Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  00:00

You’ve been told to walk more, to lose weight, to focus on cardio, but here’s what you likely haven’t been told, muscle is one of the most underappreciated systems in the body, and the consequences of ignoring it are showing up everywhere. Muscle supports your brain, helps regulate blood sugar and plays a critical role in whether you remain physically independent as you age. My guest today is MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS, author of stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. He spent years exploring how muscle has shaped culture, health and identity, and why it deserves a prominent place at the table in healthcare. Keep watching if you want to not only add years to your life, but more importantly, add life and strength to your years.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  00:52

MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS, welcome to the show. Thank you, Gabrielle

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  00:59

I have to say that you have written my new favorite book. Oh, and I was thrilled when you agreed to come on the show. This book is called Stronger, and it is the untold story of muscle in our lives.

Michael Joseph Gross  01:13

Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  01:15

This book does something that I’ve never seen. It brings history, the history of muscle, the history of movement, and it integrates science really well done. Thank you. Thank you. Tell me about why. Why this book?

Michael Joseph Gross  01:31

Think back to when we were in grade school. It starts really early. How we get our ideas about muscle. There are bigger kids and smaller kids. There are bullies and weaklings, there are jocks andeggheads, and we all just kind of take that as a given about life. But if you went back to ancient Greece, if you could talk to the poet who wrote Homer’s epics, the Odyssey and the Iliad and you asked them, what was more important, mind or body? They wouldn’t even understand the question. They didn’t even have words that would tell the difference between mind and body. The choice to see ourselves as split down the middle is that it comes from a history of choices that people have been making for 1000s of years, and those choices, in many ways, focused on muscle. In ancient Rome, doctors and trainers had a big fight over who would corner the market in what we now call healthcare, and the doctors who won that fight won it in large part by putting down athletes who trained to build mass, to build muscle. There was one Galen of Pergamon, and he said that athletes who trained to build mass were incapable of rational thought, he said that they actually smothered their souls with the slime of this muscle, right? And that kind of marked muscle as a locus of anxiety and marked it as something there was something wrong about building muscle that has, in a way, that has lasted right up until today. So I had an experience when I turned 40, of starting to train in a more serious way than I ever had before. And it really changed me, and I was fascinated by that. I wondered why I didn’t know more about muscle, and I went looking for a big book that could kind of help me understand muscle in all the ways that you just mentioned. I couldn’t find it, so I had to write it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  03:59

And to be fair, you are an acclaimed journalist and author. You have been contributing editor at Vanity Fair. You have contributed to the New York Times, GQ, the list goes on. You’ve been a very curious person, which is evident in this book. After you had this moment of understanding we had really missed the mark on skeletal muscle. How did you decide about the sections in this book as you began to formulate, there’s three big characters. There is this story that becomes interwoven. How did you begin to break that down and think about it?

Michael Joseph Gross  04:39

Most books about muscle tell you what to do, and this one’s different because it’s descriptive, it’s not prescriptive. So I knew from the beginning that my way into talking about muscle was going to be through individuals, really fascinating people. I knew that one of them had to be a doctor. Doctor. I knew that one of them had to be an ancient a scholar of ancient Greece in some way, because we get so many of our ideas about athletics and medicine from there. And I knew that at least one of them had to be really high level athlete. And so I found, I found these people. It took a long time hunting for them, but it’s just kind of like casting, and you find the right balance of characters, and then you let them, let them start playing on the page.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  05:34

How long did it take you to write this book?

Michael Joseph Gross  05:37

Eight years full time.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  05:39

Eight years full time, and for the listener or the viewer, to give you a perspective of how in depth this is on the history of muscle it is exactly that. There were many things that really struck me about this book. I would love for you to touch a little bit about the history of muscle performance, the idea of the gymnasium. I’m fascinated by the way that the ancient Greeks looked at skeletal muscle.

Michael Joseph Gross  06:10

The first thing to know about how ancient Greeks looked at skeletal muscle is to really sit back and take in the fact that they didn’t see it. Now, that sounds impossible, because you look at an ancient Greek sculpture, and to us, it seems that they’re obsessed with muscle, but it’s really the lines of articulation around muscle that they believe do the work of movement, and specifically the tendons. They thought that the fleshy part of muscle, the muscle bellies, the contractile tissue that we now know moves us. They thought that was just dumb stuff that was maybe for padding, maybe for insulation, like Aristotle thought that your glutes were a built-in bean bag chair. He called them useful for resting the body. It’s not until just before the classical period of Greece that scientists start to open up the human body that had been proscribed in Greece before, and they begin to see how muscles work. They know that somehow muscles are part of movement, but they believe that there is a portion of hot air that gets trapped at the body in birth, at birth, called pneuma. Pneuma Pneuma is the word for breath or wind from which we get pneumonia. So Pneuma is circulating in the body. And Pneuma basically blows up the muscles like a balloon and and then they deflate. And that is part of the process of of of muscle.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  08:01

This is crazy, the idea how wrong we got skeletal muscle.

Michael Joseph Gross  08:05

The next big beat in the story of discovering skeletal muscle is under the Roman Empire and the doctor Galen, he understands that muscle has to do with movement, but he still thinks that there is a mysterious substance, like a portion of hot air trapped in the body called Pneuma that causes us to move. And he says that the brain is completely in charge, and muscle is just something it uses. We don’t begin to understand that the contractile part of muscle actually moves us until the 17th century, and then we don’t really begin to understand how it’s integrated with the neurological system, how the brain and muscle are partners, not it’s not a hierarchical relationship until the late 19th, early 20th century, even though I don’t think we’ve accepted that yet, I think we’re still pretty intent on thinking the brain’s the boss and the muscle is always second fiddle.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  09:17

That’s really fascinating. Did they look at muscle as something different. I mean, there was we can think about words as words like victory. I know that that was something that you had wanted to put in the title before. Have we really changed the way that we have thought about muscle? Was it something to be revered back then and then transition to now? It’s okay. Well, you’re a knuckle dragger. Or just what do they say, all brains and no brawn, or all brawn and no brains.

Michael Joseph Gross  09:47

So Greeks were fascinated by muscle even before they knew what muscles did. They were running races at the Olympics for hundreds of years before they had any idea. Idea that muscles had to do with movement, okay, but we know that it’s muscles that are making the sprinters win the race. They believe that. They believe that strength is actually it’s not only something that an individual builds through training. It’s not only an individual accomplishment, it’s a collaboration with the gods you have to train, but then you also have to be given the gift of strength. And this is fascinating, the gift of strength, yeah, I mean, Greeks were as likely to talk about strength as something you receive, as to talk about strength as something that you have,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  10:46

That is an unusual way to frame it.

Michael Joseph Gross  10:50

But there is a connection between that and current physiological thinking in that there remain, there remains an element of mystery in performance, an element of unpredictability in performance that you see in something like the super compensation effect after a periodized training regimen. And Charles Stocking, who is one of the main characters in this book. He’s a classicist who worked his way through graduate school as a strength and conditioning coach for Bruins athletes at UCLA. He’s become the really, the world’s greatest expert on the Greek language of strength, and Charles says that he thinks the super compensation effect is a modern analog for Greeks description of great performances on the battlefield or in athletics as being a gift from Zeus. It’s, it’s something, it’s their way of explaining what we have come to understand as a physiological adaptation.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  12:14

What is super compensation the super compensation effect.

Michael Joseph Gross  12:19

Super compensation effect, just in simplest terms, is it’s the outcome of a certain kind of cyclical training. So you know, you can’t push harder and harder all the time. You’ve got to take a couple steps forward, couple steps back. Periodization, the many forms of it are ways of organizing our training to build up to a moment where we have a high level of performance. Just before we reach that highest level, we take a rest, and in that rest, we our bodies repair ourselves so that we can leap ahead of where we were before that rest began.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  13:03

And I have a quote from your book, and it’s Ancient Greeks considered strength, not mainly as a quote, an individual accomplishment based on individual effort, but as a paradoxical phenomenon that depended partly on what a person did and partly on what help and gifts the person received from the gods. That’s right, you know, I’m sure the listener, well, you guys better be interested in muscle, but really understanding we talk about it in terms as if we’ve always known it. This is the bicep. This is the quadricep. But very few of us, myself included, has have thought about the history and putting it into context of what was thought of it before we knew it was actin and myosin and that these muscle fibers and muscle bellies were attached to various parts of the body, and there’s a whole history of what we imagined it was.

Michael Joseph Gross  14:07

And let me give you a really concrete example of the gift and of strength in action as the best as we can tell, the very first Olympic event was called the Stadion. The stadion was the equivalent of the 200 meter sprint now. And the way the Stadion was set up, it started the Stadion was a race between two altars. The first one was an altar to a hero who was a human who lived a long time ago but was especially blessed by the gods. The other altar was to Zeus, the greatest of the gods. On the altar to Zeus, they had laid out their sacrifice to him, which was the best part of the bull, the fleshy thighs. Now this is a time when meat is not a part of anybody’s regular diet, so the whole community is there, and they’re looking forward to this feast on meat, which they never get to taste at the end of the day. Everybody’s watching this. The priest of Zeus is standing right by that altar, and he’s got in his hand a torch. And what the athletes are looking at as they’re getting ready for the race is the torch in that hand. Because what they want to do is be the first to get there, take the torch, light that meat on fire, and give everybody this just great gift they’ve been wanting for the whole for the whole four years. And you run faster if you’re trying to complete the sacrifice that brings your community together than if you’re just going for a run. And they all believe that the person who wins wins because Zeus gave them a very particular kind of strength called Kratos. Spell it, K, R, A, T, O, S and Kratos is only given by Zeus. It is the strength of winning.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  16:07

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Michael Joseph Gross  17:35

It is the strength of winning victory.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  17:39

I love that. That’s very different than how we look at it now. Yeah, it’s very disconnected. Did everybody participate in those kind of events? I mean, it seems very serious. And in the early part of your book, you’re you have a quote here that says it’s really a matter of life and death, that these athletic concepts, these athletic contests, they developed as sacrificial religious rituals, communal gatherings, to honor, to the gods as a matter of life and death.

Michael Joseph Gross  18:13

So, to the question of whether everybody participated. No. When we talk about ancient Greek athletes, we’re talking about elite males. In almost every case, Sparta was really the only place where young younger women, girls and young women would be trained as a regular part of their education. But that was largely for eugenic purposes, so that they would be strong. They thought that strong mothers would produce strong sons. They would be strong warriors. They were actually right, yes, yes, but, but that was really the main reason that women were allowed to train. It didn’t continue beyond marriage.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  19:00

Oh, really, they trained up until marriage, and then when they had their babies, they were able to take it easy. Interesting.

Michael Joseph Gross  19:08

Right, so we don’t know specifically whether they trained through pregnancy. That’s a great question. The historical record about Sparta is very sparse, and a lot of what we think we know about it is mythology, but the strictest historical readings make it clear that once women are either married or past childbearing age, training stopped for them.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  19:34

That’s fascinating. Do you know that our son’s name is Leonidas? After a famous Spartan. That’s a great choice. So we really he’s a he’s a wallflower, as you can imagine. But that is very fascinating that people would get together. And this is really in stark contrast to modern secondary lifestyles.

Michael Joseph Gross  19:56

Before we get too far away from athletics as a matter of life and death. I want to say what they meant by that. They believed that the competitions of athletes reenacted the stories of heroes, the life and death struggles of heroes like Hercules, who spent a lot of time in his labors fighting monsters, and if he didn’t kill the monster he himself was going to die. So they wrote poems after Olympic victories to celebrate the victor when he went back to his hometown. And this the poems would compare what the athlete did with something Hercules or another hero had done, and that comparison raised the stakes for everybody in how they saw these athletic attainments.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  20:53

It’s really it’s really fascinating. And you know, as I look forward into the book, there is chapter two,which is Break and Build. And it is, you know, raises this question about athletic training having to do with happiness and well being. You know, you talk about, there’s this myth of, you should probably say the name

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  21:19

Yeah, yeah. And this story, there’s this paradox it looks like is muscle, is this path to glory and also immortality?

Michael Joseph Gross  21:21

Cleobis and Biton,

Michael Joseph Gross  21:26

Yeah. Well, let me, can I tell you the story of Cleobis and Biton? So, it starts with a mother, and the mother is at home, and she’s getting ready to go to a sanctuary to celebrate a festival for a goddess. But the it’s getting late in the day, and the oxen who are supposed to pull her in the cart to the sanctuary, don’t show up, so she’s wondering what she’s going to do now. She’s got two sons, big strapping, champion athletes, and they get the idea that they’ll just put the oxes yoke on their own shoulders, and they will pull her in her wagon five whole miles to the sanctuary. So they do this. It’s a great feat. Everybody surrounds them, congratulating the woman for having such strong sons, congratulating the sons for doing such a great thing. And then the woman says a prayer to the Goddess, and she prays that they be given the greatest thing a man can can have. Now, the boys, they all they want to do after they’ve done what is basically a feat that you’d see in a modern strong man competition like the Arnold in Columbus. They just want to take a nap, so they lay down in the sanctuary, and then they die. Now in the first book of history, written in ancient Greek, the wisest man in Athens tells the story of Cleobis and Biton when he is asked about the greatest happiness he’s ever seen. And that kind of confuses the modern mind, right? What is happening in this story is that strength is being shown both as something that allows you to do good things for the people you love, but it also shows that sometimes transcendence comes at a great cost, sometimes that gift comes at a great cost. Greeks were much more comfortable living in paradoxes like that than we are.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  22:36

Meaning that there is this opportunity to strength, but the cost, you know, if they were given the greatest gift and then they die, that’s, you know, from my perspective, in this day and age, confusing, how can we or how do you think about that in the landscape of the end of the story?

Michael Joseph Gross  24:33

So what does athletics have to do with happiness and well being, we would all love it if there were a really simple and straight line between training and a good life. But sometimes it’s a crooked line. You have spoken about an injury that you had 10 years ago, and it’s something you still struggle with today, I had an injury 10 years ago that I still struggle with today. I herniated a disc inwhile I was dead lifting. But sometimes these crooked lines are also a gift. And I think the story of Cleobis and Biton kind of exaggerates that to its furthest extent. I mean, they didn’t herniate a disc or tear a hamstring. They died, but they became symbols of victory and of the gift of strength that we’re still talking about today.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  25:51

It’s fascinating. You know, another theme throughout the book is that physiological strength isn’t separated. There’s this spiritual aspect and this mental strength that’s very interconnected. Do you think that that is reflected back to us now?

Michael Joseph Gross  26:15

I think we are slowly working our way back to a more integrated sense of mental and muscular strength, mental and physical strength, but we’re still a long way from there. There are mind blowing discoveries about the intricate interconnections of the neurological and the muscular system. I mean, a lot of the gait cycle, a lot of how we walk doesn’t involve the brain at all. It’s just something that is created by signals that move between the muscles in our lower bodies and the lower part of our spinal cord. There’s the phenomenon of cross education, where if you injure yourself on one side, but you continue to train on the other side, you will substantially retain strength and mass on the injured side that’s doing nothing. Widen that up a little bit and look at medical research on how weight training effect affects mental health. And things start to get even realer and even more useful. We didn’t ever see there had never been a study of heavy weight training, of any kind of weight training as treatment for depression, until the one published in the late 90s. And there still haven’t been many, but what they found when doctors finally started using weight training to treat depression was that for most people, for about 75% of people, it was as effective as the most effective antidepressant drugs.

Michael Joseph Gross  28:18

I mean, that’s fascinating for the listener who’s really interested in mental health and emotional health and mood regulation, the fact that we can utilize our skeletal muscle to change not just our mind state, but our overall, just our overall well being from a mental standpoint, is extraordinary. The idea that muscle is medicine or movement is medicine is pretty profound. And you know your next chapter, which is Live and Die. And I think that you’d mentioned that this is many of the readers that there’s a passage in here that’s one of their favorites, and it’s this is the chapter that really focuses on the earliest athletic training manual, the, how do you say it so, this is the gymnasticus,

Michael Joseph Gross  29:06

Yes, gymnasticus.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  29:08

And it says that athletic training is a form of wisdom. What? What is meant by that? How is that translated?

Michael Joseph Gross  29:19

So, gymnos was the Greek word for naked. You know, that’s where we get the word gymnasium, because all training and competition was done fully in the nude.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  29:34

My husband was very excited about that. He was just like, Sign me up. Where can I go? I’m ready.

Michael Joseph Gross  29:40

So the gymnasticus, or gymnasticus, which was written by which was, which was written in the third century, AD, it’s the only Athletic Training Manual we have from the whole ancient world. Every other long piece of writing that solely focused on athletics has disappeared. But what the gymnastics starts out by saying and carries through all the way is that it says, let us consider that athletic training is a form of wisdom inferior to no other. So it’s putting it’s putting training on the level with music, with math, with navigation, with poetry, with all the other things that we take seriously. It’s saying you have to take it exactly that seriously. And then, but then most of what the gymnastic is focuses on is how bodies should look, and what it’s arguing for is a sense of symmetry. The symmetry is not always functional. It actually says that sometimes symmetry should be preferred to performance because it’s more noble.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  31:04

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Michael Joseph Gross  32:15

The gymnastics is an argument against the tetrads. The tetrads were an early form of what we now call periodized training. And to make its argument, the gymnasticus gives another really great story. There was a wrestler named Geranos. He was a great wrestler. He was an Olympic champion, and when he won at Olympia, he decided that he was going to go out and celebrate just he went on a total Bender, got drunk and stayed drunk for days, and when he finally showed up at the gym, his coach was really, really not happy. He decided he was going to teach the kid a lesson, and he said, you are going through with this workout no matter what. And Geranos tried really hard. And I realized Gabriel, the bodies are starting to pile up here because Geranos tried so hard that he died.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  33:16

Oh my gosh, so morbid.

Michael Joseph Gross  33:19

Yeah, yeah, but life and death stakes again, the reason that gymnastics tells this story is that to draw a line between what’s good training and what’s bad training. Bad training is training by prescription. Good training is choosing exercises all improvised for the right time. So, what the gymnasticus is saying is that any training plan, no matter how scientifically valid has to be, has to take second. Any training plan, no matter how scientifically valid, has to give way before the realities of our own bodies on a given day.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  34:12

You know, it’s again, the history of muscle, and right now we’ve been talking about it from this historical perspective of ancient Greeks, but if we were to look at where we are now, I’m curious, as if you agree with this, that strength training and muscle is really been about men, from a historical perspective, the strength and muscle seems to be aside from the women that trained at Sparta to make better, stronger babies, which I fully believe. It’s really focused on our male counterparts. Is that, in fact. Impact, what the history shows, and how do we then move forward to some of the origin stories about strength in women, because you have a very amazing character in your book. And character, she’s a real person, Jan Todd, one of the strongest women in history,

Michael Joseph Gross  35:20

As a way into talking about Jan Todd, I want to ask, What do you deadlift?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  35:25

Well, I have a two torn hamstring, but easily, I don’t know, 200 some pounds, probably. And what do you weigh? 108 Okay, probably lift more than that. Probably deadlift a little bit more than that. But yeah,

Michael Joseph Gross  35:42

So, I want to tell you a story about how that is both a life changing feat and a world changing feat. Come with me to 1973 and let’s go to a really heavy duty, grungy gym in Austin called the Texas Athletic Club. Now, like most gyms at the time, it is pretty much an all male space and young married couple who come in, Terry and Jan, Todd and Jan looks around and she realizes there’s only one other woman in this whole gym, Jan’s just there to keep her husband company. She thinks maybe she’ll lift some light weights. Maybe it’ll make her posture a little better. But she looks over at this women woman, and she sees her lifting really heavy weight. The woman is aboutwhat you weigh. She’s 115 pounds, and she builds up in the deadlift to about what you lift about 225 pounds. And Jan just thinks it’s like a religious revelation. She has never seen a woman exert great force by means of muscle before, because she grew up at a time when, as she says, girls didn’t play sport and girls didn’t try hard, but in that day at the gym, she says she wants to try it. She builds up to that same amount of weight. She realizes she has a gift for this, and then she asks her husband, who just happens to be, happens to have been the first US Men’s power lifting champion. Do you think I might be able to go further if I tried this? Now, he doesn’t really know women who train with heavy weights either, because there are so few of them at the time, so wild. And he says, let’s try it. So it’s really Jan Todd 18 months later, just 18 months later, earns her first entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. She breaks a record in the women’s deadlift that had stood for 50 years. And that is the start of 10 years of being called the strongest woman in the world by Guinness and breaking one record after another. But one of the most important things about this story, I think, is that it shows how women get stronger when they see other women getting stronger. There are all kinds of barriers that Jan Todd had to overcome. She had to get access to gyms. She had to overcome the prejudices of people in her life, who believed that lifting weights was going to harm her body? One of them even said, If you keep dead lifting, your uterus will fall out. But she she she also heard that she also just had to overcome the the isolation of not knowing other women who did this, and it was building those relationships she eventually it was because of Jan in large part that the first women’s power lifting competition finally happened in 1977 She then took over administration of the sport and coaching of the sport, and she she created a space for more women to be able to get stronger.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  39:34

That is, it’s beautiful, and I can only imagine what the societal pushback was for her. Think about it. You’ve got Arnold Schwarzenegger. You have Lou Ferrigno. What’s up? Lou down there, Venice, you know, in Venice Muscle Beach, you look at that old footage, it is all men. And then you’ve got the two women that Arnold, you know, like, Hey baby, puts. On his shoulders. You don’t ever, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a female training in that in any of those films. I mean, at least not that I recognize how was she or did she talk to you about the desire to continue. I mean, that is if we were to put ourselves in that situation or position, doing something that nobody I mean, kind of like my friend, Danica. Danica Patrick, when there were really no other female race car drivers, do you think that there was a big societal pushback on that kind of behavior?

Michael Joseph Gross  40:40

Jan kept a scrapbook of clippings

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  40:43

My kind of girl,

Michael Joseph Gross  40:46

And when I would sit and go through that with her, I was just shocked by some of the stuff that reporters would say. I mean, a reporter from the big Toronto paper said I had to see the World’s Strongest Woman was she some kind of galumphing elephant. But one of the things that made Jan Todd unusual was that she was a very conventionally feminine and conventionally beautiful woman, and so and one of the things that made the other woman she met in that in that Texas gym on the first day, unusual was that she was conventionally feminine and beautiful. Like a lot of women, Jan had this fear that lifting heavy weights, that doing really hard things was dangerous was a threat to her femininity, but because she found a way of continuing to be, continuing to fulfill her own standards of beauty as she did this, others saw her the same way, and that that helped her go on. But really the the main breakthrough moment for her with that was not meeting another woman who was live. It was having an encounter with a woman who was long dead.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  42:21

At the time, Jan seemed to feel as if she was on an island, and rightly so. There probably were not a lot of women that we know of, but in retrospect, was that true? Were there really only a few women lifting weights?

Michael Joseph Gross  42:36

At that time, there were really only a few women lifting weights, but much earlier, Jan eventually discovered it had been much more common in the Victorian era. If you can believe it, I cannot, a lot of women were lifting heavy weights. After Jan retired as a competitive athlete, she decided to get her PhD, and she started looking at the strong women from the 19th century who she called her athletic foremothers. She wondered what their lives were like. She knew that those strong women had been like pioneers and made her life possible, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know how that happened. So she dug even a little deeper, and she found that, starting in the 19th century, in the early 19th century, there were gyms on both sides of the Atlantic, where women were doing things like overhand chin ups they were doing they were doing dips between parallel bars. And there was a doctor in Boston named George Barker Winship who had a practice of what we might call muscle centric medicine. He believed that strength was health, and he actually had a special clinic, a special sub clinic in his clinic for ladies, where they would do something like a heavy partial deadlift. And he wasn’t the only one he had competition from a guy who created health lift parlors. These were some of the first chain gems. There were four or five of these in New York City, just on Broadway alone in 1871 and you can see pictures of women in their bustles and corsets walking in there and doing these heavy, partial dead lifts. It was advertised, in part, as something that would help with making pregnancy easier, help with true labor, true easier. That’s right. But then what happened was George. Parker Winship died early of a stroke. He was in his 40s, and people took that as a sign, because he was so dominant as a symbol of lifting, they took it as a sign that lifting itself was dangerous. And within a couple years, all those health health lift parlors closed, and it really wasn’t until the later 20th century that there started to be a little more of a movement toward lifting for women.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  45:33

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Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  47:08

That’s so sad to think that just because this person who led the movie obviously had some genetic predisposition for cardiovascular disease, his death just changed generations.

Michael Joseph Gross  47:22

But it shows you the power of examples in strength training. You know, this is something that comes up over and over in the history of muscle and of strength, that people look for others that they can identify with, not necessarily to build themselves up in exactly the same way, like a role model, but more as a sort of there’s a type of example that’s more of a form of companionship. You know you you become the people you hang out with. Is, is a saying in some gyms I’ve been part of, and you have to find those examples of strength in order to get strong in your own life.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  48:13

That so far, I mean, I find this conversation really fascinating, but so far, that’s my favorite aspect, and it was one of my favorite aspects of the book, this idea that women were doing it, and you would have never thought in the Victorian age, and then it stopped.

Michael Joseph Gross  48:32

But it is part of women’s cultural history, and I think now as women are coming into gyms more, although the statistics on women’s participation in strength training are still really discouraging,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  48:50

What do you mean by that?

Michael Joseph Gross  48:52

I mean men are still much more likely to lift weights than women, according to one of the most recent publications on this. At any given day, 70% of the people in gyms are men, but strength training is a part of women’s cultural history. It’s not something that they it’s not strength training is part of women’s cultural history. Strength training is not something that women need to feel like aliens about.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  49:34

That makes sense. And it’s something that what I’m hearing you say that we’ve been doing for a long time, and that we don’t even know that we’ve been doing for a long time. That’s right, which is extraordinary to think about, as this cultural narrative shifts in 100 years, people are going to look back and tell the story of stronger and tell the story about how muscle reemerged as this organ of longevity and really reinvigorated, I think, a society and hopefully. Have you know, hopefully the message has global impact, because it’s really one of strength. And you know, when we look out now, and part of your book also recognizes female athletes, do you think that there is a cultural shift happening?

Michael Joseph Gross  50:19

There is a shift. Sociologists who look at sociologists who spend time with female athletes, report that there is a lot less consternation, a lot more confidence and comfort among female athletes. There’s a great study of a soccer team where there’s a very powerful center forward whose name is Sharon. They nicknamed her big bird because she just gets out in front and and really saves the day on many games. And she’s able to do that because of her her strength and her size. She celebrates that. Her classmates celebrate that. But at the same time, you still have women on that very same team who are subverting their own strength training by doing extra cardio or skipping some of their lifting days because they don’t like how their thighs get big, and they’re afraid that it will make them less attractive to men.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  51:35

And I don’t think that we’re seeing that any any longer also fast forwarded this idea of aging, and you mentioned sarcopenia again, this book, sarcopenia again, this book is fascinating because it really does a historical perspective. Shows a historical perspective about muscle, but also a scientific perspective. And I would argue that if we want to age well, we have to recognize that it starts early, but there’s also no time that is too late to begin training.

Michael Joseph Gross  52:10

Absolutely.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  52:12

I would love for you to share some of the things, some of the surprising scientific evidence that you found as you were doing investigative journalism for this book.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  52:21

They really believed that?

Michael Joseph Gross  52:21

Well, one of the things that really blew the top of my head off was a study that ended up getting published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990. The title is strength training, high intensity strength training in nonagenarians. It sounds like near future science fiction, right? It all happened because there was a young woman who had gone to work in a lab in Boston. She’d never lifted weights before. She’d in medical school. She had never taken a class on exercise, but she happens to land in this lab right around the time when there’s another guy who, because he grew up playing basketball, because he liked to lift weights, had suggested, Why don’t we do some kind of study of weight training, in addition To all this study of aerobics that we’re doing, and he worked with a group of men in their 60s. In a very short time, he doubled the strength of their quadriceps, tripled the strength of their hamstrings, and this is at a time when it was just settled scientific knowledge in medicine that it was too late to build muscle in your 50s and 60s.

Michael Joseph Gross  52:45

They really believed that, and they believed that any increase in strength was solely owing to neural adaptations. So he shows that’s just not true. This young woman arrives in the lab. She looks at that and she just says, big deal. Like these guys are young, they don’t have any real problem with function. Why don’t we see what would happen if we gave this to the people who need it most. So she went to a nursing home that was called the Hebrew rehabilitation center for aged they nicknamed it inside the nursing home Hebrew rehab for short. And Hebrew rehab was full of Holocaust survivors. It was full of people who had lived through the Depression. This was not a generation that had grown up exercising, and so once they reached their 80s and 90s, they’re in really bad shape. They i. Uh, she she finds a group of nine or 10 of them, and most of them are in wheelchairs or walking with walkers, if they’re lucky enough to be able to walk again, very short time, very simple program, just doing knee extension extension. And she increases their strength so much that some of them are able to walk without their canes or walkers. They open up a whole new way of seeing muscle and aging that then leads to all the research that makes the practice of Geriatrics the way you’ve learned it possible.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  55:49

Yeah, I mean, it’s really striking, this idea of aging, what we can do about it, where muscle is. And, you know, you hear a lot about this idea that walking and just moving is going to be enough, and I just don’t see that reflected in the evidence. We do have to focus on strength, because it doesn’t happen by accident.

Michael Joseph Gross  56:13

Oh, the research is very clear that walking and just general physical activity do not preserve mass and strength. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  56:23

and people get, from what I see, at least online, very upset about that, and what, in part, I believe that you’re doing in this book is re examining the past so that we have a better future. Yes, because if we do not recognize and look backwards, we will repeat the same things. And that’s really what I’m seeing. That you’re doing, is exposing where we come from and potentially where we’re going, so that we don’t revert back to the same kind of behaviors that have seemed to follow us like sedentary behavior, misunderstanding muscle, thinking that it’s only about strength versus vitality and and really strength as a privilege. Would you? Would you agree with that, that strength is a privilege? Yeah, it’s not a luxury. It’s a responsibility.

Michael Joseph Gross  57:19

Yes, it is a responsibility right now, unfortunately, the the social reality is that it is a luxury. I mean, the people who are most likely to do strength training are the people who have college degrees or the people who have more money, and there’s just no encouragement. There’s no access. There are no systems set up to help most of our population learn this. There are so many things that could be done to change that I mean, medical schools really need to open up the curriculum to include exercise and to weight strength training equally with aerobic exercise in in how they teach about exercise, nursing homes need to have leg press machines. I mean, that would be incredible. Medicare needs to start reimbursing to have an exercise physiologist teach us how to exercise on the medical school board exams, there need to be exercise focused questions, because if there aren’t, there’s no practical reason for doctors to learn this. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  58:34

also, muscle is an organ system. Yes, just like you take a cardiology exam, you take a pulmonary exam. When you’re in medical school, you’re learning all of these organ systems. Why would you not learn muscle?

Michael Joseph Gross  58:50

But muscle, even by many doctors, is still viewed as something superficial. Go back to Aerobics, that book by Ken Cooper that was mega bestseller, 10s of millions, maybe even 100 million copies sold, and he says that muscular exercise is like just putting a paint job on a car that actually needs An engine overhaul like so informed muscle is so much more than a style choice. But you hear people say, I don’t care about my muscles, which is insanity. You would never hear somebody say, I don’t care about my pancreas. I don’t care about my liver.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  59:36

That’s absolutely true. You’d mentioned nursing homes, and there is a Center for Strong Medicine, which I did was totally unaware of until now, or reading your book actually, in Sydney, I’d love for you to highlight how perhaps other countries or how they are doing it in other areas.

Michael Joseph Gross  59:56

Well, let’s just talk about Australia. And let’s just talk about the Center for strong medicine, because that’s a whole world in itself. And speaking of examples, it’s a great example of what medical care could look like. Maria Fiatarone Singh, who is the doctor who did those first breakthrough studies of high intensity strength training for nonagenarians. She and her husband, Nalin Singh, did the very first study of weight training for treatment of depression. Then they moved to Australia, and they decided that they were going to open a clinic where they would implement the research they had done in clinical care so every single patient who comes to this doctor gets a prescription for weight training that is targeted as treatment for whatever chronic diseases they have, like somebody with depression actually needs to lift weights more frequently than somebody who doesn’t have it like, just like somebody with diabetes needs to lift more frequently than somebody who doesn’t. So it’s not just saying lift weights. It’s saying here is the dose, here is the timing. And I spent about a week inside this clinic, just sitting with the doctor, listening to all of the patients stories. It was amazing. There was one man who had come in he was really struggling with depression. I talked to him about I said, What did your body feel like when you were depressed before you started lifting, and then what did it feel like when you lifted and when your depression went away? And he said, before I was just like water. He said I was just I was just soft and flowing, and I didn’t feel solid, and now I feel like I’m a rock in the stream.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:01:55

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Michael Joseph Gross  1:03:32

The other great thing that happens at the Center for strong medicine is that little muscles get big attention. You know, triceps are one of the most important muscles for our long term well being, because triceps do so much to help us be able to get up from a chair to be able to I saw a man at the center for strong medicine. In the center for strong medicine has a 2000 square foot gym in the middle of it. That is the biggest part of this clinic. There are like, 30 machines, 30 Kaiser machines there. And I saw a guy on the triceps push down, and I went over and I said, What? What makes you do this? And he said, Get off the bloody toilet. And well, said, like I couldn’t, I couldn’t understand. And, and he said, he said, triceps are what allow me to get through the world like i He has been on Lipitor, a statin. It’s one of the most common drugs, and he just had the bad luck to have one of the rare side effects of Lipitor, which was a disease that just attacked his muscles and made them atrophy almost in. Nothing. So he came to this doctor, no other doctor had been able to help him, because no other doctor had even thought to use exercise to treat him. But at the Center for strong medicine, the sings said, we’re going to even though it looks like you don’t have any muscles, they’re still there, and we’re going to wake them up. They gave him this prescription, and he was able to start making his way around the world again.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:05:33

The title, the subtitle, stronger and it’s untold, is in the subtitle, the untold story of muscles, the untold story of muscle in our lives. What do you think is the most important aspect of what is untold? Which part do you think is untold? I mean, clearly the whole thing has not ever been put together in a manner like this. It just doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen a book like this. It took you eight years to do it, and within those eight years, I can only imagine that you kept you kept coming up with things that he thought, nobody knows this. I’ve never heard this. What was the most untold aspect of this book.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:06:29

The most amazing thing about muscle is that it is what modulates our power to act upon the world. Without muscle, we can’t be the people we want to be. We can’t be with the people we want to be with. We can’t get up and move around the world on our own steam. But muscle is also so much more than that, and when you start to understand the central role it plays in our metabolism and in our bone health and in our mental health, it just becomes kind of mind blowing we’ve been treating muscle like it’s mainly an aspect of how we look, but it is at the core of who we are.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:07:35

Yeah, you’re doing a tremendous job at really reframing the conversation. I hope everybody listening picks up a copy of this book. I think that it is transformative to understand where we came from, and you mentioned something that I also had not thought of before, that even really the scientific language needs updating. Can you share a little bit more about what your perspective is on that?

Michael Joseph Gross  1:08:06

I’ll start with another story.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:08:07

I love stories.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:08:10

It’s 1944 toward the end of World War Two, and there’s an Army Hospital in Chicago that’s just filling up with wounded soldiers, and the orthopedic department there just can’t get them out fast enough because there are more wounded soldiers coming in. So a doctor who grew up lifting weights decides that he’s going to try a rehab program that is based on lifting heavy weights relative to a person’s tested maximal strength, so 80% of one repetition maximum. And this is at a time when most physical therapy textbooks say muscles should never be injured. Muscles should never be exercised beyond a point of moderate fatigue. So he is completely throwing out the rule book. He is going rogue by doing this. And it works. I mean, people, the other doctors, look down on him. He says that because of bodybuilders, most people, especially doctors, are just bewildered and repulsed by training to build muscle. But he shows that it works. It works so well that the whole US Army system adopts his technique. But in the course of that happening, he makes a discovery that figuring out how to solve the problem is just half the battle. You also have to figure out how to talk about the problem. And he made a big mistake at the beginning of his journey here by a. Calling what he was doing heavy resistance exercise. Now, every other doctor who heard him say that just had a kind of allergic response, and because they thought heavyweight training, they thought big guys, they thought bodybuilders. And he he took this problem to his wife, and they had a long talk about it, and they decided to come up with another term, and they called it progressive resistance training. So the shift there is a shift from challenge, heavy resistance training to invitation, progressive resistance training, and that is what opens the door and makes all kinds of people be able to start imagining themselves lift weights. And he does experiments with women and with adolescents, and he keeps finding that this works. He uses it to treat polio, and others do and over and over, while I was researching this book, I would discover that the scientific breakthroughs were accompanied by revolutions in language. When Maria Fiat Aroni Singh did her early studies of heavy weight training in nursing homes, she worked with a colleague, Evelyn O’Neill, who did most of the training. Evelyn O’Neill was a 30 year old who had never really exercised. She had never lifted weights. She was just coming to this totally blank and it allowed her to find a new way of talking about heavy weight training to old people like you can’t tell a 90 year old no pain, no gain, because they’re in so much pain already. So she said, instead of pain, we always talked about soreness. She said, instead of talking about something being hard, a lift, an effort being hard, we talked about it being challenging. And she said that to learn about the cyclical nature of strength, essentially, you know, like periodization that we were talking about earlier, she learned to say, life is life has ups and downs, and you’re gonna you’re gonna be weak one day and you’re gonna be strong the next day, but you can always know that if you rest a little bit, but keep doing what you can do, your strength is gonna come back.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:12:51

It is an entire mental shift, I think, for people, right? You spent quite a bit of time, almost a decade, actually researching this full time, which is truly noble. What has to happen for us to move the needle culturally? You’ve gone back in history to see what happened to allow things to take hold from a cultural perspective. Again, I don’t think anyone has studied this more, from where we are now to where you think. And again, this is your opinion. So I want to open the floor up to your opinion, because you’ve done such an amazing job at reporting and really investigating all this. Where do you think we need to go. And I’m curious as to is there, is there a language shift that we have to have to really move the needle forward

Michael Joseph Gross  1:13:52

in terms of language,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:13:54

or in terms of anything, what do we what do we have to do to create a strong culture again?

Michael Joseph Gross  1:14:01

I think it needs to start with our kids. I think we need to really normalize strength training, thinking about being strong, thinking about our muscles, for all of our kids, not just the athletes, not just the big kids, not just the boys. And in fact, really emphasize for the people who don’t look strong, who don’t seem like they have the greatest potential for strength that they do, because, because there’s a lot of research showing that sarcopenia age related muscle loss that can just devastate us in our later years actually starts in childhood, and weakness in adolescence is the strongest predictor of disability in adulthood, according to a study of like a million Swedish soldiers that’s been going on for longitudinal study that’s been going on for years. So if we can build a really positive sense of strength and muscle into childhood and adolescence, that is going to get the ball rolling, but at the same time, we can’t let go. We can’t give up on old people and the people who have the knowledge and the practices of strength training right now need to be sharing those I don’t know why there’s not some kind of Peace Corps, for for for training. I mean, I don’t know why the big gym chains don’t create some kind of buddy system. I mean, wouldn’t you be willing to do a workout every week, or every two weeks with with an 80 year old who can’t find a way around the gym.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:16:03

I’m always down. I’m always down. And I mean, my parents, when they’re here, the deal is we’re going to train, yeah, and they love it, yeah. I mean, although my dad’s a little dangerous, because he will not quit. You just he was a wrestler in college. I was kept on the wrestling team at Penn, and you just drop him in there, and that guy has no quit at all. Cold plunge, Sign me up. Sled pushes, I’m in, dad. Just chill a little. But I agree with you. And then I…What is the answer? Because you, you know, during this conversation, you really made me think about my own messaging as you were sitting there talking, because I am the kind of girl that’s no pain, no gain. Don’t break rule number one, let’s go. And maybe that has to be really re evaluated.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:16:55

So, I’m going to give you a word for that. It’s Kairos. Go back to the gymnasticus, that story about the wrestler, he died, and then, then the gymnasticus says it’s because he was just trying to keep up with the program instead of doing exercise all improvised for the right time. The word for time there is Kairos and Charles Stocking, who translated the gymnasticus, says that that is a hard word to translate, but it really means doing the right thing at the right time.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:17:40

Discernment.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:17:41

That’s right. That’s right. So we need to give ourselves some grace. We need to give other people some grace. It doesn’t mean take it easy all the time. It means, I mean, you’ve learned about this through your own injury.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:18:00

Yeah, I’ve torn both hamstrings, and again, that was 10 years ago, and I decide to go do something fun, and then I re hurt myself. I mean, it’s just certainly a cycle. How do we how do we take history and move it forward? How do we go back where you know you and I are, if we’re alive in 100 years, which, gosh, hope they have really good Botox. But if they don’t, how do we look back? And the next MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS, who writes the book saying, Okay, here’s the history of what we did. And every 100 years, how do we say, You know what? They got it right?

Michael Joseph Gross  1:18:37

Well, I hope they’ll look back and they’ll say medical schools started teaching about exercise. Medical boards started putting questions about exercise on their exams. Nursing Homes started putting leg press machines and other actual, real strength training equipment in their in their PT rooms. Medicare and insurance started reimbursing to teach people to exercise, and schools started to really get serious about including everybody from the beginning in thinking about themselves as a gym. Person 100 years from now, everybody is a gym person, because everybody is a gym person even now, even though they might not know it yet, 100 years from now, though that’s set in so much that lifting weights is just as normal as brushing your teeth.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:19:39

Wow. Think about what that would look like. Do you think we have a chance at that? Do you honestly think we have a chance at that, that I wake up, I brush my hair, brush my teeth, put on deodorant, which we need certain family members to also do that don’t and then hit some push ups and swing a couple kettlebells, have breakfast, and off we go.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:19:58

So I’ll answer your question. With a question, 25 years ago, would you ever have believed it if somebody told you that in 2025 you would be spending at least an hour a day looking at a little machine that you held in your hand, mostly while sitting on your butt, and that most of your social life and much of your professional life would be happening through this thing. I mean, we’ve all made time in the last few years to spend time on social media. We can make time to work out.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:20:42

I love that I truly do, and Michael, what you are doing, I have so much respect for and I really hope this podcast brings visibility to your work and to this book, which stronger? Where can people get it?

Michael Joseph Gross  1:21:00

Any bookstore, any online bookseller, it’s it’s everywhere.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:21:07

It is everywhere. And if you are listening to this podcast, this is probably one of the more important podcasts that I’ve done it. And by the way, I believe all of my podcasts are important because I’m so particular, and the team is so particular about who we bring on. This book is extraordinary. It is unique. It is historical. And there are not many books that I think can pivot the way that the culture sees something. I think that this is one of those books. Thank you. You have my absolute endorsement. If you are a friend of mine listening to this podcast and would like to connect with Michael, please, let’s do that, and I will make that introduction, because I think that everybody needs to hear what you have to say. So thank you so much for coming on and being a guest on the show.

Michael Joseph Gross  1:21:57

Thank you, Gabrielle

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon  1:21:59

If today’s conversation with Michael Joseph Gross challenged the way you think about muscle, what it’s for, and who it’s for, and why it matters. You are not alone. Being strong isn’t just a book about fitness. It’s a cultural reframe of how we see strength across age, gender, medicine and society, the idea the idea that muscle is only for athletes or esthetics, outdated, and as you heard today, muscle is medicine. It’s autonomy, it’s memory, it’s mood, it’s movement. When you build muscle, you’re not just lifting weight, you’re lifting your capacity to live, to connect and to shape your world. If you’re inspired to take action, start by rethinking about your own definition of strength. Like and subscribe and we’ll see you next week. And as always, stay forever strong you.