falling. Or being unable to reach for the higher place in the cabinet or whatnot. And so reclaiming at least even some sense of agency by incrementally strengthening yourself in our older years, I feel, as you just said, it’s one of the reasons why doctors are telling people at any age, under supervision, right?
We should say that. That you can really benefit, especially as you get older, from strength training.
TSUI: Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that I really learned in my time in the book with the adaptive yoga pioneer, Matthew Sanford, he said this thing to me that really clarified my understanding of our bodies and as we age and movement and muscle, which is that we’re all on this continuum.
We’re all moving along this continuum of disability, of ability and disability. And that’s all of us. We’re all situated on it, whether disability, it can happen quickly, right? With an accident or an injury or illness. Or it can happen slowly, as you’re aging. And if you have the great fortune to age to a great age, like you are, like we are all changing, our bodies are always changing.
We’re always relearning our bodies in many ways. And to constantly meet ourselves where we are and to understand what we need, and we are all deserving of the grace and the joy of movement, and to invest in who we are at this particular moment. And that was really special, I think, to understand we have to constantly be calibrating our understanding of ourselves and our bodies.
CHAKRABARTI: Bonnie, I should finally get down to just the biology of muscle. I actually, one of the reasons why I truly enjoyed your book is you got me thinking about muscle in a different way, other than it’s like strings of protein, et cetera, et cetera.
So thank you for diving into that space with me. But I do want to also learn, have all of us learn from you about, okay, so when we’re talking about muscles, what actually are we talking about? There are three types of muscles and what are they made out of? Give us the 101.
TSUI: So I think most of us remember from biology class that we have three different types of muscles in our body. Cardiac, smooth, and skeletal. Cardiac is of course heart muscle. Smooth is like the muscles that power our blood vessels and our digestive tract.
Things that we don’t necessarily, we don’t have voluntary control over, and skeletal muscle is, as it sounds like, are the muscles that move our body around, our skeleton around and they attach to our bones and get us where we want to go. And these are the ones that we have voluntary control over, but … there is actually really a range of like conscious and unconscious like control over all of our muscles, really. It’s less divided I think in some ways than we might think.
But those are the rough categories. And all the muscle tissue is a little different. But when we talk about skeletal muscle, which is what I mainly talk about in the book, although I do talk about the other types of muscle as well.
Skeletal muscle fibers are long and skinny, and they’re like fibers and it’s complicated. I’m gonna try to boil it down. So when our muscles, there are muscle fibers and when they need energy to move the mitochondria in those muscle cells, and we think about mitochondria, I think being the powerhouses of the cell, right?
And so when we need that energy, the mitochondria send an electrical charge across those membranes to convert nutrients into ATP, which is used to contract muscles. And so that’s why mitochondria is called the powerhouse of the cell.
Because it’s really about powering us through the world. And there are different types of muscle fiber filaments, like actin and myosin. I think we know about, like how they slide back and forth and relax and also contract muscle. But in general, we also have fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers.
And I think people know a little bit about that too, which is, in general, muscles with fast twitch fibers are ideal for sprinting, power movements. We think about our hamstrings right on the back of our thigh, which are used for sprinting. And also, this is a little weird, because if I give you an analog to like white muscles or white meat.
Like chicken. Because they call, they are analogous to that because they appear lighter in color. And so in a chicken breast, like that muscle is fast twitch muscle.
CHAKRABARTI: Why do they appear lighter in color though?
TSUI: It’s because they get their fuel from glycogen, and so that’s stored glucose. And I think we all understand probably, again, from biology class that that’s like the quick storage quick access storage of glucose, when you need quick energy, so when you’re sprinting and so it requires less oxygen and so it has fewer blood vessels, so it’s not as red.
And so like slow twitch fibers are good for endurance, and they are known as red muscle or dark meat because they need a lot of oxygen. And so they have a lot of blood vessels, and they also have a lot of myoglobin, which is like the oxygen binding protein blood that gives muscles that reddish color.
And yeah, I hope everyone didn’t fall asleep just then. Because I’m like your biology or your AP bio teacher.
CHAKRABARTI: No, I guarantee you everyone was doing what I was just doing, again, just looking at my own aging body, but still as a marvel as you described all of those aspects or characteristics of muscle.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: In Bonnie’s book she does point out that up until about the age of 10 years old, boys and girls have pretty similar bodies and physical abilities.
But then of course, puberty kicks in and in adulthood on average, Bonnie, I’m just quoting you directly here. Men have 80% more muscle mass in their upper body than women do, and 50% more muscle mass in their legs. And so this is one of the reasons why even in modern times in public, when we think of sort of idealized musculature. We often think of men, but Bonnie asks in her book, what happens when a woman steps in? And that brings Bonnie and us to the story of Jan Todd, a powerlifting legend.
JAN TODD: In my prime, I could hold a thousand pounds in my hands at the top of a deadlift. I could put my shoulders under the side of my Ford Fiesta and I could lift the side of the car off the ground. And I can still do weird things like bend bottle caps with my fingers, even though I’m now in my seventies. I still practice that from time to time just thinking I never know now, which when it’ll be the last one.
CHAKRABARTI: These days, Jan chairs the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin. She got her start weightlifting in 1973.
TODD: I did appearances for different people, like for the Guinness World Records. I did some appearances for them at state fairs. I did the Johnny Carson show.
JOHNNY CARSON [TAPE]: My next guest has the distinction of being the strongest woman in the world.
CHAKRABARTI: Live, on stage, Jan deadlifted 415 pounds. A new women’s world record.
CARSON [TAPE]: (GASP) (APPLAUSE) Good Heavens! If I tried that every organ in my body would be lying somewhere on the stage over there.
TODD [TAPE]: (LAUGHS)No, you just have to know how.
CARSON [TAPE]: (LAUGHS) Well, sure, of course,. You can also fly all by yourself if you know the secret.
CHAKRABARTI: In the summer of 1979, Jan tried for another world record: In Scotland, she attempted to become the first woman to lift the Dinnie Stones. Two boulders that together weigh about 740 pounds.
TODD: One of the things that I knew was gonna be complicated for me was that the one stone is larger than the other, and so it weighs over 400 pounds alone, and they have rings in the top. They’re small rings, and so when you’re pulling on them, they’re actually really cutting into your fingers. I try it once, the front one comes up easily. The back one is like dragging on the ground, but it’s not leaving the ground. And I’m disappointed, you know, put him back down, try again in just a second. And then I’m really frustrated. And so I take a walk away.
CHAKRABARTI: Jan takes a breath. She walks toward the nearby river. Then, her husband Terry walks over and reminds her of something that had happened earlier in their trip. A Scottish official had offered whiskey to all of the men traveling with Jan — but he didn’t offer any to her.
TODD: And Terry comes over to me and he said, he said, I know you’re thinking about this. He said, but what I want you to do is I want you to take your next attempt, and I want you to remember the whiskey man as we were calling him. And I did. And then I lifted them up.
So, and they didn’t come up very far. Because you don’t have to. They have an expression in the Highlands, it counts as a lift as long as you can feel the wind beneath the stone. And then there wasn’t another woman who did that till. 39 years, something later, something like that. So it was a very, very long time.
CHAKRABARTI: Jan’s husband, Terry Todd, is actually how she found her way to weightlifting in the 70s. He was a champion powerlifter himself.
TODD: I did not do sports to speak of in any meaningful way in high school because I went to high school before Title IX passed. And so this really started out with, you know, me following my boyfriend and then my husband to the gym. And then I met a young woman in Austin, Texas in 1973, and I saw her and she was doing deadlifts. And as we talked, she encouraged me and then I found I could deadlift the 225 with no trouble.
CHAKRABARTI: Jan Todd went on to help launch women’s powerlifting as a U.S. sport. She helped organize the first women’s meet in April 1977.
TODD: For the first several years, if you went to a contest, they were normally run by men’s rules and like men’s rules don’t allow you to wear a bra.
There were some cases where women would show up to compete and then somebody would say, oh, well you can’t wear that. The second issue then came up, well, if you had a bra, could you have a bra with an underwire? As if that would somehow make you bench press more, right?
TODD: There are young women now who can pick up the 418-pound Húsafell Stone in Iceland and carry it for long distances. There are a number of women deadlifting over 600 pounds in competitions that would not have even been imagined back when I began training.
We don’t gender speed, right? It’s okay for girls to be fast. And we don’t gender flexibility or a lot of other things. Muscle is muscle. And I think and hope that women in the future will continue to celebrate the idea that it is okay to be strong.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s Jan Todd, pioneer powerlifter and current professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the kinesiology and health education department.
Bonnie, you write at length about Jan. What is it about her that you wanted to celebrate so much in the book?
TSUI: I love Jan. She is not only a person who could talk about what it felt like to occupy a body that could do all of these extraordinary things as she talked about in this interview.
But also, what it meant to be a woman who was doing this in that time, when women were not doing these things. And she told me, context of when she was coming up, she said, my dad didn’t let me do ballet because he said it would make my legs too muscular.
And her grandma, because she was a fast kid when she was in elementary school and her grandma would say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to be running too fast. Because you don’t want the boys to think that you’re faster than they are. And so she has spent really the last 50 years observing and writing about the changes that have happened in women’s sports and fitness.
And she still does it. She is a sports historian. She still also directs the Arnold Strongman and Strongwoman contest every year. And she is the reason that there is an Arnold Strongwoman contest to begin with, and I love that it’s not just her ability to talk about what it feels like to be strong, but also what it means to be strong for a woman.
And over the arc of this time, it’s just, like she was talking about where we now see women deadlifting well over 600 pounds and carrying the Húsafell stone. Like it’s pretty awesome. And it’s also, it also reminded me when I was listening to her talk in this, in the interview that she did for this program, that she told me, it used to be that they thought that women were like half as strong as men, and then it was like two thirds.
And really the reality is that women have only been doing these things, these public demonstrations of strength for a very short time compared to the men. Men had been doing this in a capacity that’s like military, it’s training, it’s competition, it’s sports, like all this stuff. And women have only, again, like within Jan’s lifetime, like so much has happened.
So much has changed. So much has been deemed more acceptable for women. The world has opened up much more. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. A lot we don’t know about women’s capabilities.
CHAKRABARTI: But Bonnie, let me just, let me ask you about that a little bit more because in terms of accepting that women can and should be building their muscles, we have come a long way.
But again, biologically though, men, I’ve read those facts from your book. Men do have more muscle mass. And they do have a higher sort of a hormonal propensity to grow muscle faster. I think it’s still a fair statement to say that literally speaking on average, men are stronger than women? Or is that not fair to say anymore?
TSUI: I think it is a reality, because it’s just like evolutionarily what biology has done,
CHAKRABARTI: It just means biology. Exactly.
TSUI: And it’s also, you look across animal species, like generally speaking, or rather oftentimes, there’s a size differential in the male or the female of the species because of these evolutionary reasons, like where there are roles to occupy and in some species, in Raptor species, the females are larger because they’re the ones who are doing the hunting of food or warning of predators and all of this. And there are reasons that this is true.
And in the human species, like of course across human history that has been true for men and women, and these public demonstrations of strength have really skewed towards men.
But that does not mean —
CHAKRABARTI: But it’s a public demonstration of a specific kind of strength, right?
And that’s the other thing I take from your book though, because, in talking about all the different kinds of muscles, in terms of what we idealize. It’s only one kind of strength that gets that place in our culture.
Whereas bodies that are also using muscles but in different ways are actually quite equally remarkable, but we just may not look at that as, oh, here is the picture of strength. Honestly, I’m gonna be selfish and say I think of like moms all the time as like pictures of strength, but that’s not necessarily what pops to mind when we talk about that.
TSUI: Yeah, exactly. Like you’re absolutely right. Picking up a heavy thing.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)
TSUI: … It is funny to think about even today how when we see that happen in front of us, we applaud it and we have a response to it, I think.
All of us do. But you’re right, like strength is, you can talk about strength in many different ways across many different kinds of bodies and also things that you want to be doing.
CHAKRABARTI: Bonnie, we only have a few minutes left and there’s a couple more important points that I want to hear from you on.
And one of them is, again, just biologically speaking and check me on this. In terms of our ability to build muscle, we peak as human beings relatively early, and then, I don’t know what it is, after 30-ish really, what we’re trying to do is preserve what muscle mass we have.
TSUI: Yes. So most people know about osteoporosis and osteopenia, which is just the age-related loss of bone, which is very normal.
It happens to everyone. And less people know about sarcopenia, which is the age-related loss of muscle. And again, it happens to everybody whether you are a professional athlete or not. It’s totally normal. It happens, unfortunately, starting in your thirties. But what that means is that strength training is really important as you get older.
And you just need to keep thinking about your muscles and again, like strengthening them, investing in them for health as you get older. Because it does become more challenging, as many things do when we age, to put on that muscle and keep it on.
It does become more challenging … when we age to put on that muscle and keep it on.
CHAKRABARTI: One of the things about modern life where for all the wonderful technologies we have, I’m thinking about the car, especially in terms of reducing the burdens on our body.
The downside is that we used to live lives that just in the natural course of a day, we were working our muscles more than we are now. I’m sitting in a chair right now, for goodness sake.
TSUI: Me too! Talking.
CHAKRABARTI: And so that’s why we’ve had to refocus on intentional exercising of our muscles.
But I also wanna just quickly ask, you mentioned this before, there’s a lot of medical research right now and the importance of strength training. That’s being translated into the media in a way that I frequently see headlines that say, if you want to be a super ager, do this one thing. And it’s strength training. Are we at the risk of overpromising what strength training can do?
TSUI: I don’t think so. I do want to pull that apart a little bit by saying like, when you see the headlines that are like, live forever, if you wanna, you have to eat this much protein or you need to do this, and these are the five things you should be doing.
I hate that. I don’t like that messaging because it’s a secret, and it’s not a secret that you need to make your muscles strong to be able to do everything that you want to be doing as you get older. And that’s for all of us. And I also want it to feel for everyone that muscle is for you.
Like no matter what age you are, no matter what gender you are, no matter what your experience is with exercise or lifting weights, that it is something that all of us can be doing in some way to move our bodies, really, like also for joy. I don’t want to forget about the joy element because that’s what really movement is.
And we all need access to that.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
