Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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When Bonnie Tsui was growing up, her dad would often ask her to flex, to show him her muscles. Yes, he did. Why do you think he did that? He was a funny guy. I mean, he was, he still is a funny guy. And he was a funny guy.
He just saw the humor in everything. He would joke around with us. He'd walk by us, me and my brother, in the kitchen and just say, like, you know, make me a muscle. And so we would just put up our arms automatically and flex for him. And he would kind of make a big deal of squeezing our biceps and just, you know, and then demonstrating his own, you know, sort of quintessential flexed bicep pose and just laugh. I think he just wanted us to feel comfortable
Being strong and comfortable in her own body, it's a message that stayed with Bonnie throughout her life.
And it's a message that she's weaving throughout her new book on muscle, the stuff that moves us and why it matters. Bonnie is a journalist and bestselling author, and she's also a swimmer and a surfer. Her book dives deep into an exploration of strength and muscle. It's one of those everyday things that people take for granted and they think they understand.
But do they really? And in the inquiry, I found for myself how much I didn't know. And yet they're how we move, right? So they are the literal stuff of what moves us through the world. And that is true for the tiniest flea to the biggest whale and us in between. And so I saw it as a very rich story.
topic to explore across many disciplines from science and culture and literature and just this personal through line of being raised by a father who was both an artist and a martial artist and
And for me, art and exercise always went hand in hand in my upbringing. And I think a lot of people have made a separation between muscle and art and muscle and mind and essentially being strong and being smart, if we're being honest, right? But in your house growing up, that separation wasn't there, right?
Yeah, that's right. So my father was a professional artist throughout my childhood and still is an artist. And he was also a black belt in karate.
He practiced other martial arts and lifted weights and just was an all-around athlete. And we were brought up in that tradition in his studio. So his downstairs studio was both an art studio and an exercise studio. And that we would be immersed in paintbrushes and canvases. And right next to it would be a pile of free weights and the, you know, the bench, the weight bench.
And I think that just meant for me that muscles, actual muscles, in terms of like having a strong physical body and having this life of physicality was very normal. And also that my brother and I were brought up in the same way without regard for age or size or gender. And that art also, you know, the body was beautiful, but the body was beautiful because of what it could do.
And this was in the 80s, so not a time when a lot of people had weight studios in their house. Like I don't think we talked as much about lifting weights and doing that.
No, and I would say that weights and weightlifting were associated with a particular kind of body, you know, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, this is the age of all those action hero movies and magazines like Muscle and Fitness and bodybuilding competitions on TV, right? So that still has a very outsized influence on how we think about muscle and the body. I mean, if you asked...
20 people on the street, what they think of first when they think of muscle, chances are that that still comes up at the top of the list. But I think that's changing and that's changing in a way that is much more wide-reaching and far-ranging to a larger segment of the population. And that includes women and people who are older because now...
Yeah.
Muscle mass and muscle strength is even more important as we get older to health and cognitive health, which is so fascinating. And we know that to be true. In our language, we make connections between muscle and mind, right? We say, oh...
we have to stretch that muscle when we're trying a new skill, or we have to flex that muscle, or we say some skill atrophy, that kind of stuff, right? Yes. But what did you learn about the actual physical connection between muscle and mind? Oh, gosh, this is one of my biggest takeaways from this whole exploration of muscle was that I did not know that, I mean, obviously, most of us understand that muscle is
Skeletal muscle is the muscle that attaches to our bones and moves us around. It's our mode of locomotion, I guess, and that's sort of mechanical. But what I discovered and I didn't know before writing this book was that muscle is also an endocrine tissue. That means...
that it releases molecules, signaling molecules that travel all around the body and talk to other parts of our body, right? Including our brain. And so it's constantly doing this when we move. And when it
sends these messages to the brain, they can affect cognition, mood, and emotional behavior, right? So this is kind of like, I say this in the book, but I really like it. It's kind of like a love letter from your muscle to your brain when you exercise. And this kind of brain muscle crosstalk is what scientists call it. And these messenger molecules are doing all kinds of
Right. Which is sort of like...
The furthest thing in the 80s, if somebody had told me that. Oh my gosh, yes. You think of muscle heads and you're thinking that they have muscles actually for their brains, right? Or in lieu of a brain, I guess. Right, exactly. ♪
Where do muscles come from? Because obviously we have all kinds of different muscle in our body, heart muscle and twitch muscles. And do they all come from the same place? How do they know where they belong? So such a great question. So basic facts about muscle, you know, muscle 101. It's a tissue and it's made up of lots of little fibers, right? So it's the largest organ in your body and it makes up about 40% of your body weight. And it's a tissue that's made up of lots of little fibers, right?
And most of us know that there are three types of muscle. There's cardiac muscle, which is your heart muscle. Smooth muscle. And it's like muscles in your intestines or in your gut or in your blood vessels that kind of push muscles.
blood and food through your body and also sort of move things around in ways that you don't think about. And then the one we're probably most familiar with, skeletal muscle, which we control voluntarily and which allows us to move around in the world.
So for the most part, we're born with a set number of these fibers, these muscle fibers, and they grow bigger not by multiplying like the way we think of most cells doing, but the way muscle grows is it recruits a special stem cell, a muscle stem cell called the muscle satellite cell that contributes their nuclei to muscle growth and regeneration. So we...
know that muscle requires stress and strain to get bigger. You have to stress the muscles to do that. And how it does that is by recruiting these stem cells to contribute their nuclei to both repair the muscle fibers and also to get bigger by adding their nuclei to the mass.
And what I found so fascinating about muscle is this character trait to change, right? To be capable of change, to be one of the most adaptable tissues in the body. So what it really is doing is helping you to respond to your environment by, let's say, you are required to run long distances to get food, right? So your muscles...
your body responds that way. So it is using the food that you consume to help build that muscle and make it bigger and give you more endurance to do that. And then let's say you don't have to be so active anymore. Then they kind of shrink, they atrophy.
in response to the fact that you don't need to move as much and so conserve energy. Because muscles are very, what people say, calorically expensive. I mean, to maintain muscles requires a lot of energy. And what feeds our muscles? You know, there is so much information about that. And I think most people who are heavily into weightlifting talk about protein all day long. Yes.
But what are some of the basics of, yes, they do. What are some of the basics of really feeding your muscles? What do they need?
Well, obviously muscle is, you know, protein, so it does need protein to maintain it, but it's really energy, right? So energy is stored in the body in different ways. And, you know, fat is very efficient in storage. You know, your body stores fats for when you need it. So again, like imagine yourself as a creature roaming around the plains and you
You need energy stores for maybe when food isn't readily available. And so muscle is also a place for energy to be stored. And so muscle is used for locomotion. And so it demands more calories to feed it. But really, it's like you eat
food and then your body breaks it down. And it's all, there's a whole cascade of, you know, physiological processes that happen, but, you know, ATP is sort of like that energy source, you know, that we depend upon as like pure energy. And that sort of makes a reaction in the muscle that involves the breaking of bonds and like moving different proteins around. But it really is
that your movement depends upon the food you eat. And that includes protein, but not only protein. So really this obsession we have with protein is... Most doctors will tell you that you probably don't need as much as your reading that you need for the most part, unless you are a very active athlete and need to be performing at a certain level. And so you might need more protein than the average person. But it's really...
Everything in moderation, including moderation, is always the key here, I think, with food. Bonnie Tsui is a journalist and the author of On Muscle, The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. Coming up, we explore the connection between muscles and art. When the doors open and you enter, you have to run all the way through all the galleries and past everyone else to get to the Sistine Chapel. You'll have 10 minutes alone. That's still to come.
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This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking with journalist and author Bonnie Tsui about her new book, On Muscle, the stuff that moves us and why it matters.
Art plays a big role in your book because your dad is an artist. You grew up surrounded by art. How did you see muscle reflected in artwork? I think it was always present for me. And one of my father's favorite artists was Michelangelo. And when I was 12, it was the year that the Vatican completed its restoration of the Sistine Chapel building.
And my father took this opportunity to teach us, you know, to show us all these magazines and art films about this restoration and how to depict a body in this glow and robustness of life. Really how Michelangelo was able to make history.
his human figures so alive, right? And so part of that was, I mean, a large part of that rested on his foundation of anatomy and the study of anatomy. And both he and Leonardo da Vinci were, you know, they're two of the greatest Renaissance artists of the human body. And both of them were artists who
relied on anatomical dissection as part of their education and part of the understanding of how a body worked and was put together. And so that was something, you know, it had a foundation of science. It had a foundation of, like, this is how the body performs and what is underneath, you know, the surface. And with Michelangelo, he...
also had this way of portraying the body without regard for gender in terms of muscularity. So at the time, it was not uncommon for artists to use
and men, male models in the studio for every figure, including female figures, because it was very rare to have conditions in which a woman could model for you that were appropriate, right? So you look at these preparatory sketches that Michelangelo made for, say, the Libyan Sybil, which is this female figure on the ceiling, just so beautiful, so gorgeous, the shoulder and the back and turning and
And the preparatory drawings, these chalk drawings are of a male model. And yet on the ceiling, she is this beautiful, glowing female figure that retains the muscularity and yet is still very much a woman. And I think that to me was like an early
I guess, signal maybe that paired with this physical practice that my dad had us do in terms of sports and exercise, lifting weights and karate and swimming, that this was beauty. This was the female figure could be beautiful in muscularity, just like a male figure.
You went to see the Sistine Chapel. I did. As a student. I did. And you kind of made this mad dash to get there first, which you succeeded. How did you do that?
Well, it's so funny because hearing you say that made me realize that it was a physical mad dash to get to the place where I could witness the muscularity. So it was like that. I had a friend who had been there not too long before my visit, and he was an artist as well. And he said, this is what you have to do. When the doors open and you enter...
You have to run all the way through all the galleries and past everyone else to get to the Sistine Chapel. And you'll have 10 minutes alone in the chapel without the crowds before everyone else gets there. And so my friend...
And roommate at the time, Melissa and I, we waited, we followed instructions, the doors opened, we entered and we ran all the way. And when we got to the chapel, we walked in, it was like this hush, it was beautiful. And we walked in and I just lay down on the floor and looked up. And I just remember being so moved, the mere fact of being there.
moved to tears, moved to a sense of awe and wonder at, again, being physically in the place that meant so much to my dad, to my education in art and in the body. And I think about this often now. And I think about this sense that to be physically present somewhere matters, to be physically present in front of someone else and be there with them. I started writing this book
pretty deep in COVID still. It was 2021 I decided to write this book about muscle. And what struck me was how difficult it was to figure out how to write about muscle and physicality and being a witness to all of that without being able to be with people, without being able to observe and keenly use your senses to observe life. And I think that is a really important
tenet of my journalism and my writing in general. And so as the world opened up again, and to be able to spend time with people in person, to really depict these people, these scientists, these runners, these yogis, these power lifters in physical detail and in person was really meaningful to me.
And I wonder if your emotion at that moment was also tied to the fact that at this point, your relationship with your dad was strained and your parents had gotten divorced and things were challenging. Was it also that connection and the last connection that got to you in that moment? Oh, for sure. You know, I'd always had such a close relationship with my father growing up.
And then when my parents divorced and he just basically vanished from my life as a daily presence. And it had started before that when my parents separated. I think I've always spent my adult life kind of still chasing after that sense of closeness because he lives so far away. He lives in China and we don't see each other very often. And I struggle always to maintain a sense of connection to him that way.
feels real, feels true. And the practice of art, the practice of exercise, the practice of like being physically present in front of each other. I mean, that's just how he operates best, right? Like so many of us. And he's not a great phone companion or, you know, video chatter or even just like text messaging or emails. Like he's just, he's just best friends.
Yeah, yeah.
In the chapel there, you saw all this beauty created by an artist who had studied a lot of anatomy. And then you yourself visited an anatomy lab and you got to witness a dissection. So what was that like to kind of see the muscles really laid bare? It was extraordinary. I mean, I am not a person who is comfortable with that.
I'm not comfortable with being in the presence of a dead body. And I had to, I knew it was important to witness. I knew it was important. So dissection and human anatomical dissection in a medical context was something that once was very, like it was a public event. People would go and
see this happening. And of course, now it is absolutely not that. It's the opposite, that it's very private. It's the place where this takes place is really in very rarefied conditions in medical schools and the like. And it's not something that we as a culture these days are comfortable with. And yet there was something that I felt that I had to
experience myself, which was this reverence for the body, this amazing gift that someone gives to science, you know, to knowledge, um, you know, the pursuit of knowledge when they donate their body to, to a medical school for dissection purposes. And, um,
And I did this at UCSF, the University of California in San Francisco, which is one of the leading medical schools in the country. And I was able to observe a dissection and it was really, I was very grateful to the Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation and the anatomy departments for letting me do that. And
It was amazing. It was really amazing. What did you see that made it so fascinating? You know, what was it that you witnessed? I think just to understand how the body is so connected, right? So in the peeling back of the layers, in the study of anatomy is really like a sort of breaking down into parts so that you understand how the whole works together.
And I saw that. Bonnie observed the dissection of a shoulder. You know, I think the shoulder and the shoulder complex, I mean, there's so many muscles that work on this joint and it's very complicated. And in the dissection, you really see how all of these muscles are so overlapping and pulling in different directions and attaching to certain points on bones. And it's so complex. And also there's a word that describes this feathery,
to the texture of a muscle. You're imagining these fibers and it's called penation. And you can see that and you can see the fascia, which is basically the envelope that holds the muscle. And so the muscle is the contents, the letter of the envelope, and the fascia is the container. And so then the way the fascia allows these muscles to slide and move together is
in symphony, in the support of whole body movement that we rely on, again, so often taking for granted. Yeah.
Now when you go to swim, how do you think about that? Because as a swimmer, you're really relying so heavily on your shoulder. Oh my gosh, yes. And once you've seen that... And I'm thinking that it hurts. And I'm thinking that I must be doing something wrong if I'm pulling that it hurts. You know, the direction and maybe one muscle is working a little bit too hard, is pulling too hard, is doing too much of the work. And so I did start working with a trainer once.
And also talk to like a paddle coach about, you know, swimming and sort of like the best technique for, you know, for swimming and surfing and sort of this paddle technique with your arms to basically preserve the shoulder, you know, because I am getting older and I want to be able to do this in some much later life. I wanted to be able to do this for many, many more years to come. And in order to do that, you have to do it right. You have to be careful with,
technique and your movements and take care of your body. I mean, I would say certainly over the course of researching this book about muscle and then going to do the things that I love doing like surfing and swimming, I understand and value my body so much more for that.
Bonnie Tsui is a journalist and the bestselling author of Why We Swim. Her new book is called Unmuscle, The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. When we come back, we'll talk more about aging and our bodies. Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle, and that starts in your 30s. I hate to break it to you all, but... That's still to come on The Pulse.
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This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. My guest is Bonnie Tsui. We're talking about her new book on muscle, the stuff that moves us and why it matters. Now that you've learned so much about muscle and how our bodies work, how do you think about it now, especially as you get older? What do you want to do for your body? I think I want to pay attention to it. I think
One thing that we don't think about as much with the aging body is that you need to lift weights and you need to continue the strength training in order to have the muscle mass to support your overall health. And so, you know, this is something, again, that doctors and medicine is communicating more and more to the general public is
is that in order to age well, and this includes cognitive health, brain health, you have to be moving and you have to be doing work that stresses your muscles to maintain that muscle mass that you lose naturally as you get older. So in the same way that you lose bone mass as you get older, everyone is familiar with
osteoporosis and osteopenia, which is the age-related loss of bone. Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle. And that starts in your 30s. I hate to break it to you all, but it does. And so in order to support your physical health and brain health,
later in life, you really do have to commit yourself to doing some strength training and weight training throughout your adult life. And the thing is that doesn't, I know it sounds intimidating to many people because it's not something that they see themselves doing. But what I did realize over the course of reporting this book is that it doesn't have to be intimidating.
Because you can do many, many things. You just have to understand that to lift heavy really only means that you have to lift a weight or do some resistance, meaning you can use resistance bands or your own body weight to lift.
to the extent that it's hard for you. You're pushing your muscles to a point of what we call failure. And that's generally speaking like eight to 10 repetitions of a particular movement. But the flip side of that is that you do not have to spend a lot of time in the gym or with weights to do that. And so when a movement starts to get easier, you just add more weight. And so people do say, you know, it's easier to do this in a gym because there are many, many weights available to you. So like that you don't have to
keep acquiring new weights when it becomes easier for you to do a movement with a particular weight. But really it's what I'm telling people is
Something that is supportive for all kinds of activities, which is, you know, do it with a friend, do it with a buddy. You're accountable to each other. It makes it fun. It makes it social. Do it with someone, you know, when you're starting out, get a lesson with a trainer, you know, have some introduction to this so that you feel confident in your practice and in your movements because it doesn't take much to kind of get there.
And once you do, then you're feeling capable. You can do it yourself or you keep doing it with a friend because that makes it always more fun. Yes. And heavy, I mean, heavy is only heavy for you. It's relative. Sometimes that gets lost in that whole narrative. You don't have to be a strong man, strong woman, strong person. You don't have to be a bodybuilder. You just have to be strong for you. Yes. Yes.
You've written about the experience of going to the locker room at the place where you swim, where you do your labs. And I just love what you described there, which is just being around people of different ages, in this case, mostly older women who have a totally different relationship with their body. Why do you love it so much? I...
cherish my time in that locker room. Sort of backstory is that I, when I first moved back to Berkeley from San Francisco, I was mother of two young children. I had just had my second child and I was tired and I just did not feel like myself. And I just
Yeah.
And it's the same people. It's so wonderful. You know, I wave to Kathy every morning when I see her and I say hi to all the ladies. And it's this place of camaraderie. It's this place of community. It's a place of acceptance. Everybody is just there doing the work, you know, basically committing every day again to a practice that supports values.
their healthy bodies. And they're not always feeling great every day, just like the rest of us. But it is a triumph to get there. And the way they talk about it, it's full of joy. It's full of little barbed jokes and this comfort with being, again, naked in the space, which
You know, you don't often see naked bodies of all ages and older bodies very often, I don't think. And there's something to this, to seeing bodies on a continuum. And this is something that I also learned from the yoga teacher, Matthew Sanford, you know, which was like to view, you know, he's a pioneer in adaptive yoga for all kinds of bodies, disabled bodies due to injury or illness. And he,
he taught me that we all exist on this continuum. And so if we're lucky enough to live to an older age, we will experience what it is to be disabled, which just means you're not able to do the things that you used to do. And everyone exists on this continuum together, and we're always moving along it. We're always changing. And to kind of be able to extend to yourself and your body this grace, like,
And I think especially as women, we are...
We come into this world and then at a very young age, we start thinking about our body in terms of looks. What do I look like? What do I look like? If, you know, for athletes, it might be what can I do? What can I do? And then as we get older, it quickly becomes...
OMG, how do I hold on to my looks? Or I can't do it anymore. Exactly. How do I avoid this sagging part and that sagging part? So to see older people who are more just grateful for what their body can do and how their body functions and to give the body some grace and to say, hey, maybe today I can't do that, but maybe tomorrow I can. Yeah.
I think there is so much beauty in getting to that part a little earlier in life that you really, your body is this amazing machine that we almost never appreciate. Yes, I think that's exactly right. And to realize this a little earlier in life, as you say, is a gift because you realize
You see what's coming. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean it in a positive way. I mean it in a, you can see yourself in this whole world.
continuum of life and you are part of that and so because you're part of it because you're part of this community because you're understanding that you don't exist in a vacuum you kind of exist on this again like the spectrum continuum of yourself all these different versions of yourself and to be able to say i know i'll change we all do and to look at it as as
You know, it's not that you look at it neutrally, but you accept that it will happen. And you kind of try to figure out who is the person I want to be tomorrow. I think that's a really valuable lesson.
Bonnie Tsui is a journalist. Her new book is called On Muscle, The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and also the Commonwealth Fund. This podcast extra was produced by Lindsay Lizarski. Our engineers are Charlie Kyer and Diana Martinez. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.
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