Some time ago, I was in a hotel room, scrolling my phone, and enraged, as usual, at my body. The source of my rage was, again as usual, what I think of as “my weight problem,” though there have been only two extended periods of my life—childhood and my early thirties—when anyone but me would have thought my weight was a problem. At worst, it is a situation. I was very fat in middle school, and have spent, now, more than three decades looking over my shoulder at the owlish, plodding, rotund child I was, a child with the sort of face that is said to invite bullying, perhaps because he is looking at everything but the fist that swiftly approaches his jaw. This child walks slowly but steadily after me. He is never far back enough.
That night, for whatever reason, I was quite conscious of him, and I found myself looking again for a solution to the problem of my never-quite-hard-enough body. I ended up reading a lot about weight lifting. Though I had lifted weights unsystematically for decades—almost as long as I had been exercising at all—I had given strikingly little thought to the subject. Mostly, I just tried to stick with it in between long, punishing runs. Weights were part of a broad, continuous and painful campaign designed to differentiate my body from that child’s. Wherever his body curved, mine must be lean, angled. Where his body was useless, mine must be strong, enduring—a man’s body, some part of me still insists, though I know that childbirth tests one’s strength, that monthly periods require a certain endurance, that women serve with distinction in the military, and that there is nothing more deserving of the term “hysteria” than the feverishness with which some people still argue for the special relationship of masculinity to strength.
Somehow that night I ran across the work of Casey Johnston, who used to write a column called Ask a Swole Woman for the Hairpin, then for Self and then for Vice, before joining the growing army of newslettrists. My weight-lifting habit, as her writing explained, was an illustration of the difference between exercise and training. Exercise uses energy, burns calories, perhaps maintains a certain level of fitness. Training aims at definite improvement. “The difference between a workout and training,” she writes, “is a smart, predictable increase of intensity.” In other words, you increase weights every time you lift, at least at the beginning. The excitement with which I binged Johnston’s writing that night, and the immediacy with which I implemented several of her ideas on my return home, came from the thought that I might, in my early forties, still be capable of improving at anything. As is so often the case, the best way into a hobby stereotyped as masculine was to read a woman.
●
How and when did we become exercisers? It is difficult to establish a clear picture of the grouped history of exercise, physical training, physical culture and sports. They are like the bourgeoisie, always emerging. One reads of Henry James taking up, say, fencing in order to “reduce,” or Elvis rededicating himself to karate. There are Patroclus’s funeral games, and the epic brawls of Jacksonian America: little keyhole glimpses of something that seems too diffuse to really have a history.
But exercise does have a history, or at least, it has historians. Exercise historian Shelly McKenzie, for example, sees a turn toward “self-centered” forms of exercise during the post-World War I era, as Americans sought to develop “personality” rather than “character.” On McKenzie’s account, these tendencies continue throughout the twentieth and 21st centuries, leading to a situation in which we use exercise to add little marks of meritocratic virtue to our bodies. It is “a personal accomplishment,” like the degree we hang on our wall.
Exercise is a way to react—continuously, generation after generation—to the fact that our society is both complex and leisured enough that many workers can sit down all day, a fact for which we have never forgiven ourselves. (McKenzie’s book came out in 2013, the year of the standing desk, and it ends with a call to put “moderate amounts of energy expenditure back into our daily lives.” She praises, you guessed it, the treadmill desk.) There have been repeated spasms of concern over both the physical and spiritual degradation of sit-down jobs. In his history of office work, Cubed (2014), Nikil Saval quotes various early pundits drawing an explicit contrast between the degraded bodies of clerks and the sunburnt, rippling bodies of “real” workers. In Victorian schools, individual exercise was promoted as a way to build character and virtue and, reading between the lines, to burn up energy that might otherwise fuel masturbation, which was, like clerical work, thought to make a person weak, whitish, grublike. Slightly later, Teddy Roosevelt promoted both individual exercise and team sports as a way to, very literally, “save” that chimera known as the white race.
Individual exercise reemerges in the context of postwar affluence, as the very men who helped win World War II found themselves disturbingly slow and flabby after ten years of commuting to the office. Successive Cold War presidents, beginning with Eisenhower, supervened in “transforming the pursuit of physical fitness from a suspicious pastime of narcissistic deviants to a requirement of self-fulfillment and civic life,” as historian and Equinox instructor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela writes in Fit Nation (2022). They did so, Petrzela notes, without bothering to build the physical infrastructure—more pools, more parks, more walkable cities and suburbs—that would encourage such effort. This was how it came to pass that George H.W. Bush teamed with Arnold Schwarzenegger to encourage middle schoolers of my generation to do pull-ups.
One can poke holes in the ideas that came along with this new emphasis on exercise, or object to the less than benign social forces they sometimes encouraged. The elevation of the skinny-yet-somehow-curvy late-teenage girl as the ideal female body, for example, was a crime against humanity. Jingoism is irrational. But there’s really no case to be made against exercise as such. The science behind the folk wisdom that it’s better to move than not to move was laid out fairly clearly in Kenneth Cooper’s Aerobics (1968), one of those paperback bestsellers that fanned out across Middle America. Since then, the epidemiological picture has sharpened itself to a certainty.
●
By ninth grade, through daily slow jogging, I had mostly, as the common and telling image has it, “torched” the fat that I had carried through childhood. I could have used my new and much thinner body to seek out activities that I enjoyed and was good at. Instead, I kept running. I learned of the existence of a sport called “cross-country,” and applied myself to four years of fruitless misery.
I hated basically every second of cross-country practice—the grueling interval runs, the ribbing and outright bullying by teammates (who had all been ribbed and bullied in their turn), the feeling of bile rising to mid-gullet that afflicted me within the first hundred meters of every race and never stopped, the occasional near-collapsing at the end of a race as my consciousness contracted to a pinhole. Most of all, I hated that the last of these outcomes signified success.
But, perversely, I sought this pain. I didn’t enjoy it, as a masochist would, but I thought that it was the proper goal of my running, or at least the only goal under my control. I could train and train and still not be as fast as someone with better genetics. But there was nothing stopping me from working harder, and suffering more, than my rivals. Such suffering would perhaps be good for my character, as well as my relationship with a stern and rather unimpressible Baptist God. If I were to join the army after high school, and get caught by the enemy and subjected to torture, cross-country might make me strong enough to withhold information, even when they went for my fingernails. Cross-country could make me something better than successful—it could make me worthy of success.
Not once in four years did it ever occur to me that this internal messaging might have been getting in my way; that telling myself, at the beginning of a mile time trial, “Let’s really hurt ourselves today” might be slowing me down a little. By the end of the third or fourth race of the season, I always seemed to settle into a performance slump that lasted through November. Coach thought I was malingering. If a person as motivated as I was faced repeated slumps, it is no mystery, and perhaps such a self-punishing approach to a sport is, in its perverse way, a kind of malingering.
This outlook was, I now recognize, merely the machismo of the naturally ungifted. I do not wish that I had instead been some sort of dominant and cruel young “alpha.” Indeed, I wish I had not so nearly resembled such athletes in their terror of weakness and will to control, which I simply projected inward when the external world proved unavailing. Almost any other attitude would have served me better, including mere apathy.
These days, I run about as hard as I feel like, for the pleasure and the air and the benefits to my heart and waistline, several times a week. It is possible to have a healthy relationship to running (I suspect that most runners do).
The rest of the time, I train.
●
It’s not that weight training can’t lead to the sort of demented self-punishment that running so long tempted me to. Some lifters absolutely take a similarly maximalist approach. It’s just that their attempts do not work. Runners can, for a few days or even weeks, lie to themselves about how exhausted they are, or tell themselves that the point of their activity is, in part, learning to ignore fatigue and pain. A weight lifter won’t make it through the next session. If I try to do a set of heavy dead lifts before my body has recovered, I will simply fail. This means that the bodily adaptation to this new weight—or new number of repetitions—that I am doing all this work in order to provoke won’t happen. Rest, food and water are mandatory. You have to quit when you’re done.
All the writers on weight lifting are adamant on this point. Mark Rippetoe, the venerated lifting coach, writes that “You don’t get big and strong from lifting weights—you get big and strong by recovering from lifting weights.” Johnston describes soreness not as the sign of a great workout but as “the gap between what you did to break down your muscles with exercise … and what you gave them to rebuild themselves.”
In weight training, you ask a lot of your body for a very brief, incredibly focused interval of time. Then you stop. You give your body time to rebuild. You make higher, steeper demands, stop, rebuild. And so on, till you approach either the outer limits of what you, an adult with a job and obligations, can reasonably do, or your own willingness to chase further gains.
I had always avoided the big compound lifts—the exercises that involve many muscle groups working together simultaneously. In addition to all the other things I dislike about myself, I am clumsy. When my anxiety is properly medicated, my clumsiness is worse. So I thought that if I did, say, heavy squats or dead lifts, I was likely to hurt myself or someone else. It turns out that this is actually a good reason to practice big, simple movements that involve the entire body, such as the squat. In addition to training your muscles to handle more weight, you are also training your nervous system to monitor and control all those muscles at once. In other words, it is good for an uncoordinated person to practice coordinating.
The point is to start with a weight low enough that you can actually handle it in the beginning. This is humiliating. No adult wants to be seen squatting an empty bar, and struggling to do so, in public. By the same token, there is relief in realizing that nobody is watching—nobody really sees you squatting that bar, because they have lives and workouts of their own. And since much of the learning you’re doing in the early months is, often enough, about form and muscle memory, you can move up weight fairly quickly. The weight that I squat is, at this point, a number so objectively low that I’m not interested in putting it in print; it’s also nearly 150 pounds more than what I started out with.
I have discovered another benefit to lifting, which is mental. I have never quite figured out what “mindfulness” is, but I know that I am the sort of person who is held to benefit from practicing it. Unfortunately, precisely because I am this kind of person, meditation makes me angry. A compound lift, it turns out, involves the exact amount of being-here-now that my mind is capable of. Ask me to sit still and concentrate on my breathing, and I will panic. Ask me to lift a heavy weight off the ground without throwing out my back—to keep the legs involved, activate the posterior chain, avoid hyperextension (and do all this fast, before I have a chance to register just how heavy the bar is)—and it makes me remain in my body without getting bored. I know from experience that I simply cannot think about, say, climate change while doing a heavy dead lift. The activity itself forces good form on both mind and body. It’s a sort of violent yoga.
Though the goals of building bulk and losing fat are often treated as incompatible, I have not found them to be so. When you lift weights, you are forced to eat with a purpose: you have to get enough protein. This probably takes more time than weight lifting. It is certainly more of an affront to the senses, given the chalky taste of protein powders. On any given day, by the time I am done collecting every last elusive gram, and incidentally cramming in enough fiber to ensure that whatever my cause of death it won’t be one of those cancers that insistently reminds your mourners that you had a gastrointestinal tract, I don’t really want to eat much else. Between that and the fact that I walk to work, there’s a calorie deficit most days. And meanwhile the weights—though not my weight—go up.
They will not go up forever. I am still in the honeymoon phase of lifting, the period of “newbie gains.” When I reach the end of that period, various methodological tweaks await me, which each have their own funny names (Madcow, Super Squats and the like) and their own partisans. I can somehow eat even more protein, or take up rowing, or swing kettlebells. Or perhaps a car will hit me tomorrow. At least, by consciously setting out to build strength, I have learned not to hate weakness so much.
●
This is, to put it mildly, not the most common way that lifting gurus—especially the male ones—have described its virtues. Mark Rippetoe’s canonical lifting guide, Starting Strength (2005), begins thus:
Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. … Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals—our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. … This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
God bless him, he’s direct. This is Nietzsche in a nutshell, social Darwinism for the Muscle and Fitness reader. We are often said—not least by some of Rippetoe’s more ardent fans—to be experiencing a crisis of masculinity. There are thoughtful versions of this idea, based in the notion that men need new stories to tell themselves and new examples to work from in a technological society where fewer people need to be physically strong. I would argue that those stories and examples often lie close to hand; it’s just that they are not always labeled For Men Only. This is no reason not to profit by them. More often, the idea of a masculinity crisis is simply a neutral-sounding name for the fact that most people don’t think physical strength is the most important thing in the world.
I could argue against this idea by pointing to, say, every major religious tradition in the world. “My strength is made perfect in your weakness,” wrote St. Paul, who did not realize how much happier he’d be if his squat strength went up. Or I could note that it substitutes a means (strength) for an end (any of the things we want to be strong for). But the best refutation is the one that never leaves the original system of thought behind. The person who really lived as though physical strength matters more than everything in life would be a thoroughly neurotic invalid. Unlike Rippetoe, a COVID-19 lockdown skeptic, he would live in terror of any illness that might interrupt his training. He would never use his strength for anything but building more strength, just as misers never enjoy their wealth, needing every scrap of it to generate more compound interest.
Weight lifters mostly don’t act like they think this, in my experience. (Even Rippetoe, in his video tutorials, comes off as a relatively jovial sort, not the grim Frank Miller-esque figure his writing suggests.) There are several men, and a number of women, who regularly use my gym who, just estimating from size alone, I would not fight unless in the name of some cause for which I was willing to give my life. I have never seen any of these people display the slightest rudeness to anyone. They do not act like they regard themselves as the top caste in a natural hierarchy of human worth based upon strength. They are the politest people in the gym.
Perhaps this instinctive respect and reserve comes from the fact that they are too proud of their superiority to the betas that surround them to even bother being rude. More likely it is because they have been forced to live on friendlier terms with weakness. As much as building strength involves extreme effort, it also means, when the time comes—when the barbells are racked again and the plates back on their metal pegs, and you’ve jog-walked home and showered—not only accepting but almost coddling your own exhaustion. If you truly believe that strength is the most important thing in life, you can only resent this. Perhaps you can try to resist it. But fighting your weakness—getting back to the gym too soon, starving yourself, overdoing cardio on your off day—will only make things worse. Weakness and strength are systole and diastole, to borrow one of Emerson’s favorite metaphors.
More: we build strength only by confronting, in every workout, the outer limits of our strength as it currently exists, limits that we know we won’t be able to move outward forever. To know, with certainty, that I can deadlift a certain amount five times, and no more, is also to know that I cannot deadlift an infinite number of larger amounts. I’ll make my incremental progress for a while, but I won’t conquer infinity by steps. Eventually we add our last plate; someday we do our last rep. We age, and become curvy again like the younger self we may still be fleeing, or we waste and therefore grow weak as he was. Accepting this is, in a way, our last test of strength.
That is the price of living in a world that is bigger than ourselves, a world that strength makes us useful to but not superior over. That price is worth paying. Finitude is not much to trade for the privilege of existing on this planet, and a little solid effort in the gym is just enough to remind you that you are, for now, alive, alongside—whatever their gender, and whether or not they even lift—all your bros.
Art credit: Patrick Waugh, Masc, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Some time ago, I was in a hotel room, scrolling my phone, and enraged, as usual, at my body. The source of my rage was, again as usual, what I think of as “my weight problem,” though there have been only two extended periods of my life—childhood and my early thirties—when anyone but me would have thought my weight was a problem. At worst, it is a situation. I was very fat in middle school, and have spent, now, more than three decades looking over my shoulder at the owlish, plodding, rotund child I was, a child with the sort of face that is said to invite bullying, perhaps because he is looking at everything but the fist that swiftly approaches his jaw. This child walks slowly but steadily after me. He is never far back enough.
That night, for whatever reason, I was quite conscious of him, and I found myself looking again for a solution to the problem of my never-quite-hard-enough body. I ended up reading a lot about weight lifting. Though I had lifted weights unsystematically for decades—almost as long as I had been exercising at all—I had given strikingly little thought to the subject. Mostly, I just tried to stick with it in between long, punishing runs. Weights were part of a broad, continuous and painful campaign designed to differentiate my body from that child’s. Wherever his body curved, mine must be lean, angled. Where his body was useless, mine must be strong, enduring—a man’s body, some part of me still insists, though I know that childbirth tests one’s strength, that monthly periods require a certain endurance, that women serve with distinction in the military, and that there is nothing more deserving of the term “hysteria” than the feverishness with which some people still argue for the special relationship of masculinity to strength.
Somehow that night I ran across the work of Casey Johnston, who used to write a column called Ask a Swole Woman for the Hairpin, then for Self and then for Vice, before joining the growing army of newslettrists. My weight-lifting habit, as her writing explained, was an illustration of the difference between exercise and training. Exercise uses energy, burns calories, perhaps maintains a certain level of fitness. Training aims at definite improvement. “The difference between a workout and training,” she writes, “is a smart, predictable increase of intensity.” In other words, you increase weights every time you lift, at least at the beginning. The excitement with which I binged Johnston’s writing that night, and the immediacy with which I implemented several of her ideas on my return home, came from the thought that I might, in my early forties, still be capable of improving at anything. As is so often the case, the best way into a hobby stereotyped as masculine was to read a woman.
●
How and when did we become exercisers? It is difficult to establish a clear picture of the grouped history of exercise, physical training, physical culture and sports. They are like the bourgeoisie, always emerging. One reads of Henry James taking up, say, fencing in order to “reduce,” or Elvis rededicating himself to karate. There are Patroclus’s funeral games, and the epic brawls of Jacksonian America: little keyhole glimpses of something that seems too diffuse to really have a history.
But exercise does have a history, or at least, it has historians. Exercise historian Shelly McKenzie, for example, sees a turn toward “self-centered” forms of exercise during the post-World War I era, as Americans sought to develop “personality” rather than “character.” On McKenzie’s account, these tendencies continue throughout the twentieth and 21st centuries, leading to a situation in which we use exercise to add little marks of meritocratic virtue to our bodies. It is “a personal accomplishment,” like the degree we hang on our wall.
Exercise is a way to react—continuously, generation after generation—to the fact that our society is both complex and leisured enough that many workers can sit down all day, a fact for which we have never forgiven ourselves. (McKenzie’s book came out in 2013, the year of the standing desk, and it ends with a call to put “moderate amounts of energy expenditure back into our daily lives.” She praises, you guessed it, the treadmill desk.) There have been repeated spasms of concern over both the physical and spiritual degradation of sit-down jobs. In his history of office work, Cubed (2014), Nikil Saval quotes various early pundits drawing an explicit contrast between the degraded bodies of clerks and the sunburnt, rippling bodies of “real” workers. In Victorian schools, individual exercise was promoted as a way to build character and virtue and, reading between the lines, to burn up energy that might otherwise fuel masturbation, which was, like clerical work, thought to make a person weak, whitish, grublike. Slightly later, Teddy Roosevelt promoted both individual exercise and team sports as a way to, very literally, “save” that chimera known as the white race.
Individual exercise reemerges in the context of postwar affluence, as the very men who helped win World War II found themselves disturbingly slow and flabby after ten years of commuting to the office. Successive Cold War presidents, beginning with Eisenhower, supervened in “transforming the pursuit of physical fitness from a suspicious pastime of narcissistic deviants to a requirement of self-fulfillment and civic life,” as historian and Equinox instructor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela writes in Fit Nation (2022). They did so, Petrzela notes, without bothering to build the physical infrastructure—more pools, more parks, more walkable cities and suburbs—that would encourage such effort. This was how it came to pass that George H.W. Bush teamed with Arnold Schwarzenegger to encourage middle schoolers of my generation to do pull-ups.
One can poke holes in the ideas that came along with this new emphasis on exercise, or object to the less than benign social forces they sometimes encouraged. The elevation of the skinny-yet-somehow-curvy late-teenage girl as the ideal female body, for example, was a crime against humanity. Jingoism is irrational. But there’s really no case to be made against exercise as such. The science behind the folk wisdom that it’s better to move than not to move was laid out fairly clearly in Kenneth Cooper’s Aerobics (1968), one of those paperback bestsellers that fanned out across Middle America. Since then, the epidemiological picture has sharpened itself to a certainty.
●
By ninth grade, through daily slow jogging, I had mostly, as the common and telling image has it, “torched” the fat that I had carried through childhood. I could have used my new and much thinner body to seek out activities that I enjoyed and was good at. Instead, I kept running. I learned of the existence of a sport called “cross-country,” and applied myself to four years of fruitless misery.
I hated basically every second of cross-country practice—the grueling interval runs, the ribbing and outright bullying by teammates (who had all been ribbed and bullied in their turn), the feeling of bile rising to mid-gullet that afflicted me within the first hundred meters of every race and never stopped, the occasional near-collapsing at the end of a race as my consciousness contracted to a pinhole. Most of all, I hated that the last of these outcomes signified success.
But, perversely, I sought this pain. I didn’t enjoy it, as a masochist would, but I thought that it was the proper goal of my running, or at least the only goal under my control. I could train and train and still not be as fast as someone with better genetics. But there was nothing stopping me from working harder, and suffering more, than my rivals. Such suffering would perhaps be good for my character, as well as my relationship with a stern and rather unimpressible Baptist God. If I were to join the army after high school, and get caught by the enemy and subjected to torture, cross-country might make me strong enough to withhold information, even when they went for my fingernails. Cross-country could make me something better than successful—it could make me worthy of success.
Not once in four years did it ever occur to me that this internal messaging might have been getting in my way; that telling myself, at the beginning of a mile time trial, “Let’s really hurt ourselves today” might be slowing me down a little. By the end of the third or fourth race of the season, I always seemed to settle into a performance slump that lasted through November. Coach thought I was malingering. If a person as motivated as I was faced repeated slumps, it is no mystery, and perhaps such a self-punishing approach to a sport is, in its perverse way, a kind of malingering.
This outlook was, I now recognize, merely the machismo of the naturally ungifted. I do not wish that I had instead been some sort of dominant and cruel young “alpha.” Indeed, I wish I had not so nearly resembled such athletes in their terror of weakness and will to control, which I simply projected inward when the external world proved unavailing. Almost any other attitude would have served me better, including mere apathy.
These days, I run about as hard as I feel like, for the pleasure and the air and the benefits to my heart and waistline, several times a week. It is possible to have a healthy relationship to running (I suspect that most runners do).
The rest of the time, I train.
●
It’s not that weight training can’t lead to the sort of demented self-punishment that running so long tempted me to. Some lifters absolutely take a similarly maximalist approach. It’s just that their attempts do not work. Runners can, for a few days or even weeks, lie to themselves about how exhausted they are, or tell themselves that the point of their activity is, in part, learning to ignore fatigue and pain. A weight lifter won’t make it through the next session. If I try to do a set of heavy dead lifts before my body has recovered, I will simply fail. This means that the bodily adaptation to this new weight—or new number of repetitions—that I am doing all this work in order to provoke won’t happen. Rest, food and water are mandatory. You have to quit when you’re done.
All the writers on weight lifting are adamant on this point. Mark Rippetoe, the venerated lifting coach, writes that “You don’t get big and strong from lifting weights—you get big and strong by recovering from lifting weights.” Johnston describes soreness not as the sign of a great workout but as “the gap between what you did to break down your muscles with exercise … and what you gave them to rebuild themselves.”
In weight training, you ask a lot of your body for a very brief, incredibly focused interval of time. Then you stop. You give your body time to rebuild. You make higher, steeper demands, stop, rebuild. And so on, till you approach either the outer limits of what you, an adult with a job and obligations, can reasonably do, or your own willingness to chase further gains.
I had always avoided the big compound lifts—the exercises that involve many muscle groups working together simultaneously. In addition to all the other things I dislike about myself, I am clumsy. When my anxiety is properly medicated, my clumsiness is worse. So I thought that if I did, say, heavy squats or dead lifts, I was likely to hurt myself or someone else. It turns out that this is actually a good reason to practice big, simple movements that involve the entire body, such as the squat. In addition to training your muscles to handle more weight, you are also training your nervous system to monitor and control all those muscles at once. In other words, it is good for an uncoordinated person to practice coordinating.
The point is to start with a weight low enough that you can actually handle it in the beginning. This is humiliating. No adult wants to be seen squatting an empty bar, and struggling to do so, in public. By the same token, there is relief in realizing that nobody is watching—nobody really sees you squatting that bar, because they have lives and workouts of their own. And since much of the learning you’re doing in the early months is, often enough, about form and muscle memory, you can move up weight fairly quickly. The weight that I squat is, at this point, a number so objectively low that I’m not interested in putting it in print; it’s also nearly 150 pounds more than what I started out with.
I have discovered another benefit to lifting, which is mental. I have never quite figured out what “mindfulness” is, but I know that I am the sort of person who is held to benefit from practicing it. Unfortunately, precisely because I am this kind of person, meditation makes me angry. A compound lift, it turns out, involves the exact amount of being-here-now that my mind is capable of. Ask me to sit still and concentrate on my breathing, and I will panic. Ask me to lift a heavy weight off the ground without throwing out my back—to keep the legs involved, activate the posterior chain, avoid hyperextension (and do all this fast, before I have a chance to register just how heavy the bar is)—and it makes me remain in my body without getting bored. I know from experience that I simply cannot think about, say, climate change while doing a heavy dead lift. The activity itself forces good form on both mind and body. It’s a sort of violent yoga.
Though the goals of building bulk and losing fat are often treated as incompatible, I have not found them to be so. When you lift weights, you are forced to eat with a purpose: you have to get enough protein. This probably takes more time than weight lifting. It is certainly more of an affront to the senses, given the chalky taste of protein powders. On any given day, by the time I am done collecting every last elusive gram, and incidentally cramming in enough fiber to ensure that whatever my cause of death it won’t be one of those cancers that insistently reminds your mourners that you had a gastrointestinal tract, I don’t really want to eat much else. Between that and the fact that I walk to work, there’s a calorie deficit most days. And meanwhile the weights—though not my weight—go up.
They will not go up forever. I am still in the honeymoon phase of lifting, the period of “newbie gains.” When I reach the end of that period, various methodological tweaks await me, which each have their own funny names (Madcow, Super Squats and the like) and their own partisans. I can somehow eat even more protein, or take up rowing, or swing kettlebells. Or perhaps a car will hit me tomorrow. At least, by consciously setting out to build strength, I have learned not to hate weakness so much.
●
This is, to put it mildly, not the most common way that lifting gurus—especially the male ones—have described its virtues. Mark Rippetoe’s canonical lifting guide, Starting Strength (2005), begins thus:
God bless him, he’s direct. This is Nietzsche in a nutshell, social Darwinism for the Muscle and Fitness reader. We are often said—not least by some of Rippetoe’s more ardent fans—to be experiencing a crisis of masculinity. There are thoughtful versions of this idea, based in the notion that men need new stories to tell themselves and new examples to work from in a technological society where fewer people need to be physically strong. I would argue that those stories and examples often lie close to hand; it’s just that they are not always labeled For Men Only. This is no reason not to profit by them. More often, the idea of a masculinity crisis is simply a neutral-sounding name for the fact that most people don’t think physical strength is the most important thing in the world.
I could argue against this idea by pointing to, say, every major religious tradition in the world. “My strength is made perfect in your weakness,” wrote St. Paul, who did not realize how much happier he’d be if his squat strength went up. Or I could note that it substitutes a means (strength) for an end (any of the things we want to be strong for). But the best refutation is the one that never leaves the original system of thought behind. The person who really lived as though physical strength matters more than everything in life would be a thoroughly neurotic invalid. Unlike Rippetoe, a COVID-19 lockdown skeptic, he would live in terror of any illness that might interrupt his training. He would never use his strength for anything but building more strength, just as misers never enjoy their wealth, needing every scrap of it to generate more compound interest.
Weight lifters mostly don’t act like they think this, in my experience. (Even Rippetoe, in his video tutorials, comes off as a relatively jovial sort, not the grim Frank Miller-esque figure his writing suggests.) There are several men, and a number of women, who regularly use my gym who, just estimating from size alone, I would not fight unless in the name of some cause for which I was willing to give my life. I have never seen any of these people display the slightest rudeness to anyone. They do not act like they regard themselves as the top caste in a natural hierarchy of human worth based upon strength. They are the politest people in the gym.
Perhaps this instinctive respect and reserve comes from the fact that they are too proud of their superiority to the betas that surround them to even bother being rude. More likely it is because they have been forced to live on friendlier terms with weakness. As much as building strength involves extreme effort, it also means, when the time comes—when the barbells are racked again and the plates back on their metal pegs, and you’ve jog-walked home and showered—not only accepting but almost coddling your own exhaustion. If you truly believe that strength is the most important thing in life, you can only resent this. Perhaps you can try to resist it. But fighting your weakness—getting back to the gym too soon, starving yourself, overdoing cardio on your off day—will only make things worse. Weakness and strength are systole and diastole, to borrow one of Emerson’s favorite metaphors.
More: we build strength only by confronting, in every workout, the outer limits of our strength as it currently exists, limits that we know we won’t be able to move outward forever. To know, with certainty, that I can deadlift a certain amount five times, and no more, is also to know that I cannot deadlift an infinite number of larger amounts. I’ll make my incremental progress for a while, but I won’t conquer infinity by steps. Eventually we add our last plate; someday we do our last rep. We age, and become curvy again like the younger self we may still be fleeing, or we waste and therefore grow weak as he was. Accepting this is, in a way, our last test of strength.
That is the price of living in a world that is bigger than ourselves, a world that strength makes us useful to but not superior over. That price is worth paying. Finitude is not much to trade for the privilege of existing on this planet, and a little solid effort in the gym is just enough to remind you that you are, for now, alive, alongside—whatever their gender, and whether or not they even lift—all your bros.
Art credit: Patrick Waugh, Masc, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.