Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle, Strength, and Human Potential | Michael Joseph Gross

Summary

Summary of "Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle, Strength, and Human Potential" with Michael Joseph Gross

Episode: Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle, Strength, and Human Potential | Michael Joseph Gross
Host: Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
Release Date: July 1, 2025

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon welcomes Michael Joseph Gross, the esteemed author of Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives. Together, they delve deep into the multifaceted role of muscle in shaping our culture, health, and personal identities. Gross, with his extensive investigative research spanning eight years, uncovers the often-overlooked significance of muscle beyond mere aesthetics, emphasizing its critical impact on longevity, mental health, and societal structures.

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The Cultural History of Muscle

Gross opens the conversation by exploring the historical perceptions of muscle, tracing back to ancient civilizations. He highlights that muscle was once misunderstood and undervalued:

"My guest today is Michael Joseph Gross, author of Stronger the Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives. He spent years exploring how muscle has shaped culture, health, and identity and why it deserves a prominent place at the table in healthcare." [00:24]

Gross recounts how ancient Greeks admired muscle aesthetics without a true understanding of muscle physiology. Sculptures emphasized the lines and tendons rather than the muscle tissue itself. It wasn't until the Roman era that figures like Galen of Pergamon began recognizing muscle's role in movement, albeit still shrouded in misconceptions about substances like pneuma (breath or wind).

"They didn't even have words that would tell the difference between mind and body. The choice to see ourselves as split down the middle is that it comes from a history of choices that people have been making for thousands of years." [01:32]

This historical ignorance perpetuated a stigma around muscle-building, portraying it as antagonistic to rational thought and spiritual well-being.

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Muscle and Health

Dr. Lyon and Gross discuss the scientific advancements that have reshaped our understanding of muscle as a vital organ system integral to overall health. Gross emphasizes that muscle influences numerous physiological processes:

"Muscle is at the core of who we are." [66:05]

They explore groundbreaking studies, such as the 1990 Journal of the American Medical Association publication on high-intensity strength training in nonagenarians. This study challenged the long-held belief that muscle building was ineffective in older adults, demonstrating significant strength gains and improved mobility even in the 80s and 90s age group.

Gross highlights the Center for Strong Medicine in Australia, where muscle-centric treatments are integrated into medical care:

"Every single patient who comes to this doctor gets a prescription for weight training that is truly targeted as treatment for whatever chronic diseases they have." [60:15]

This approach showcases muscle as a therapeutic tool, addressing conditions ranging from depression to muscle atrophy caused by medications like statins.

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Gender and Strength Training

A significant portion of the discussion centers on gender dynamics in strength training. Gross narrates the inspiring story of Jan Todd, one of the strongest women in history, who broke barriers in the predominantly male-centric world of weightlifting during the 1970s.

"Jan Todd, 18 months later, just 18 months later, earns her first entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. She breaks a record in the women's deadlift that had stood for 50 years." [37:27]

Gross underscores the historical presence of women in strength training, noting a decline after early pioneers due to societal pushback and misconceptions about femininity and muscle building. However, the resurgence of female athletes today, like the powerful center forward named Sharon in a studied soccer team, indicates a cultural shift towards embracing women's strength.

"Strength training is not something that women need to feel like aliens about." [48:42]

Despite progress, Gross points out that women remain underrepresented in gyms and strength training communities, advocating for increased accessibility and normalization from a young age to combat age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia).

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Muscle as Medicine

The concept of muscle as medicine is a pivotal theme in Gross's book. He articulates how strength training goes beyond physical appearance to influence mental health and metabolic functions.

"For most people, for about 75% of people, [strength training] was as effective as the most effective antidepressant drugs." [28:18]

Gross discusses the synergistic relationship between the neurological and muscular systems, revealing that activities like weight training can significantly improve mental health outcomes, including reducing symptoms of depression.

Additionally, the episode touches on innovative medical practices like the Center for Strong Medicine, where muscle-centric therapies are prescribed to address various health conditions, demonstrating the practical applications of Gross's research.

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The Future of Strength Culture

Looking forward, Dr. Lyon and Gross contemplate the cultural evolution needed to elevate muscle training to a fundamental aspect of health and well-being. Gross envisions a future where strength training is as routine as brushing teeth, integrated seamlessly into daily life and medical practices.

"Hundred years from now, everybody is a gym person because everybody is a gym person." [78:13]

They advocate for educational reforms, including incorporating exercise physiology into medical school curricula and creating supportive infrastructures like buddy systems in gyms to promote intergenerational strength training.

Gross introduces the concept of kairos—the idea of doing the right thing at the right time—as essential for sustainable and effective strength training, emphasizing discernment and adaptability over rigid regimens.

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Conclusion

The conversation wraps up with a heartfelt endorsement of Gross's work, highlighting its potential to transform societal perceptions of muscle and strength. Dr. Lyon encourages listeners to embrace the insights from Stronger to enhance their own lives and advocate for a healthier, stronger world.

"Muscle is autonomy, it's memory, it's mood, it's movement. When you build muscle, you're not just lifting weight. You're lifting your capacity to live, to connect, and to shape your world." [81:59]

Stronger emerges as a seminal work that redefines muscle not just as a physical attribute but as a cornerstone of health, identity, and societal progress.

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For those inspired by this episode, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle, Strength, and Human Potential is available at all major bookstores and online retailers. Embrace the journey of strength and discover how muscle truly is medicine.

Transcript

[Gabrielle Lyon]

You've been told to walk more, to lose weight, to focus on cardio, but.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Here'S what you likely haven't been told.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Muscle is one of the most underappreciated systems in the body, and the consequences of ignoring it are showing up everywhere. Muscle supports your brain, helps regulate blood sugar, and plays a critical role in.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Whether you remain physically independent as you age.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

My guest today is Michael Joseph Gross, author of Stronger the Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives. He spent years exploring how muscle has shaped culture, health, and identity and why.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

It deserves a prominent place at the table in healthcare.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Keep watching if you want to not only add years to your life, but more importantly, add life and strength to your years. Michael Joseph Gross, welcome to the show.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Thank you, Gabrielle.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

I have to say that you have written my new favorite book.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Oh.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And I was thrilled when you agreed to come on the show. This book is called Stronger, and it.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Is the untold story of Muscle in our lives.

Thank you so much for having me.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

This book does something that I've never seen. It brings history, the history of muscle, the history of movement, and. And it integrates science. Really well done.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Tell me about why. Why this book.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

And to be fair, you are an.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

How long did it take you to write this book?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Eight years. Full time?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

This is crazy.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

The idea how wrong we got. Skeletal muscle mean.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

The gift of strength.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yeah. I mean, Greeks were as likely to talk about strength as something you receive as to talk about strength as something that you have.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

That is an unusual way to frame it.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

What is super compensation? The super compensation effect?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And I have a quote from your book, and it's. Ancient Greeks considered strength not mainly as a quote, an individual accomplishment based on individual effort, but as a paradoxical phenomenon that depended partly on what a person did and partly on what help and gifts the person received from the gods.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

That's right.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

You know, I'm sure the listener, well, you guys better be interested in muscle. But really understanding. We talk about it in terms as if we've always known it. This is the bicep. This is the quadricep. But very few of us, myself included, has. Have thought about the History and putting it into context of what was thought of it before we knew it was actin and myosin and that these muscle fibers and muscle bellies were attached to various parts of the body. And there's a whole history of what we imagined it was.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

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[Gabrielle Lyon]

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[Michael Joseph Gross]

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[Gabrielle Lyon]

A year per capita.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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It is the strength of winning victory.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

So to the question of whether everybody participated. No. When we talk about ancient Greek athletes, we're talking about elite males in almost every case. Sparta was really the only place where younger women, girls and young women would be trained as a regular part of their education. But that was largely for eugenic purposes. So that they would be strong. They thought that strong mothers would produce strong sons and be strong warriors.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

They were actually right.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yes, yes. But. But that was really the main reason that women were allowed to train. It didn't continue beyond marriage.

Oh, really?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

That's fascinating. Do you know that our son's name is Leonidas?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

I do.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

After king of this part. Spartans. Yeah.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

That's a great choice.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

So he's a wallflower, as you can imagine. But that is very fascinating that people would get together. And this is really in stark contrast to modern sedentary lifestyles.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

It's really fascinating. And, you know, as I look forward into the book, there is chapter two, which is break and build.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

And.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And it is, you know, raises this question about athletic training having to do with happiness and well being. You know, you talk about there's this myth of, you should probably say the.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Name Cleobis and Byton.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yeah. Well, let me. Can I tell you the story of Cleobis and Viking?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yes, gymnasticus.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

My husband was very excited about that. He was just like, sign me up, where can I go? I'm ready.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

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[Gabrielle Lyon]

My pores should be, I don't know.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh my gosh. So morbid.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

You know, it's. It's again the history of muscle. And right now we've been talking about it from this historical perspective of ancient Greeks. But if we were to look at where we are now, I'm curious, as if you agree with this, that strength training and muscle is really been about men. From a historical perspective, the strength and muscle seems to be aside from the women that trained at Sparta to make better, stronger babies, which I fully believe it's really focused on our male counterparts. Is that in fact what the history shows? And how do we then move forward to some of the origin stories about strength and women because you have a very amazing character in your book. And she's not a character, she's a real person. Jan Todd, one of the strongest women in history.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Well, I have a two torn hamstring, but easily, I don't know, 200 some pounds probably.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

And what do you weigh?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

108.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Okay.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Probably lift more than that. Probably deadlift a little bit more than that. But yeah.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

So I want to tell you a story about how that is both a life changing feat and a world changing feat. Come with me to 1973 and let's go to really heavy duty grungy gym in Austin called the Texas Athletic Club. Now, like most gyms at the time, it is pretty much an all male space. And there's a young married couple who come in, Terry and Jan Todd. And Jan looks around and she realizes there's only one other woman in this whole gym. Jan's just there to keep her husband company. She thinks maybe she'll lift some light weights, maybe it'll make her posture a little better. But she looks over at this woman and she sees her lifting really heavy weight. The woman is about what you weigh. She's 115 pounds. And she builds up in the deadlift to about what you lift, about 225 pounds. And Jan just thinks it's like a religious revelation. She has never seen a woman exert great force by means of muscle before because she grew up at a time when, as she says, girls didn't play sport and girls didn't try hard. But in that day at the gym, she says she wants to try it. She builds up to that same amount of weight. She realizes she has a gift for this. And then she asks her husband, who just happens to be happens to have been the first US Men's powerlifting champion, do you think I might be able to go further if I tried this? Now, he doesn't really know women who train with heavy weights either because there are so few of them at the time.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

So wild. So wild.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

And he says, let's try it. So it's really Jan Todd, 18 months later, just 18 months later, earns her first entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. She breaks a record in the women's deadlift that had stood for 50 years. And that is the start of 10 years of being called the strongest woman in the world by Guinness and breaking one record after another. But one of the most Important things about this story, I think, is that it shows how women get stronger. When they see other women getting stronger, they're often all kinds of barriers that Jan Todd had to overcome. She had to get access to gyms. She had to overcome the prejudices of people in her life who believed that lifting weights was going to harm her body. One of them even said, if you keep deadlifting, your uterus will fall out. But she also. She also just had to overcome the. The isolation of not knowing other women who did this. And it was building those relationships. She. Eventually, it was because of Jan, in large part, that the first women's powerlifting competition finally happened in 1977. She then took over administration of the sport and coaching of the sport, and she created a space for more women to be able to get stronger.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Jan kept a scrapbook of clippings.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

My kind of girl.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Lifting weights at that time? There were really only a few women lifting weights, but much earlier, Jan eventually discovered it had been much more common in the Victorian era, if you can believe it.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

I cannot.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

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[Gabrielle Lyon]

It's Mud Water.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Now, I have two little children, therefore I do not have a perfectly structured morning routine. My days are full. And like most of you, I need something that helps support my focus, clarity and energy without wrecking my nervous system. And Mud Water has come to the rescue. It's not coffee, it's something even better. And it helps me in the afternoon with focus without making me feel wired. Mud Water is made with functional mushrooms. No, not that kind. Adaptogens and organic ingredients like cacao and turmeric. It's a totally different flavor than coffee and it really is amazing. No sugar, no artificial junk. Just clean, focused energy. And again, no crash. I love that it supports mood and immunity and focus. But what I really appreciate is how it helps me stay even. Because we've all experienced the too much caffeine effect. If you've been thinking about cutting back on caffeine or just want something that is different, then I highly suggest you try Mud water. Go to mudwater.com that's m u d w t r.com drlion and use the code doctorline to get up to 43% off your starter kit.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

What do you mean by that?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Tell me more. I mean, men are still much more likely to lift weights than women. According to one of the most recent publications on this, at any given day, 70% of the people in gyms are men. Strength training is part of women's cultural history. Strength training is not something that women need to feel like aliens about.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

That makes sense. And it's something that what I'm hearing you say that we've been doing for a long time and that we don't even know that we've been doing for a long time.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

That's right.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Which is extraordinary to think about. As this cultural narrative shifts in a hundred years, people are going to look back and tell the story of stronger and tell the story about how muscle reemerged as this organ of longevity and really reinvigorated, I think, a society. And hopefully have, you know, hopefully the message has global impact because it's really one of strength. And, you know, when we look out now, and part of your book also recognizes female athletes, do you think that there is a cultural shift happening?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Absolutely.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

They really believed that.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

The research is very clear that walking and just general physical activity do not preserve mass and strength.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And people get, from what I see, at least online, very upset about that. And what, in part, I believe that you're doing in this book is reexamining the past so that we have a better future.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yes.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Because if we do not recognize and look backwards, we will repeat the same things. And that's really what I'm seeing that you're doing is exposing where we come from and potentially where we're going so that we don't revert back to the same kind of behaviors that have seemed to follow us, like sedentary behavior, misunderstanding muscle, thinking that it's only about strength versus vitality and really strength as a privilege. Would you agree with that?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

That strength is a privilege?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah. It's not a luxury, it's a responsibility.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yes, it is a responsibility. Right now, unfortunately, the social reality is that it is a luxury. I mean, the people who are most likely to do strength training are the people who have college degrees or the people who have more money. And there's just no encouragement, there's no access. There are no systems set up to help most of our population learn this. There are so many things that could be done to change that. I mean, medical schools really need to open up the curriculum to include exercise and to weight strength training equally with aerobic exercise in how they teach about exercise. Nursing homes need to have leg press machines.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

I mean, that would be incredible.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Medicare needs to start reimbursing to have an exercise physiologist teach us how to exercise on the medical school board exams. There need to be exercise focused questions, because if there aren't, there's no practical reason for doctors to learn this.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And also, muscle is an organ system.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Yes.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Just like you take a cardiology exam, you take a pulmonary exam. When you're in medical school, you're learning all of these organ systems. Why would you not learn muscle?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

But muscle, even by many doctors, is still viewed as something superficial. Go back to aerobics, that book by Ken Cooper that was mega bestseller, tens of millions, maybe even a hundred million copies sold. And he says that muscular exercise is like just putting a paint job on a car that actually needs an engine overhaul.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Like so misinformed.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Muscle is so much more than a style choice. But you hear people say, I don't care about this, my muscles, which is insanity. You would never hear somebody Say I don't care about my pancreas, I don't care about my liver.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

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Another great thing that happens at the center for Strong Medicine is that little muscles get big attention. You know, triceps are one of the most important muscles for our long term well being because triceps do so much to help us be able to get up from a chair to be able to. I saw a man at the center for Strong Medicine in the center for Strong Medicine has a 2,000 square foot gym in the middle of it. That is the biggest part of this clinic. There are like 30 machines, 30 Kaiser machines there. And I saw a guy on the triceps push down and I went over and I said, what, what makes you do this? And he said, get off the bloody toilet. And well said, like I couldn't, I couldn't understand. And, and he said, he said, triceps are what allow me to get through the world. Like I. He has been on Lipitor, a statin. It's one of the most common drugs. And he just had the bad luck to have one of the rare side effects of Lipitor, which was a disease that just attacked his muscles and made them atrophy almost to nothing. So he came to this doctor. No other doctor had been able to help him because no other doctor had even thought to use exercise to treat him. But at the center for Strong Medicine, the Singhs said we're gonna. Even though it looks like you don't have any muscles, they're still there and we're gonna wake them up. They gave him this prescription and he was able to start making his way around the world again.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

I'll start with another story.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

I love stories.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

In terms of language or in terms of anything?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

What do we have to do to create a strong culture?

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Again, I think it needs to start with our kids. I think we need to really normalize strength training, thinking about being strong, thinking about our muscles for all of our kids, not just the athletes, not just the big kids, not just the boys. And in fact really emphasize for the people who don't look strong, who don't seem like they have the greatest potential for strength that they do. Because. Because there's a lot of research showing that sarcopenia, age related muscle loss that can just devastate us in our later years actually starts in childhood.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes, sir.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

And weakness in adolescence is the strongest predictor of disability in adulthood, according to a study of like a million Swedish soldiers that's been going on for longitudinal study that's been going on for years. So if we can build a really positive sense of strength and muscle into childhood and adolescence, that is going to get the ball rolling. But at the same time, we can't let go. We can't give up on old people. And the people who have the knowledge and the practices of strength training right now need to be sharing those. I don't know why there's not some kind of Peace Corps for training. I mean, I don't know why the big gym chains don't create some kind of buddy system. I mean, wouldn't you be willing to do a workout every week or every two weeks with an 80 year old who can't find her way around the gym?

[Gabrielle Lyon]

I'm always down. I'm always down. I mean my parents, when they're here, the deal is we're going to train and they love it. Although my dad's a little dangerous because he will not quit. He was a wrestler in college, he was captain of the wrestling team at Penn. And you just drop him in there and that guy has no quit at all.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Cold plunge.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Sign me up. Sled pushes. I'm in. I was like, dad, just chill a little. But I agree with you. And then I what is the answer? Because you know, during this conversation you really made me think about my own messaging as you were sitting there talking. Because I am the kind of girl that's no pain, no gain, don't break. Rule number one. Let's go. And maybe that has to be really reevaluated.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Discernment.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

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

[Gabrielle Lyon]

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

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Any bookstore? Any online bookseller? It's everywhere.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

It is everywhere. And if you are listening to this podcast, this is probably one of the more important podcasts that I've done. And by the way, I believe all of my podcasts are important because I'm so particular and the team is so particular about who we bring on. This book is extraordinary. It is unique, it is historical. And there are not many books that I think can pivot the way that the culture sees something. I think that this is one of those books.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Thank you.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

You have my absolute endorsement.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

If you are a friend of mine.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

Listening to this podcast and would like to connect with Michael, please, let's do that. And I will make that introduction because I think that everybody needs to hear what you have to say. So thank you so much for coming on and being a guest on the show.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Thank you, Gabrielle.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

If today's conversation with Michael Joseph Gross challenged the way you think about muscle, what it's for and who it's for, and why it matters, you are not alone. Being Strong isn't just a book about fitness. It's a cultural reframe of how we.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

See strength across age, gender, medicine, and society.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

The idea that muscle is only for.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

Athletes or aesthetics outdated. And as you heard today, muscle is medicine.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

It's autonomy, it's memory, it's mood, it's movement. When you build muscle, you're not just lifting weight. You're lifting your capacity to live, to connect, and to shape your world.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

If you're inspired to take action, start by rethinking about your own definition of strength. Like.

[Gabrielle Lyon]

And subscribe.

[Michael Joseph Gross]

And we'll see you next week. And as always, stay forever strong.