The Life-Changing Power of Lifting Weights
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This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.

In the 1930s, a teenager named Thomas DeLorme was laid up in his bedroom in Birmingham, Alabama. He had rheumatic fever, an infection believed to weaken the heart. So doctors told him that he had to get in bed and stay there and not do anything for four whole months. This is author and journalist Michael Joseph Gross. And like any teenage boy, sort of

going crazy, being cooped up for that long, his imagination started going. And what was fueling his imagination was reading what was then a new magazine. The magazine was called Strength and Health.

And it was a muscle magazine that was full of tips about training and stories about legendary strongmen. One of the stories was about Milo of Croton, a Greek wrestler and one of the most celebrated athletes of antiquity. There was a legend about Milo.

said that he built his enormous strength by picking up a calf every day until that calf grew into a bull. This is an ancient myth, but it illustrated a truth to Thomas de Lorme. The fact that to build

build strength, you need to train by lifting increasingly heavy loads. Michael writes about all this in his new book, Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. So once DeLorme got clearance from his doctors to get out of bed, he was unstoppable. He wanted to be like Milo. He started going to junkyards and collecting spare parts, and he took...

train wheels and an axle, and he made himself a barbell, and he made himself really strong. Thomas DeLorme went on to medical school, and he became a doctor for the U.S. Army at a military hospital in Chicago in 1944, right as World War II was coming to an end.

and the hospital was overwhelmed. And soldiers keep coming in wounded, just filling up the beds. The orthopedic surgeons who are repairing their injured legs can't get them to heal fast enough to get out of there to make room for more patients.

And so Dr. DeLorme has an idea. Maybe he can apply what he learned about heavy weightlifting to the work of healing these patients and see what happens.

Now, this is completely against conventional wisdom. The thinking back then was that with physical therapy, muscles should never be worked beyond a point of moderate fatigue. But DeLorme has a different idea. He first tests people's maximum strength and then has them start lifting weights at about 80% of that.

From the beginning of applying three sets of ten of heavy weightlifting, this works so well that people are back up on their feet faster than they've ever been. The whole U.S. Army system adopts this technique, and then it starts to go out into the world.

Weight training can aid recovery. Strength can be built and rebuilt. Those were revolutionary concepts, but it would take many more decades for DeLorme's ideas to really take flight.

For a long time, weightlifting was relegated to the realm of muscle heads and Conan the Barbarian types. Until more recently, when it started to be seen as a life-changing practice by people who want to be strong and help their bodies thrive for decades to come. There's also a lot of new research coming out about the many benefits of lifting weights.

It actually promotes brain function and so much more. On this episode, lifting weights and how it supports health and longevity. Let's stick with Michael Joseph Gross and his new book, Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. Where did the earlier ideas about muscle come from? That you shouldn't, you know, overdo it. That if you're already not feeling good, you should rest and then rest some more. It goes back to...

The Roman Empire, in fact. When arguably the most famous doctor in history, Galen of Pergamon, who, among other things, was the personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Galen was...

trying to win a turf war over the bodies of young ancient Roman men in Roman schools, gymnasium schools, based on a Greek idea of education. Galen was advocating for exercise in moderation. Trainers were pushing for excellence. And

Galen, in his debates with trainers, would often point to what we would now call big muscular athletes, the athletes who trained to build mass. And he would say that they were actually building so much mass that they were smothering their souls. They were making it impossible to think and that they were becoming like animals. And so this myth...

that building mass and building strength are inherently dangerous, and also that they are inherently damaging to our mental or spiritual selves, just got taken up as something in the water. It got mistaken for common sense.

And it's funny because as you were talking, I was trying to think back to my younger years and teenage years, and I certainly bought into that. Like if I saw a big bulky dude with lots of muscles, I have to admit that I probably thought like, oh, that guy is dumb.

That was totally in the water. Like the Schwarzenegger types did not appeal to me at all because I thought if you're going to be smart, you're not going to be spending time in the gym and worried about, you know, lifting weights. And it's really funny because if you sort of strip that to the beams and consider it as a biological statement, it's

utter hogwash. The muscles can't work without constant interaction with stimulation by the nervous system. And we're finding out in recent years that what is anabolic for the body, what builds the body up, is also anabolic for the brain. It builds the brain up.

In fact, weightlifting exercise, but not aerobic exercise, increases the size of the brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain where the

emotional memory and empathy reside. It's the first part of the brain to atrophy in Alzheimer's disease, even before people show any signs of memory loss. But it's only weightlifting that builds those qualities that we've always associated with finer sensitivity and even, you know, maybe stereotypically associated with femininity.

So if we go back to DeLorme and what he realized in working with the World War II veterans, when do his ideas really take flight? When do they become more accepted? When do researchers start to investigate what happens to muscle when we are active versus inactive?

The research of Thomas DeLorme gets a really strong start out of the gate. After he does his studies on soldiers, he starts to study how heavyweight training can help polio patients and adolescents and women and...

And he publishes a series of papers that get a lot of pickup. And there's this little stretch in the 1950s where in the Journal of the American Medical Association, you can see all kinds of publications and enthusiasm around this, especially as treatment for polio. But then it just falls off the radar in the medical literature.

Until about the 1980s, when a doctor in Boston set up a small experiment in his lab. This doctor, Walter Frontera, had grown up in Puerto Rico. He was a basketball player. He liked to lift weights. He was studying the process of aging. And one of the things that they were curious about was why older people lost so much muscle, why they lost so much strength.

Frontera had the idea that one reason it happened was that nobody was giving them the option of building it. So he asked for permission to do a small study on older men, I think mostly in their 60s. The doctor tested the older men's baseline strength and then designed their routines around that. Three sets of 10, three or four times a week, just like DeLorme did with the soldiers, and

And in 12 weeks, he doubled the strength of their quadriceps, he tripled the strength of their hamstrings, and he substantially increased the size of their muscles. Now,

Nobody thought that this was possible. And it gave another doctor in that same lab an idea to push even further. That doctor was Maria Fiataroni-Singh. She went to a nursing home. It was a nursing home called the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged.

And a lot of people there were Holocaust survivors. A lot of them had crossed the Atlantic in steerage. They had all grown up in the Great Depression. These were hardy people. These were survivors. But they were really old now, and most of them needed help to do all the activities of daily living, dressing themselves, getting out of bed.

And she said, what can I do that would improve your life? Like, what are your goals now? Would you like to live longer? Is that the goal? And an old man raised his hand and he said, I don't want to live longer. I just want to be able to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom by myself and get back to bed.

So she started the first study of high-intensity strength training for nonagenarians, people in their 90s. She had a group of nine people, and in a similar short period of time, just a couple of months, she got extraordinary strength responses. These 90-year-olds were

increased their strength by an average of 174%. Now, this was a very small pilot study, and Maria wanted to test this out in a randomized controlled trial. She enlisted 100 people and divided them into three groups. One group was lifting weights, one group lifted weights and added a protein supplement, and the last group did nothing. The group that only lifted weights increased their strength by 100%.

The group that lifted weights and took the supplement increased their strength by 250%. The group that did nothing lost strength, lost muscle. But...

It wasn't just strength and muscle size that was changing. It was walking speed. It was spontaneous physical activity. People were now able to get up out of a chair without holding on to the arms. A few people were able to walk without canes or walkers who had to use them before. So it really translates into quality of life. Yes.

That's author Michael Joseph Gross. His new book is Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. We'll talk more with Michael later on. A lot of older people are lifting weights to stay strong and to maintain mobility for years to come. I went to City Fitness Gym in Philadelphia to watch a training session. Inhale, back down, reset.

Make sure you're squeezing those glutes and keep the shoulders pinched together. Coach Kevin Rimler is working with Sandy Katwalader. She is 77. Make sure you're squeezing those glutes and keep the shoulders pinched together. It's just something that I maintain as a regular part of my life.

I did have a fall about a year and a half ago, and I am assuming that this is doing me good as I do get older, approaching my 80s, that it will help me retain balance and quicker reaction if I do trip again. And so that's basically what I'm in it for. Hands on your shoulders. A little bit wider with our knees to start. Yep. Kick your right leg.

Strength training has been proven to improve bone density as well as muscle mass and that just helps with quality of life, their balance, their posture, mobility and endurance because those are the main traits you want to look at to improve their quality of life.

The incentive of coming and having a trainer would mean I'd be here rather than having to rely on my own self-discipline. So if they can do, if we go in 10 reps and they could do probably maybe 13, they should probably bump their weight a little heavier. And also you can kind of tell by the look on their face that they're, you know, they're not sweating and not looking like they're working too hard. You can probably bump their weight up or challenge them to do some more reps. He's wonderful and he never lets up. So we're going to stand right over top of the weight.

They can lift a lot of weight once they start to get in the swing of things. And it's really just about consistency. You just keep showing up and you see a lot of improvement over time. And just small wins can lead to big wins in the future. She's very mobile, very agile.

I have a lot of clients who just can't do that and they're my age. Hips go back, come on down and grab the handle from here. Well, a win is to be able to go through a day without any pain or any kind of restriction of movement. A lot of clients who are older have pain in their hips, their joints, their muscles, and they just can't do the things they used to back in the day. So, be able to move around freely without any compensation or pain is probably the main indicator. I do think I'm

relatively fit for my age. So I intend to keep it up. Nice. Great work.

That's Sandy Katwaliger, who is in her late 70s, with her coach, Kevin Rimmler, at City Fitness Gym in Philadelphia. We're talking about strength, weights, and why it matters to our health. Coming up... Where is it here? We'll meet one of the most legendary powerlifters of all times. There it is. Highest competitive deadlift by a woman is 294.5 pounds.

That's still to come on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about weightlifting, strength, and health with Michael Joseph Gross. He's the author of Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. How did you get into weightlifting? I had an experience of lifting weights that really kind of changed my life and opened my eyes to a whole different way of seeing muscle.

And do you lift? I do. Oh, great. Fantastic. When did you start? I would say I started to go to the gym in earnest probably about 10 years ago. At first, I was doing more like swimming and then a little bit of weightlifting. And then the longer I went, the more and more and more I got into weightlifting. Oh, great. And now I go at least twice a week. I'm on the iron journey. Thank you.

It wasn't until I was in my early 40s that I found a different reason for going to the gym. I decided that I wanted a new physical challenge, and I wanted to learn whitewater kayaking. But I knew that I needed to be stronger to handle myself on the river. So I found a trainer, and I told him that was my goal, and he took that goal seriously.

And he started working with me to build the strength and muscle in the shoulder girdle in the back, in the chest, so that I could paddle well and to strengthen my core so that if I flipped over in the kayak, I would have an easier time bringing myself up. And in the process of training, I just became so interested in

not only in what I originally thought was my goal, but in the means to get there because it changed me in so many ways. I found that I was less anxious. I was less depressed. I felt more at home in my own skin. I felt calmer.

I just felt like I was becoming more authentically myself. And I wonder if you had to overcome a certain embarrassment or feeling out of place when going to the gym to lift weights.

I remember when I first started going, a lot of times I felt like, oh, people are going to see that I can only lift this little puny weight and I don't even know how to lift it or I don't know how to get this machine set up. And I just, I always felt like an idiot. Completely, completely. How did you overcome that?

I guess I overcame it because I was with a trainer who was really great. He had been a trainer for the 82nd Airborne. He had been injured in a parachute landing, and becoming a trainer was his way of getting his life back on track. So when you're with somebody who really knows what they're doing, it...

focuses you so much on the activity itself that you just don't have a lot of energy left for thinking about what other people might be thinking of you. And then if you really stick with it, if you take it seriously, if you eat the protein that you need to eat, and if you get good sleep, almost always you're going to start to see visible changes within three months or so.

Once you start to see some changes, that just creates a positive reinforcing cycle where you stop thinking about yourself so much and just start realizing that going to the gym is like brushing your teeth and everybody belongs there.

It's interesting now when I see somebody at the gym who I think, you know, looks self-conscious, looks like maybe they feel like they don't belong.

I just try to focus inwardly on how much I admire them for doing this. Because, you know, anybody who feels like they don't belong at the gym, I think might benefit from remembering that the people who've been there forever were all in that place to start with. And the people who've been there forever are all looking at them and thinking, you go.

This idea that everybody belongs at the gym and everybody should feel welcome is still pretty new. And one of the people who changed that is legendary powerlifter Jan Todd. Michael profiles her in the book. I feel like Jan Todd's life and work really show how strength shapes identity.

The Guinness Book of World Records puts her in as the strongest woman in the world for about 10 years, a real symbol of women's strength. Jan appeared on The Johnny Carson Show in 1978. She tried to coach Johnny on how to deadlift a barbell with massive amounts of weight on it.

I'm not going to try to lift this, but I just want to feel what it feels like by putting any kind of pressure on it. You understand? I understand. I will not try to. You're on your own, John. Do you overgrip or what? You reverse your grip. You have one hand one way and one the other so that when you bend down, it doesn't roll out of your hands. Try to get, no, put your hands on, your elbows on the inside of your knees. Put your feet closer in, just like you're going to do. Yeah. Right into the, your hands outside there. Like this. Like that. That's right. What you want to do is pull straight up. Ha!

I don't think you're trying, Johnny. Oh, boy. And he says, why do you do it? And she says that it keeps her pretty healthy and it satisfies, and this is a wonderful phrase, it satisfies a fascination in what is difficult. Jan sounded like a true pioneer in this field, and we wanted to meet her. So we asked reporter Sarah Willa Ernst to visit her at her Austin, Texas, home.

Jan Todd lives tucked away in the hills of Central Texas. I know. Go ahead. You can go now. Her two huge bull mastiffs are splayed out by the pool basking in the sun. Jan introduces me to them. There's Monty and Pudgy. She says, I am Pudgy Stockton, and I'm three years old, and I'm a very, very good girl and a little overweight.

I've never seen a dog this big. Well, she's a bull master. Pudgy Stockton, named after the iconic American strongwoman from the 1940s. We walk past a replica statue of the Farnese Hercules, this one with the fig leaf. Muscled, chiseled, defined. And then head into the pool house, aka Jan's office, which is a total treasure trove of powerlifting history.

boxes and boxes of research materials, and a personal archive of the history Jan made herself. Where is it here? There it is. Highest competitive deadlift by a woman is 394.5 pounds by Jan Suffolk Todd at Chattanooga, Tennessee on 3 May, 1975.

So almost 50 years to the day. Jan was about to turn 23 when that deadlift broke the Guinness record. And that was just the beginning. Jan kept lifting and setting records. 1977, first woman to officially squat more than 400 pounds. 1981 world record deadlift, 479 pounds. 1981 world record squat, 545 pounds. More than 60 national and world records in total.

All these achievements were unthinkable when she was a teenager in the 1960s. First thing you should know about me is that I graduated from high school before Title IX passed. She was on the swim team in high school, but there were no varsity-level opportunities. So I didn't have normal sport experiences like modern girls do.

When she was in college, Jan met her future husband, Terry Todd, a powerlifting champion. I had started going with Terry to the gym just because, you know, he's your cute boyfriend and you love him and, like, you want to spend all your time together. Not thinking about being an athlete at all. It was a different world in terms of what women were expected or even allowed to do when it came to weight.

And to be honest, it was really boring. I mean, it was like, no offense to the cute boyfriend-husband, but it was pretty boring just to go and do light stuff. Because that's not who I am. But one day she met a woman doing something she'd never seen a woman at the gym do before, training with a barbell. Jan decided to take a crack at it. And she was a natural. On her very first try, she deadlifted 225 pounds, the weight the other woman had been training to lift.

And this experience, it planted a seed. The Guinness record at the time was 392 pounds. And Terry said, I think you could do that if you wanted to. And in her mind, a goal was set. But there were some obstacles in the way. We had to navigate where I could go to do things because most gyms weren't open to women.

They tried using the gym at Mercer University, where she got her bachelor's and master's. We had to, like, get permission. And I could only go in there if there were no men in there at the same time. So he could be with me, but nobody else could. I couldn't go in, like, when the team strained. And then there was European Health Spa, an old chain of gyms across the U.S. Health spas in those years primarily had men's stays and women's stays.

The idea that women don't want to be seen in public when they lift weights, primarily, and that you might be distracted or men would be distracted by women. And so I couldn't go with him on men's days to the health club, but I could go on women's days, but he couldn't come with me. So he couldn't like show me what to do and how to do things.

And if I went on women's days, I wasn't allowed to use the barbells. I could only use the machines. How come? I asked her. Because we're girls and we're delicate and it's too dangerous for us to lift weights. What if you just went up and did it? Well, then they would come over and speak to me, which I did one day. I was trying to do some deadlifts and the guy said, you're really not allowed to do that in here. And so I told him, you know, we didn't need to continue. We just quit training there. She finally found a spot. It was a men's club.

But Terry knew the owner. And so we then negotiated with him. But there was no women's restroom. There was no changing room for me. And nobody made fun of me because Terry was with me. She was lifting up men's events. Women's competitions weren't around until 1977.

It was a thrill. I liked it so much. I liked the fact that lifting does provide you with psychological rewards all the time when you're training. If you have set goals for yourself and you hit those goals in training, you walk out of the gym feeling great.

And I liked that. The other thing I liked, though, honestly, was doing something that most other women didn't do. And this was in part because of health misinformation. One of the beliefs of the 80s was that somehow there were still gender-appropriate exercises for women to do as opposed to what men did. So men would do squats, but girls would do leg presses.

And like, why? You know, why do you need that difference? Because the leg press will probably not make you as strong as doing squats will make you. It's not as much of a sort of multi-muscle, multi-joint exercise. Jan helped change perceptions around female bodies, strength, and muscles. When I began lifting weights, there were no models who showed any muscles on their bodies if they walked the runways.

The idea of a woman having muscles was seen as somehow being somewhat transgressive. There must be something wrong with you if you want to have muscles.

But because of Title IX passing and because women have more access to weight rooms and because as you play sports, you will develop muscles, you know, like even tennis players, a very ladylike sport, as we used to argue, you will develop muscles. Now, of course, if you go to the gym, you're going to see as many women in current health clubs as you are men. The women will be working with basically the same kinds of exercises that men do.

Compound movements like squats, deadlifts, and pull-ups. But I think now people have begun to realize that there really isn't any reason for men and women to train differently. And because of that, one of the things that to me is most exciting is we're finally beginning to understand how strong women can be. ♪

That story was reported by Sarah Willa Ernst. We're talking about weightlifting and muscles. One of the words that Michael Joseph Gross writes about in his book Stronger that plays a big important role is kairos. You talk a lot about the word kairos, which is a little difficult to translate because sometimes we...

Translated as moment or time, but it's really more about what you do in a specific moment. Why is that word so important when it comes to this topic? In the Soul Surviving Athletic Training Manual from Antiquity, in the Gymnasticus of Philostratus,

There's a story about a wrestler named Garanos. And Garanos was a great wrestler. He was an Olympic champion. And when he won at Olympia, he decided to celebrate. He went on a bender and he just got drunk and stayed drunk for days. Yeah.

He finally showed up to the gym for training and his coach was not happy at all. The coach had a

tough workout planned for him, and he decided that he was going to teach this kid a lesson. He was going to make him go through with the workout, whether he was up to it or not. And so he pushed him, and he pushed him, and in the middle of that workout, Gerenos died. Now, Philostratus tells this story to illustrate the difference between good training and bad training. And he says that bad trainers basically train by cookie-cutter prescription.

And they always follow their formulas no matter what.

But good trainers prescribe exercises all improvised for the right time. Now, the word he uses for time there is kairos. And of all the Greek words in the book, I think kairos is the very most important. Kairos means something like doing the right thing at the right time. And it's a reminder that meditation

No matter what the progression of weights we feel like we might have liked to make in this workout or in this week might be, no matter what the program is that's laid out for us, if paying attention to the realities of our own bodies, we know that that's the wrong thing, we have to improvise something else. We have to

to constantly pay attention to the reality of our body and do the right thing for it at this particular time. Now, that may sound banal. It may sound like common sense. But I think back to when I first started lifting weights, and one of the most difficult things for me to learn was that my trainer kept telling me, well, just listen to your body. And I was like, what in the world does that mean? What

I never listened to my body. I don't ever listen to my brain. But training, and I think especially weight training, it requires so much careful attention to the little details of how your joints are, what your energy is. It's this constant

constant adventure of improvisation to figure out what is the right thing for this time. I think a lot more people are aware of the benefits of lifting weights than were perhaps 10 years ago. But I

I still think it's a tool that's often underutilized. Like, I have never had a doctor say to me, you should be lifting weights. Never. I've had doctors say, oh, you should watch your cholesterol or you should watch your weight. Never has anybody said, get into the gym and lift weights. And that's really, I think, the advice I should have gotten. So where are we? And is the message being heard by the right people?

That is such a good question.

And if we need a one-word answer, the answer is no. I mean, you've already given the answer. Your doctor doesn't recommend it to you. My doctors have never recommended it to me. I really struggle to find a doctor who can even be engaged in a conversation about this. I have a friend who has cancer, who has lost almost all of his muscle and strength, and

in recent years, and there was never any help for him from his oncologists in building up muscle and strength, which is the only thing that would have helped keep him moving and on his feet into the hardest last days of this process. Michael says there are more doctors out there now who are touting the benefits of weightlifting, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

He says exercise should be discussed more in medical education. Doctors should prescribe it. Insurance companies should cover exercise treatments. Every nursing home should have a leg press machine. And Michael argues that we really need to broaden our ideas around who can benefit from lifting weights. When we say the word muscle, who would you like us to picture? What would you like us to picture?

I love to think about how the world might look different if every time we heard the word muscle, the first person we thought of was not some big guy who had taken steroids, but...

Michael Joseph Gross is the author of Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives.

I have to tell you, I was on a plane last year and there was an older lady in front of me and she had a suitcase and she was sort of like looking like, how do I get the suitcase up there? And I took her suitcase and she's like, I don't think you can lift that. And I said, no, I think I can. And I took the suitcase and I put it in the overhead compartment. And then she looked at me and she said, you're strong.

And I said to her, and I meant it, I was like, this is the best compliment I've ever gotten. And it really was. Fantastic. It was. It was one of those moments where I was like, yes. Victory. Victory, exactly. That is victory. That is victory. That is victory.

We're talking about strength, weightlifting, and its importance for our health. Coming up, writer Casey Johnston describes how weightlifting changed her relationship with her body. I felt this new awareness and capability that I had never had the chance to cultivate. That's next on The Pulse. ♪

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Casey Johnston was in high school when she decided she was overweight. She came across a BMI chart specifying ideal body weight based on height, and she was well over that amount. That really planted itself in my head. It was the early 2000s. Long and lean was in vogue. Low-rise jeans were fashionable, as were super flat stomachs and crop tops. I felt very...

of it and it felt very threatening to me. The idea that you could be judged so harshly on all of these elements of yourself that you might not even be aware of. So I became like a really

intense critic of myself. Casey was determined to achieve that look by cutting down her calories to 1,200 a day and committing to a punishing running routine, even though she hated running. I was like, I'm going to have to make my peace with this. So I'll just have to do this thing that I hate and it'll be the worst part of my day. And that's

that's that. Running all the time, thinking she had to earn and burn her calories, feeling exhausted. Putting in more and more hours, running farther and farther, eating less and less, and it just not only wasn't having the result that I wanted, but

It was just getting harder to stay in the same place. And how much mental energy did all of this take up in your head? You know, the running, the calorie counting, the budgeting your meals and thinking about, did I eat too much? What did I eat yesterday? And how will it, you know, how will that affect me tomorrow? It was constant. And

Looking back on it now, I can say that it was way too much, way too much energy. And I was obsessed with how much food I was or wasn't eating.

Then, in her late 20s, Casey came across a post online written by a woman who had gotten into weightlifting, something Casey had never considered as an option. Don't lift weights, you'll get bulky. But this woman talked about lifting weights a few times a week, eating lots of food, and she looked great.

Like she was getting the result that I had always been after in all of my years of effort with running and dieting. So Casey decided to give weightlifting a try. She joined a gym, started doing things like squats, bench presses, deadlifts, and quickly she saw results. She was getting stronger, not just with weights, but in her daily life. Her relationship with her body was changing.

I felt this new awareness and capability that I had never had the chance to cultivate.

Casey has written a book about her journey. It's called A Physical Education, How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting. What were some of the early aha moments you had? I was thrilled with how nice it was to just sit down after doing five reps and then you could stand back up after a minute, do five more, sit down for a bit, stand back up, do five more. OK, you're done with that movement.

But she was suspicious. She wasn't sweating like when she was doing cardio. She wasn't panting. Her heart wasn't beating like crazy the whole time. Was this even a real workout? Not long after I left the gym with one of my first workouts, I knew that it was doing something because I could feel this new type of hunger that I had never felt in my life before. And I needed to just feed myself.

So I went out and ate a huge meal after that and waited to feel too full or guilty or any of these things. But these things sort of clicked into place with each other in a way that they never had before. And I was instantly hooked after that. She also started to see her body differently. My experience of my body thus far in my life had been completely different.

My relationship with it had been completely about denying my feelings, denying my pain and my impulses and just fighting myself at every step. I was fighting to work out more. I was fighting to eat less. I was always just trying to hold everything at bay and push down all of my resistances to all of these things. So lifting presented a very different way of looking at life

all of my body and my food and working out because the fundamental atomic unit of lifting weights is you're doing a rep, doing a set, and then asking yourself basically, how did that feel? Was it too hard? Was it too easy? Was my form right? Did it feel off in any way? Is there one muscle that's working too hard, another that's not? And I didn't always have perfect answers to these questions, but the

that it encouraged me to look inward and to value my experience of these things incrementally.

allowed me to sort of start building this new relationship to and understanding with physically what I was going through. And that kind of radiated outward in all of these ways. She was eating more, emphasizing protein in her diet, and her mood and outlook changed. I found as I was researching this book that

Literally, dieting too much can affect your brain and psychology in a way that makes you sort of more fearful, more rigid about rules and following these rules. And I really felt it that once I started eating more,

A lot of the bad experience I was having turned out to be a result of just not eating enough. I had all of these food obsessions and preoccupations and going into spirals over missing a workout or things like this. But once I was getting enough food, I felt like some of my mental function could return.

I think a lot of us grew up being told that if you lift weights, that's for guys. And if you end up like if you do that, then you're going to be massive and you're not going to have a feminine looking body. So if that's what you want, this is not what you're going to get. So there were all these things keeping us away from the gym, really. It's really a shame.

We're starting to change that narrative a little bit now, I think, which is really fortunate because I think that the theory went not even that. I think what I took from it was that lifting weights will instantly transform you in this way that you are not going to want, which is not really how it works, obviously. But also, I think there was a theory of

Why would you do this if your goal is not to be huge? If you want to be skinny and small and or lose body weight, then you should just do the cardio calorie burning activities. You have no reason to build muscle. But that's not actually the case. There's no one spoke of this middle ground where you can build.

Lift weights really change substantially how it feels to be in your body, really change your capability within your body without having to substantially change how you look. You know, there's a much wider spectrum of weight.

strength and muscle muscular appearance than I was made to believe. Talk a little bit about your own progression of strength. What were some exercises that you really excelled at? What were some that were really hard for you?

I loved squatting right away. I just, I thought... I hate squatting so much. I know. Usually people are either squatting, squat people or deadlift people. I'm a deadlift person. Yeah, yeah. So I struggled really hard with deadlifts. It took me a really long time to sort of get my, to understand my body's relationship to them. But squatting was not at all like that. Squatting clicked with me instantly. Yeah.

And then I think I liked benching, but I was afraid of it. It's like scary because you're holding the weight over yourself. So if you fail your lift and it's going to fall onto your body, it feels dangerous. But through just drilling the movement a lot, I was able to get better at it. Same with deadlifts. It's just like these things take practice. I didn't have this sense of

I came to lifting with this idea of you're either good at something and it's meant for you or you're bad at it and there's no reason to bother with it. But what I didn't understand was that lifting, like many things, but lifting especially the way that it's structured, you're able to get

so much out of it, especially if you're not already good at it. There's so much low-hanging fruit. It's almost like the less of it you've done in your life, the more you have to gain really easily from just putting in like a basic amount of effort. As Casey kept lifting weights, her body kept changing. The number on the scale didn't really budge, but she was getting stronger, adding muscle. Her body was going through what's called recomposition.

Recomposition is a phase that your body can go through when you are new to lifting weights and you're kind of very sensitive to its effects in a positive way. Your body is able to work extra hard in order to help you build your strength and build muscle, which means your body weight needs to stay the same. But if you have these inputs of enough food,

to fuel your workouts, and you're doing your strength muscle building exercises, these things sort of kickstart the process of building muscle, but also losing body fat at the same time. When we say building muscle, what's actually happening in the body? Because the process is kind of really cool if you dissect it.

The basics of it are that when you lift weights, when you lift heavy weights, they have to be heavy. They have to be heavy enough that only doing a few reps causes what we call muscle damage, which sounds bad, but muscles are designed to work this way, that you can lift a heavy weight, do an intense set of only a few reps, and your muscle fibers get sort of shredded up inside. Right.

And then once you're done, your muscle is actually built when you're not working out, when you have time to rest. You're doing the shredding up of the muscle fibers when you work out. And then afterward, your body is taking in

All of this food, the protein especially, is what the amino acids is what your muscles are made out of. Your body is taking these amino acids and using them to rebuild your muscle fibers a little bit better than they were before, a little bit stronger, meatier. So the next time you go into the gym, you are a little bit stronger than you were before. You can lift a little bit more weight. And by repeating this cycle, that's how you're able to build strength.

Which is pretty amazing, right? Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, if I had known this when I was younger, I would have lived my entire life totally differently. Like, it's just outrageous that it's not more common knowledge, I guess. Casey has been lifting weights for over 10 years now. And at this point, she doesn't think so much about how much she is lifting or progress. It's just part of her life.

So I don't think that much about progressing my weights anymore. I'm not I kind of got as strong as I am interested in being for the time being that may change later and I may want to take up a program where I'm targeting building more strength.

But now for me, it's about maintenance and just enjoying my workout. I just had a baby in December, so I went quite a long time without lifting weights as I normally do. And then once he was born, I went, I think, two months without lifting weights at all. And that is completely okay. The interesting thing about strength is that your body has a type of memory, muscle memory, that once you build strength,

It's never as hard to build it again as it is the first time. You're always going to come back to lifting and be able to get back to where you were with less effort than it took the first time. So it's the most incredible thing to me that...

You're not just getting in shape and then you stop working out and you lose everything you did. It's not like deleting a file. Your body literally transforms inside as a result of this working out. And I just find that really fascinating. Casey Johnston is a writer and the author of A Physical Education, How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.

Before that, she wrote Liftoff, Couch to Barbell, which is a book and training program for beginners. Also, check out my conversation with writer Bonnie Tsui about her new book on muscle, the stuff that moves us and why it matters. We talked about strength, aging and the representation of muscle in art and much more.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.

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