Stronger
The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives
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- 45,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
'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 enter world literature, to the Victorian-era gymnasiums where women build strength and muscle by lifting heavy weights, to the retirement home in Boston where a young doctor discovers 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 training can help prevent or treat many chronic diseases and disabilities throughout life, including depression, cancer, and diabetes. All of us, from elite powerlifters to people who have never played sports at all, can learn to lift weights in ways that yield life's ultimate prize: the ability to act in the world.
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Journalist Gross (Starstruck) presents a vigorous examination of the history and science of strength training. Charting the evolution of muscle-building exercise, Gross discusses how such ancient physicians as Galen and Seneca warned that working out too much risked under-developing the mind through neglect, how Victorian strongwomen were celebrated for their beauty despite prevailing beliefs that women should be "fragile and submissive," and how Soviet researchers revolutionized powerlifting by developing "periodization" (a training method that organizes workouts into cycles of increasing intensity) in the 1950s. Gross also profiles powerlifter Charles Stocking, detailing how fellow lifters taught him proper form to minimize his risk of injury, how a painful mistake shortly before a competition led him to adopt periodization, and how continued training keeps him feeling healthy into his 40s. "Even into oldest age... every person has some power to change how time changes the body," Gross contends, describing how geriatrician Maria Fiatarone Singh's research provided high-intensity strength training to the elderly residents of a Boston rehabilitation center and found that the training was safe and effective at building muscle even for nonagenarians. Buoyed by enlightening history and a cerebral bent (Gross emphasizes throughout that muscle's capacity to "modulate our power to act upon the world" enables "independence, autonomy, and agency"), this delivers. Photos.
