“Make me a muscle.”
Even at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, I knew to stick my arm out obligingly and contract my biceps. My father, passing through the room on his way somewhere else, would give my upper arm a squeeze and laugh. “Very good,” he’d say. Then he’d make a muscle back and ask, “Am I fit or what?” It became a family joke.
My father, who at age 21 moved from Hong Kong to New York in the late 1960s, was more an acolyte of Bruce Lee than of Jack LaLanne. But he’d long been an attentive multidisciplinary student of what I’ll call Muscle Academy. Everything from practicing judo, taekwondo (in which he earned a brown belt) and karate (a black belt) to steeping himself in fitness Americana: bodybuilding competitions on TV, a subscription to Muscle & Fitness, sketches of famous athletes. By day, he was a professional artist who, among many other accomplishments, created the posters advertising the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo on ABC and, with them, the glorification of the competitors — our modern gods on Earth. On the wall above my bed at home on Long Island, I hung my favorite of the series, an ice skater midspin, all fury and speed.
We always had a makeshift home gym, equipped with a motley collection of free weights, hand grips and pull-up bars, as well as nunchaku, jump-ropes and heavy punching bags. As far back as memory serves, my brother and I were drafted to join our father in training sessions. A recently unearthed Polaroid shows us, impossibly tiny in diapers and barely a year apart, standing alongside our father — who was indeed impressively fit in his swim trunks — all of us proudly grinning, arms akimbo in a superhero pose. It was 1979, the heyday of the movie “Superman.” All we needed were three capes to complete the look. “Am I fit or what?”
Every evening in the garage, the three of us moved in formation: forward kick, side kick, roundhouse kick. Our father would ask us to hold down his legs while he did sit-ups, or my brother and I would dangle from his biceps like a pair of baby monkeys while he lifted and swung us. After dinner, under the yellow sodium glare of the neighborhood streetlights, we’d flank him on nighttime jogs down to the parking lot behind our pediatrician’s office, a mile away. We’d chase lightning bugs — and our dad.
Exercise was fun in our house, because our father was a perpetual kid, wonderful at playing. Certainly, there was a measure of vanity involved. He had a febrile imagination; as he molded us into miniature versions of him, he enjoyed the fantasy that he could live forever through us, his modest experiment in immortality. “Pick a sport,” he said. First, we tried soccer, which didn’t stick, then swimming, which did.
What did we learn, as children, from all of this early training? That being strong was good, for both of us. Perhaps the most striking thing about the physical education my brother and I received under the tutelage of our father was that he trained us equally, without regard for size, age or gender. He set us upon each other for sparring practice. If one of us kicked or punched the other to tears, my father would exclaim, “You forgot to block!” Then he’d laugh his big laugh, dispense fierce hugs and have us go another round.
I grew up feeling that there was value in physicality and that in this arena, I was limitless.
In his way, my father was trying to tell us that muscles deserve more consideration than we give them. We often think about muscle as existing separately from intellect — and maybe even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. I’ve spent the past few years writing a book about muscle, and this is what I have learned: The truth is that our brain and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth; our long-term brain health depends on muscles — and moving them — especially when it comes to aging bodies. But the closeness of muscle and mind is not just biological.
Being a writer as well as a lifelong athlete, I can’t help but notice how language is telling. Muscle means so much more than the physical thing itself. We’re told we need different metaphorical muscles for everything: to study, to socialize, to compete, to be compassionate. And we’ve got to exercise those muscles — put them to use, involve them in a regular practice — for them to work properly and dependably.
We flex our muscles to give a show of power and influence. We have muscle memory; it’s a nod to the knowledge we hold in our bodies, of all things sensory, physical and spatial. We lift ourselves up and jump for joy. We muscle through hard things, which shows grit. Even when it’s a stretch, we still try.
The way you build muscle is by breaking yourself down. Muscle fibers sustain damage through strain and stress, then repair themselves by activating special stem cells that fuse to the fiber to increase size and mass. You get stronger by surviving each series of little breakdowns, allowing for regeneration, rejuvenation, regrowth. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues in the human body. It responds to changes in the environment, growing when we put in the work, shrinking when we stop. After illness or injury, it can remember how to rebound. The research bears this out: Even exercisers who begin late in life are remarkably capable of transformation.
When we talk about what moves us as human beings, it’s muscle. At the most basic level, muscle is the stuff that powers and animates our existence.
We move our bodies through the world, and our minds follow. The artist Paul Klee described visual art as a record of movement from beginning to end: “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” A drawing of a dancer, say, is made by a roving hand, which pins down the movement of the dancer, and the finished work is then appreciated by a viewer’s ever-tracking eye (with an assist from the extraocular muscles).
The idea that robust physical health enables strength in other arenas of your life dates to the ancients: Seneca and other Stoic philosophers wrote about the interconnectedness of sound body and mind. The physical work of building muscle can give you a feeling of flourishing and of agency. Today the same idea drives the scientific literature behind weight lifting as an effective intervention for post-traumatic stress. In an age when virtual technology and society conspire to divorce mind from body and silo us from others, simply moving together in the same space can remind us of our shared humanity — what the psychologist Dacher Keltner, building on Émile Durkheim, likes to call “collective effervescence.” As humans, we’re built to move; as social creatures, it means something to move together.
“Make me a muscle.” Everyone has been asked to make a muscle at some point, to demonstrate a whole host of things, tangible and intangible: strength, flexibility, endurance. Show me you’re in good form. Show me you’re a person of action. Character that’s grounded in something you can feel. It’s a way to assert presence. To say: I am here — conscious, corporeal, alive.
This philosophy of muscle is one that I want to live by. Fitness guarantees nothing, of course. Exercise is not a panacea for death. My father’s father died of a heart attack at 64. After that, my father’s fitness discipline was suddenly clarified as a daily grounding, in a way that was not future-oriented but present-oriented. In observing him, I learned the importance of exercise as a practice — not of becoming but of being.
Bonnie Tsui (@bonnietsui8) is the author of “On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters,” “American Chinatown” and “Why We Swim.”
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Bonnie Tsui is the author of “Why We Swim” and “Sarah and the Big Wave.”
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