Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives

by Michael Joseph Gross

ISBN: 9781399633321

Published: 2025-03-13

'Even if you've never picked up a weight, Stronger is for you' - Arnold Schwarzenegger No matter how you think of yourself - strong or weak, large or small - you are substantially made of muscle. To the last day of your life, your ability to stand and go where you want to go, your agency and effectiveness in the world, will depend on it. But what is muscle? From the battlefields of Homer's Iliad, where muscles first entered world literature, to the Victorian-era gymnasiums where women built strength and muscle by lifting heavy weights, to a retirement home in Boston, where a young doctor discovered that training at high intensity can produce the same relative gains for frail ninety-year-olds as for thirty-year-olds, Stronger places the science and significance of our muscles in an astonishing new light. Ancient binaries of brain versus brawn created an enduring prejudice against muscle, and against the type of exercise that best builds strength. Yet the research proves that weight...