On Muscle and Mind: How Strength Training Changes Your Brain, Improves Your Mental Health, and Lengthens Your Life | Bonnie Tsui

What muscles are for, how to get them, and why it's never too late to start building them. Bonnie Tsui https://www.bonnietsui.com/ is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the bestselling author of Why We Swim https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-we-swim-bonnie-tsui/12566014?ean=9781643751375, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. Her newest book is called On Muscle https://bookshop.org/p/books/on-muscle-the-stuff-that-moves-us-and-why-it-matters-bonnie-tsui/21716153?ean=9781643753089&next=t&affiliate=1882. This episode is part of our ongoing Get Fit Sanely series. In this episode we talk about: The connection between our muscles and mental health The many benefits of strength training How society, culture, and history have shaped the way we think about beauty standards and strength Misconceptions about the six-pack Running as a tool for healing  The psychological impact of realizing your own physical potential The symbolism and science of the push-up  The connection between our muscles and our longevity Practical advice for beginning strength training And food habits that supports muscle growth Paid subscribers of DanHarris.com will have exclusive access to a set of all-new guided meditations, led by friend of the show Cara Lai https://www.caralai.org/#/, customized to accompany each episode of the Get Fit Sanely series. We're super excited to offer a way to help you put the ideas from the episodes into practice. Learn all about it here. https://www.danharris.com/p/a-month-of-guided-meditationsjust Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing today? Normally, I spend a lot of time laboring over a clever framing to these episodes. But my guest today says it way better than I ever could. So I'm just going to kick off this episode by reading a few key lines from said guest's new book. Here they are. "Muscles deserve more consideration than we give them. We often think about muscle as existing separately from intellect and maybe even

• 0:45Dan Harris?

  oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. 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." I'll just note that everybody's body is aging, so this is true for everybody, this connection between mind and muscle. My guest today, whose lines I just read, her name is Bonnie Choi. She's a former competitive swimmer, a current journalist, and award-winning author. Her new book is called On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. In this conversation, we talk about what muscles are for, what they do, why they matter, the connection between our muscles and our mental health, the many benefits of strength

• 1:29Dan Harris?

  training, how society and culture and history have shaped the way we think about beauty standards and strength, misconceptions about the six-pack, which I found reassuring, running as a tool for healing, the psychological impact of realizing your own physical potential, the symbolism and science of the push-up, the connection between our muscles and our longevity, practical advice for beginning strength training, which is tough for many folks, and food habits that support muscle growth. We're now in week three of our month-long series, which we're calling Get Fit Sanely, where we talk about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. Every episode this month comes with a bespoke guided meditation only for paying subscribers over on danharris.com.

• 2:12Dan Harris?

  Today's meditation is called Find Your Swole. Dharma teacher Cara Li helps you tune into your body with appreciation instead of self-criticism, something I myself am still working on. For more information, head on over to danharris.com. We'll get started with Bonnie Toye right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now.

• 2:57Dan Harris?

  That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for.

• 3:39Dan Harris?

  One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Bonnie Tsui, welcome to the show.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Dan.

• 4:26Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. All right, well, I'm gonna ask the most basic question. The most embarrassingly basic question is like, how does someone, namely you, come to write a book about muscle?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  This is a very good foundational question and one that I think I should be prepared to answer very often, once this book comes out. I wanted to continue the conversation of the body that I started with Why We Swim, which was my previous book. I think that muscles were a really interesting way in for me. It's one of those everyday things that people take for granted and they think they understand it, right? But do they really? Do we really? And yet, they're how we move, right? Whether it's the tiniest flea or the biggest whale, muscle is that stuff that propels creatures, big and small, through their lives. I also have a sort of personal through line that kind of runs through the book,

• 5:22Speaker 01

  which is that my dad, when I was growing up, my dad was a professional artist and he was also a martial artist. And so my brother and I were, from the time we were in diapers, you know, drafted to join him in the studio and he was training us up to, as he described it to us recently, "I wanted you to be my little ninjas." You know, he's a black mountain karate and he, he's just a very singular, special guy. And so we grew up in that environment. I grew up in New York and he had a downstairs studio that was both the art studio and also the place where there were free weights and the barbells and all kinds of hand grips

• 6:05Speaker 01

  and heavy bags and speed bags and all that stuff, because that's what my dad was interested in. And so that was normal for us. And so muscle, I've been thinking about muscle in both form and function since I was a little kid. And so when it came time to be talking about, oh, what's the next book? This kind of came up and then for all of us, it just kind of, this light bulb went off. And oh, that's it. That's the thing.

• 6:27Dan Harris?

  So your interest is on at least two levels. One, this sort of, I don't want to say academic or-

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Maybe just intellectually curious?

• 6:37Dan Harris?

  Intellectual curiosity around these things that we all take for granted. But as you say, power our lives. And then also is kind of- A way to reconnect with your dad?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that's it in a nutshell. And certainly because when I started writing this book, it was during COVID. And so my dad lives in China now. When my parents divorced, he moved back to Hong Kong where he grew up and then on to Beijing and then in Guangzhou where he lives now. And, you know, China being the first place to shut down and the last place to open up. It was one of those very strange realizations. Oh, I don't know when we'll ever see each other again in person, like in front of each other. And the sort of backstory to that is that my father's language is in person. You know, it's of the body. It's physical. It's like the hug, the hand squeeze, the eyebrow raise.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Like this is just sort of the spar, you know, the spontaneous sparring in the middle of a conversation. And so I kind of instinctively knew that there was a loss there and a kind of fear, I think, for myself personally. And I wanted to figure out some project that I could work on in which I would have things to talk to him about because he's also not great on the phone or over email or text based communication. So it really was a little bit of a lifeline, I think, for our relationship.

• 8:06Dan Harris?

  Can you give me, and by extension, everybody listening, muscles 101? If I understand correctly, there are three different types of muscles.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:18Dan Harris?

  You know, what are they for? What do they do? Et cetera, et cetera.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  You've got it. You remember that from biology class, right? So muscle is a tissue. It's made up of lots of little fibers and it's the largest organ in your body. It makes up about 40% of your body weight. As you so correctly mentioned, there are three types of muscle, which I think we all basically know, which is cardiac, smooth and skeletal. And so for the most part, the book deals with skeletal muscle, which is the muscle that we use to get around and that we control voluntarily. Cardiac is your heart muscle. Obviously, smooth muscle is the muscles that sort of line your organs and like push blood through your vessels and babies out of the uterus and like move food through your digestive tract.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And for the most part, we're born with a set number of these fibers. And so this was an interesting thing that I learned, which is that muscles grow bigger, not by multiplying, not by having those cells multiply, but by recruiting a special kind of stem cell, that's like a muscle stem cell that contributes its nucleus or its multiple nuclei to muscle growth and regeneration. So when you lift weights or tax your muscles in some way, you know, I think generally people know that you have these little micro tears in your muscles that then repair themselves and then your muscles get bigger, right? And that's sort of how they get bigger. But it's also not just a tissue for movement, like for locomotion, it's an endocrine tissue.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And this is something that I didn't know until I started researching this book, which is that it secretes signaling molecules that go all around your body to other parts of your body, like your brain, and tell it to do things. That's sort of the foundation of this question of like, how does your brain and your muscles talk to each other and why is that important? Which I think is kind of the science is getting into the mainstream where the public now knows, like you have to lift muscles throughout your life to benefit longevity and your brain health.

• 10:21Dan Harris?

  Well, let's go right there, actually, because I think that's really the core of what I wanted to talk to you about. This connection between, there are muscles that we have no voluntary control over, but those we do have control over. We can try to grow them or work them, exercise them, and there is a connection between that and our mental health and our brain.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yes. So this is sort of where the connection between happiness and movement has its roots, you know? So when you're moving, these protein molecules that we were talking about, they're called myokines, and they're released into the bloodstream. And when they arrive at the brain, they regulate all kinds of like physiological and metabolic responses in your brain. They can affect cognition and mood and emotional behavior. And so I like to think of them, and say this in the book, as a kind of love letter between your muscles and your brain. So when you're moving, Especially if you're exercising, but it could be, you know, you're taking a walk. You just get up from your desk and you take a walk and you're outside or you take a dance class or you go swimming or you go for a run.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  This is your muscles sending that love letter to your brain. You know, exercise stimulates what scientists call this like brain muscle crosstalk, you know, and that includes this formation of new neurons and new synaptic plasticity, which is that's the basis of learning and memory. And so one of the big takeaways, I think, from the book is that bulking up your muscles literally bulks up your brain. And isn't that great? The whole thing of kids do better in school with PE, it's true. And I loved learning the hard science behind it.

• 12:02Dan Harris?

  Is the only way to exercise your muscles lifting weights or cardio, what we call cardio, is also

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:09Dan Harris?

  growing your muscles. So it's not just that you're encouraging people to swing kettlebells.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yes, oh, yes. Swinging kettlebells is great. Lifting heavy weights is great. And we're learning that that is a really kind of quote unquote, strength training when you're actually bearing weight is really important throughout our lives and especially as you get older, just to kind of keep the muscle mass going. But exercise of all kinds. When you say cardio, it's the aerobic stuff, right? So like dancing, swimming, running, like anything that sort of gets your heart rate up and sends those dopamine and endocannabinoids around and makes you feel good. And that is that kind of sense of wellness and that high from movement that makes us happy. That is one kind of exercise. But then there's also the strength training, which is what you're talking about, where there's some kind of resistance to your muscles.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  And it could be body weight training too. It doesn't have to be like super heavy. When we say heavy weights, and I think generally speaking, people get a little bit scared off by like the lifting of weights or like weightlifting. They don't know how to do it. I don't want to injure myself at the gym. But when you're talking about lifting heavy weights, it's really about lifting a weight that's heavy enough with correct form. And this is why you please go to the gym and take a class. Like talk to a trainer, talk to a physical therapist, talk to someone who can lead you through this to not be afraid of it. And that's sort of like what I always told people about swimming too is like, I want to learn how to swim more. I want to do more, but what's the first step? First step is to find someone who can introduce you to these things and make you not afraid of it. Just learning the basics to keep you safe.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  But lifting heavy weights means that, you know, maybe you can do eight repetitions, 10 repetitions. And, you know, once it gets easier, then you kind of increase the weight. You have to start somewhere, but the flip side of that is that it doesn't take you very long to do that. You don't have to spend hours and hours and hours lifting heavy weights or swinging the kettlebells to get the benefits of lifting that heavy weight.

• 14:07Dan Harris?

  Just to say from my own personal experience, I didn't lift weights until my late twenties or early thirties. And I just went to a gym and I signed up for the gym and you got like three training sessions. And a trainer taught me how to lift weights. And occasionally I'll go back to a trainer to get help with my form. Or now I'm part of a group of people who get together many mornings during the week and work out together. And there's usually somebody in the room who can help me with my form. If I'm doing it incorrectly, it's easy for me to get hurt. But I just want to double down on what you were saying, that it's not ridiculously hard or expensive to get some basic instructions on how to lift weights, even though it can be intimidating for some people.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think really the hardest part is that first time. And to your point, once you kind of get familiar with all of the things that you can do. And I love that you just said that you do it with a group of friends because that is the perfect reinforcement. You know, you're committed to each other. It makes it fun, it makes it social and it makes you want to do it. Because if you don't show up, you feel bad about it because you have a social obligation to these people. And they do to you. And it's something that the activation energy then to do that is way reduced. And so you see that on the calendar, you know, that like Tuesdays and Thursdays, you know, you lift with this group of buddies and you're happy to do it. And also,

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I want to say that the kind of psychological mental health picture is related to that because you start and it's daily incremental gains. It's this sense that, you know, you're paying attention to yourself and very much present with your body in that period of time. And you notice what your body is doing that day. You notice how you feel. Maybe, you know, you're, I don't know, my left shoulder bugs me sometimes from all this paddling and swimming. And I'm kind of like, how does it feel today? Do I need to set my shoulders back when I'm trying to lift this weight? How do I feel as I'm like marshaling my resources to like, do this deadlift?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And I feel very grounded in my body in those moments. And I think that's the feeling I have been really noticing lately because this kind of concentrated lifting weights to kind of support like my everyday functional life and the things I want to do is actually relatively new to me. I did it when I was in college. I did it when I was in high school training for swimming, but it was not something that I did very much, you know, in the years since. And so I wanted to connect with you about what you were saying about working out with your friends and this trainer who can correct you every once in a while, which is that, you know, the daily incremental gains make you notice yourself. Put yourself in your body, situate yourself there. And then it's like,

• 17:04Speaker 01

  okay, the next week, the next month, the next year, suddenly you do notice the bigger gains.

• 17:10Dan Harris?

  The word gains, I'm just going to pick up on this for a second. I want to come back to the connection between movement and mental health in a big way. But just since we're on that word, my wife, who is a astute commenter on her husband's behavior, has noticed.

• 17:29Dan Harris?

  Since I about nine months ago started working out with this group of people every once in a while in the morning, which I really enjoy, like I love every minute of it. It's so much more fun to do it with a group. It's kind of this circuit training where we're all like at a station lifting weights, doing some sort of strength exercise. Sometimes it's body weight, sometimes it's actual weights and you're moving around the room, but everybody's very encouraging. I really like the culture of this group. It's run by my friend Strauss Zelnick. He wrote a book called Ageless Fitness. He's about to turn 68 and is ridiculously fit. But most of the people in the room are young.

• 18:08Dan Harris?

  So I'm like, other than Strauss, the oldest person usually. And I love everything about it. And my wife has pointed out that there's been a little bit of an uptick in my comparing mind as it comes to how muscular and fit do I look in the mirror as compared to some of the other people in the room. And that's a thing I've talked about a lot on this show and publicly that I do think the problems of orthorexia, you know, the unhealthy obsession with getting healthy, or the body dysmorphism that can result from working on your muscles. And so I'm just curious, like, how do you deal with that? And does any of this resonate for you?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what you describe is real. This fixation on our appearance, what we look like, certainly with respect to muscularity and the ideal body and all that has been ingrained in us since birth. It starts really young. I mean, look at Marvel superheroes, comic books, like the movies, magazines, like everything is shouting in your face, this is what you should look like. This is what you aspire to. In the course of researching this book, I noticed there was the Harvard Medical School publication headline that said, your five-year-old should not

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Be worried about a six pack. I mean, this was nuts. Your five year old boy specifically, because I think the research is showing that, you know, a lot of young men are experiencing, and there's more attention to it too, right? That boys and young men are also suffering from this messaging that they need to look a certain way, or that there's like a muscularity and a body that is what is the ideal and that should be working towards that. And that is like the be all and all of masculinity. Okay, so that's part of this like negative side of things. I think for myself, I'm not immune to that, right? Not immune to what the culture tells me I should look like, or what beauty is.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  But I think because of my strange upbringing with my dad, again, like as an artist and as a martial artist, that he trained my brother and myself up from a young age without regard for gender, age, or size. My brother and I are a year and a week and a day apart. So we're pretty much Irish twins, as I like to say. And I think because of that, strangely, I was a little bit inoculated against it. I also think that's where sports from a young age for kids is so huge in terms of confidence and an understanding that function is more important than form, or as important, right?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Meaning like what your body can do and what it's capable of and what makes it do well, perform well on the field, in the pool, on the pitch, like in whatever the arena of sport is, is more important than what it looks like. I spent a lot of time in the book talking, and there's a section of the book on form, and it's about kind of breaks down all of the stuff that we're talking about, like over millennia, you know, like when did Western culture start thinking muscles were beautiful? Goes back to Greek medicine, ancient Greek medicine versus like ancient Chinese medicine and sort of medical texts, you kind of see where there was like a divergence of like the perception of what a healthy, beautiful body is, you know? Like, early on, a lot of the-

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Texts and the philosophy of like what healthy is and what a body that's healthy does and looks like were much more similar, but there's a diversions that happens. And you kind of see these sculptures in Greek history where there's all these bulges and ripples where there actually aren't even any muscles, which is so funny. But there was a kind of understanding that like the articulated body that like kind of looked like this was healthy in some way before they even understood that muscles did this thing, the thing of like moving your body around. And in Chinese medicine, there wasn't actually even like a word or a character for muscle for a long time. And it was all about qi, it was about like the energy and the flow of energy through the body.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And that's sort of like where acupuncture comes from, right? That was healthy. So like a body that was healthy and strong in Greece was Hercules type body. And then in Chinese history, it was like, like a yogi with a full belly, you know, where you might be like, oh, that guy has a gut, but it's not, it's just full of qi. It's just interesting to see where all that comes from and that just kind of knowing that history makes you kind of understand that this stuff dates way back before any of the stuff that we're talking about even today, but there's a grounding there. And it's interesting to know that where those ideas came from and how they shape how we think about the beautiful body today.

• 23:07Dan Harris?

  Have there been periods of time in our human history where or cultures where having a larger body is the beauty standard?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. I mean, you look at the classic example for women, right? It's like Rubenesque, like this beautiful, like voluptuous, full, shapely, and to me, strong looking woman. I think that there are lots of examples of that. I would be very curious like what the language was at the time to kind of describe that. And if, you know, someone who was like kind of maybe whip it thin and like very muscularly, they would be viewed as being like underfed or something, right? They're not rich or they're not, it's a sign of that they haven't had the indulgences and the luxuries and the good things in life. To me, it's like a little bit like when people talk about skin, right? Like that if you're so fair, you haven't been exposed to the sun or you like, you don't haven't had to labor outside.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And so that was like in many cultures and still today, like that's a mark of, oh, this is like class, station. It's a social indicator of where you are in life.

• 24:12Dan Harris?

  Another thing you explore in the book is just as I'm trying to overcome my conditioning around, I think, a somewhat arbitrary aesthetic standard for men, that you should look like an ancient Greek sculpture.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:28Dan Harris?

  Because just as a side note, like, as I sometimes joke, it would take an archaeological dig to find the six pack I had in my 30s. And, and this is immodest, but my core strength, my ability to do ab exercises is better now than it was in my 30s. I can really get after it. So why am I so obsessed about how it looks in the mirror?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 24:54Dan Harris?

  As opposed to the fact that, like, it is functioning, my body is functioning at a really high level?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Can I tell you something that might make you feel better?

• 25:01Dan Harris?

  Sure.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Which is that I had a UCSF anatomist tell me. So I went to University of California, San Francisco, is one of the premier medical schools in the country. And I went there to do, well, to observe a dissection. And that is something that used to be at a public event that people would go to. And obviously now it's very different. But I think there's something lost in terms of knowledge, right? And understanding of the body and what a normal body or any body looks like underneath everything that we sort of present on the outside. And she said, you know, we have this obsession with six packs and abs. She said, the funny thing is, we associate it with fitness and we associate it with someone

• 25:46Speaker 01

  who's like really fit. And if you have ripped abs, you must be so fit. And she said, the reality is, that generally indicates that that person is just naturally lean. So you can see their abdominal muscles. It does not indicate that they are, have an extremely strong core necessarily. And so I just went. That's going in the book. People need to know that. I was so curious about all of those assumptions that we have. And what I wanted to kind of peel back was these layers like, but what does it really show? Is that really true? And one of the questions that I also asked this group of anatomists was, if a personal trainer was going to train an actor to be like a quintessential Marvel superhero, right, for the movies? What are the muscles that they're focusing on?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  And are those muscles actually really functional for strength? And that was one of the best conversations and episodes in the book. I just enjoyed it so much because they just broke it down. And they said, like, you know, like the deltoids are so, you know, these outer part of your shoulder is like so beautiful and everyone's obsessed with them. But thing is, they're like really easy to build up. So they kind of like bulk up quickly. But they're one of 17 muscles that work on the scapula. And in fact, if they're overdeveloped and your shoulder will get super messed up. If you don't work on those other ones, it's like, are these muscles actually the strongest? The biceps, right? That we think of, or this particular biceps is the stand in for strength. It is an emoji for strength. If you type strength into your bow and it shows up.

• 27:14Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And yet it's only the strongest muscle in the arm when you're making this motion. But if you extend it, there's another deeper muscle that's actually stronger. So it's like all these things that we kind of think about and symbols and character that we attribute to muscle that I just find so fascinating. And so I love that you're thinking and talking about this because we all have all these perceptions of muscles that we wish were developed more or like associate with our character traits. And I find that to be such like a, it's like a muscle Rorschach test.

• 27:53Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And in fact, I would like to ask you, because you've just talked about your abdominal muscles, as I know that you've talked about before, as like the one that you're most self-conscious about. But what's your favorite muscle?

• 28:05Dan Harris?

  I've never thought about that. What is my favorite muscle aesthetically or in terms of function?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Well, either. I want to give you a few minutes to think about it. If you haven't before, I'll just tell you that I love the shoulders and the shoulder complex because I think of it as swimming, right? Like I swam my whole life and I think shoulders are beautiful, right? So I think that they not only are functional, so gorgeous, but they also like as a metaphor for life, right? Like to shoulder something, to shoulder a burden, to put your shoulders back, square your shoulders, like it indicates a state of being, it's kind of existential. My like writer brain kind of runs away with it, but also like physically speaking, I also am like, I'm proud of my summer shoulders. I'm proud that I have swam since a young

• 28:56Speaker 01

  age and, and I can out paddle anyone I know, right? For me, I love that set of muscles. And I wondered, I wanted to ask you because you said, okay, abs, but like, I'm like, ah, abs, but what about something that you really, like when you go work out with your friends? Is there an exercise that comes around and you're like, oh yeah, this is the one I like? Because it makes me feel strong.

• 29:18Dan Harris?

  Huh. Well, ironically, actually, it is the abs muscle. When we're doing abs stuff, that's the time in the room when I feel the least far behind because I can actually really keep up with people on that one. For all the other exercises, I'm usually having to put lower weights next to what everybody else is doing. And I have to say, it's a very, and this, this is a shout out to my friend Strauss. It's like a very non judgmental group. It's not a big deal.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  We're all our own worst critic, right?

• 29:48Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Maybe that's it.

• 29:50Dan Harris?

  BTS here, behind the scenes. I never get to read people's full books because we have so many guests. The producer who is assigned to whatever episode we're doing always gives me a briefing document and this is Eleanor. Eleanor gave me some excerpts from your book and really highlighted the stuff she thought I would be most interested in. So she, I know about your interest in the shoulders and as a writer myself, really empathize with your, the writerly flights of fancy that can go along with it. I don't think it's fanciful, actually. I think it really, it is meaningful. And along those lines, and just to invoke Strauss again. Every morning of the week, he does a workout. I don't go to all of them, but I sometimes do them

• 30:33Dan Harris?

  because he posts in our WhatsApp, the daily workout. And sometimes I'll do it at home by myself. And yesterday I was doing it at home by myself. And I don't usually work out with my shirt off. I'm not that kind of guy, but it was hot in the room. So I was working out with my shirt off. And I was doing slightly bent over lateral raises. I had always thought, because I don't know much about anatomy, that those were for your delts. But as Strauss had explained to me a couple of days earlier, actually, it's much more for your traps. I guess.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 31:03Dan Harris?

  Trapezius.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, your trapezius muscles.

• 31:06Dan Harris?

  Uh huh. And I was looking in the mirror to make sure my form was good, because every time my form is off, I hurt myself. I looked up and I saw, wow, actually, like, I have reasonably well-developed trapezius muscles, probably because I swim too. I'm always so careful, even when I see things I like about my body, of not being sucked back into old habits of mine, culturally ingrained habits of mine. But I did take note of the fact that, oh, well, Strauss is very thoughtful about the way he designs these workouts. They're not all for the muscles that you see when you look in the mirror. It's for the full body strength. I wouldn't have ever noticed my trapezius muscles before, except for I'm doing this thing where I'm trying to get my form right and looking in the mirror.

• 31:49Dan Harris?

  So that was a long rant that probably takes us nowhere, but.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  No, the trapezius is actually one of those, the Marvel superhero muscles that they work on to signal strength. FYI. And so you're achieving Marvel superhero status.

• 32:03Dan Harris?

  But are they useful?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  They are useful.

• 32:05Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  But maybe not built up to the extent that they do when they're building up a Marvel superhero for a movie.

• 32:11Dan Harris?

  Let me assure you, I am not at Captain America levels.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't want to be. You're just going to hurt your shoulder. It's not, it's going to be totally out of whack. But I do want to say that it's okay to be proud of that. I also think of this from the perspective of being a woman in the world, which is, and this is also in the book, sort of society over the years, many, many years, telling women to be smaller, right? Make themself smaller in all of the ways. And this is what happens when you have a binary thinking when it comes to gender roles. And the sort of equating of man with strength and woman with weakness, right? And it's a balance of power. It's a power dynamic. And I think it's so interesting when you look.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Over the centuries at what muscular women or women who are physically strong, how they kind of disrupt that, right? They disrupt this binary thinking about gender roles and society being structured on that. Because what then happens, which is so interesting, is that power, physical power, extends into power of other kinds, you know, political power and such. But it's not a zero something. If I am strong, you can be strong too. But I think that zero sum thinking kind of dominates this power dynamic between men and women in society historically. And we kind of see it playing out even now, which is so crazy.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  But, you know, to have bodily autonomy and physical strength was also to have like reproductive autonomy and like control over like what your body is in the world. And so I do embrace this idea of knowing your own strength and potential and owning that, because I think so many times we tell ourselves not to do that. When I hear you talk about that, I'm like, no, you should own your traps, Dan. So I think that that's actually something that is obviously to a limit. But like, I think that that is not a bad thing categorically.

• 34:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, you're making so many important and nuanced points here. And just to try to kind of sum it up and put my own top spin on it and see if you agree. I'm going to talk in terms of binaries here and just from the don't at me on this. I know I'm doing it just for the purposes of this part of the discussion. Men, we have been socialized to want the Greco-Roman ideal, muscles where there aren't actually even muscles on the body, muscles on muscles. And so I agree with you. It's nice to be able to see the visible results of the work you're putting in in the gym. And it's a slippery slope.

• 35:03Dan Harris?

  So we just want to be mindful about not obsessing and comparing and trying to wrestle your body into some. Aesthetic that is somewhat arbitrarily set, meaning that you can look a certain way, but it doesn't speak to your underlying health necessarily. On the other hand, for women, there's actually been this, as you've said, and you write about this extensively in the book. There's been these cultural messages that like muscles are unattractive and you should be wafer thin or waif thin either, or else at other times it's Rubenesque, but it's not muscular. And I think what you're trying to say is none of us should be obsessing about looking a certain way. And especially for women,

• 35:48Dan Harris?

  there might actually be some real value in taking some pride at developing your muscles in a way that's visible because actually it's a little counter-cultural and empowering.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure. And I think that is something that is becoming clearer and certainly in, you know, the fitness community, that that kind of power and strength is very positive. And I will also say in terms of mental health and sort of physical strength supporting that, there's been a lot of research and science to support that weight training has been very useful as an intervention for treating PTSD because it supports a sense of agency and control. And not like control, like in a controlling way, but like a return of control.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Because when something bad happens to you, you often feel out of control, right? You feel very uncertain and every, everything under you has shifted in a way that really throws your whole worldview out of whack. And I think something like weight training or, you know, and a lot of different kinds of exercise is grounding, as we talked about. And also it's like this discreet thing, you know, without, again, veering into the extreme of like dysmorphia or anything, that polar end of the spectrum where you feel actually that it's taking over your life, it actually can return that sense of agency to you.

• 37:23Dan Harris?

  That's really interesting.

• 37:27Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Bonnie Soi talks about exercise as a tool for psychological healing, our innate ability to change, the psychological benefit of realizing your physical potential, and the power and symbolism of the push-up.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking, and that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha, and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece, with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:21Dan Harris?

  You actually spend a lot of time in the book dwelling on different forms of exercise as a way of psychological healing. There's stuff in there about running specifically as a way to remember and to heal. Do you mind saying a little bit more about that?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Sure. This is in the endurance section of the book. So the book is organized in five different sections, and they're kind of these attributes and character qualities of muscle that we admire, right? So strength, form, action, flexibility, and endurance. And endurance is, has a lot to do, the stories in there with characters who have used their muscles, and specifically running, to kind of explore other kinds of endurance, right? So I had the great fortune of participating in something that was called the Remembrance Run. And so, at the time, Koo Stevens is this fastest high school runner, cross-country runner in the state of Nevada, a few years

• 39:20Speaker 01

  back, and now he runs at the University of Oregon, and is also about to transfer to Washington. And he grew up on the Yarrington Paiute Reservation in Yarrington, Nevada. Tiny High School was like the only runner on his cross-country team, and He grew up with running as something that he was really, really good at. But also in his family, his great grandfather was taken from their reservation to a native boarding school in Carson City. And he was eight years old when he ran away. He ran away three times, fifty miles through the desert to go home.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Because this was something that had happened to a lot of native children of that generation in North America, were sent to these kind of schools that were meant to take the native part of them away. And we know now, of course, that this was incredibly traumatizing and terrible to this community and generations of people who had their culture and families taken away from them and language, you know? And so his great grandfather, as an eight-year-old kid, somehow figured out how to run home, fifty miles through the desert, through the mountains. So Koo was eight years old when he heard the story from his dad and went through all these years of running and running success, wanting to be the fastest, you know, to get recognition

• 40:46Speaker 01

  and become known and be remembered. And so what he's kind of like used running as a way to kind of think about like, well, what does this mean to me? What is it to remember? And what is running? What does it tracing our footsteps mean? And so when he was in high school, he retraced that route through the desert from Mearington to the Stuart Indian School. And then did it three times in honor of his grandfather. And by the third time, there are many, many runners joining, and I joined that year and wrote about it in this section of the book. Because it really is powerful to kind of use your muscles to trace another's path through the world. I think I witnessed the best of humanity on that experience, you know?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And if you think about it, the running is so integral to human existence. It is what enabled us to persevere on the savanna. You know, as Heather Radke, a science writer and a friend of mine who wrote the book of Butts, she wrote about the Gluteal muscle and you know, like to succeed on Savannah, she said, big, strong gluteal muscles were a must. And it's true. You know, it's this constant state of like falling forward and catching yourself. And it'll out us to like run down prey and run upright and do it for a long time without getting tired. So there's this, we as humans, it's so funny to think about like culturally, we honor running and endurance.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  We do things, we run to remember all the time. And if you think that's weird, let me point out to you like 4th of July fun runs and like Thanksgiving turkey trots. And runs to raise awareness for everything from like breast cancer to support your kid's school, raise money. And it's like to suffer with your body to endure is to show that you care. It's like, you know, we do it all the time and we don't even realize it. And like, it shows you have skin in the game. And it's, I find that when I started to think about that, I just, I could not stop seeing it everywhere.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Swimathons, runathons, all these bikeathons where you're like, you know, if you think about it, like, why do I give money to someone who's running a marathon to support their cause? When couldn't I just give it to that cause anyway? But something about someone suffering through some experience makes me want to get behind that. If you start picking apart, you're asking yourself questions like, why do we societally culturally do that? Like, it is really interesting.

• 43:21Dan Harris?

  Well, along those lines, you also talk about movement as a form of both prayer and community building.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so this was in the context of collective movement, which the psychologist Dacher Keltner here at UC Berkeley has written about that a lot, about emotions, about awe. And he told me, he likes to call this kind of like collective movement, this like group. Dancing or sports or like, you know, one of the things we talked about was the end of the World Series when everyone comes down and onto the field and the team is like jumping up and down on top of you and it's like this collective effervescence. He likes to, he likes that term, but it's like group movement because we are tuned into as a

• 44:11Speaker 01

  species, we are very much communal and communal movement is a way to honor things, a way to like solidify those bonds, right? You could take it to the extreme by like going on this like ultra run, ultra marathon and showing that it's a way to demonstrate care. I think when Koo decided that he wanted to do that run, he couldn't have predicted that all these people would want to do it with him and to learn and kind of like work out their own traumas and stories and show that they care. You know, I think it's like a very powerful way to do that. And I was very, very, very much moved by that experience and I'll never forget it.

• 44:54Dan Harris?

  That sounds amazing. Honestly, I feel some envy because I hurt myself so much. And I talk about this actually in an episode that will have aired before yours with somebody I really admire, Christiana Wolf, who's a Dharma teacher, Buddhist teacher, physician, and ultra marathoner. And she's older than I am. She's, I think, 56 or something like that and started doing ultra marathons pretty late in life. And

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Dan Harris?

  I walked away from that interview and I bet I just can't stop thinking about, I want to do that. But I, I have so many injuries, tendonitis in my hamstrings and some tendonitis in my biceps and I've been, I'm trying to work on it. Yeah. So, long way of saying I feel some envy when I hear you talking about that run.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  I want to say, it is amazing that we can start doing those things at a much later time in life than we could ever have imagined.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  I, just by virtue of doing this book, I've heard so many stories of and met people who didn't start doing regular exercise until, oh, 50, 60, 70s. And I think what's incredible about muscle that was revealed to me in part by some of their stories and kind of seeing and hearing about their experiences is that muscle is this crazy adaptable tissue that is so capable of change. And, oh my gosh, I think I was just reading about this woman, what's it like Grandma Guns? I think she's on Instagram or something.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  I think her grandkid or her son put her on Granny Guns. You know, she didn't exercise, I think, until maybe her 60s, I think she said, and just transformed her life, started weightlifting. And again, because of all the cascades of chemicals that wash over your body and kind of change you over time that we talked about earlier, so many people like her who have started doing this exercise thing, suddenly they don't have to take these medications that they used to take for decades, or that they can like go up and down the stairs, no problem. Their joints have, feel so much better. It's not that they've repaired their joints, but it's like that the juice that is going when you have started exercising, that your muscles are producing to kind of send around

• 47:20Speaker 01

  to the rest of your body to signal it to do things that are in response, healthy making. Magical things happen. I'm not saying this is like the magical cure for everything, it's not, but it is a magical cure for stasis. And we're all capable of change. I mean, isn't that great? Isn't that great to know that like, even if you start late, that we are capable of this? And this is the thing that kind of keeps me going. It's like the longevity picture, you know? One of my favorite ways, I've heard this put is by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal. She calls it like the pharmacy in your muscles. You know, it's like the second you exercise, even just a couple of minutes in, it stimulates

• 48:04Speaker 01

  your muscle in your brain and all these other tissues in your body to release this wash of chemicals that changes you. I mean, in very real ways, from a philosophical point of view. I like that the muscles are telling us to do that.

• 48:19Dan Harris?

  There's a lot in the book and you've hinted at it in the preceding paragraphs, but maybe it's worth saying more about the psychological impact of realizing your physical potential. And it's incredible that we can do this way later in our lives than we might have thought, but this is true for anybody listening at any age. There's a real benefit to doing things with your body that that you might not have thought you could do. So maybe hold forth on that?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, how can that not help but spill over into other areas of your life? Let's be real, like when we get to a certain stage of our lives as adults, we ossify. We are like set in our ways and we like our rhythms and we like our people and we like our routines and it's just, it's nothing wrong with that. But I think novelty and the sense that change is good is something that I think we all need to kind of poke ourselves to do every once in a while. I fall into that, too. You have a comfortable state of being or you're just like, oh, I'm too old for that. But what does that really mean?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  You know, you like your routine, but is it make you then your outlook on life that you're kind of afraid of anything new? Does it make you less likely to be open to someone proposing a counter opinion to you? Do you not like certain kinds of people now? Do you not like certain kinds of experiences? I don't do that. That kind of a thinking is something that we are all guilty of. We all do it. It happens. It's not anyone's fault. It's just sort of how we're wired. And yet, if we are presented with an experience that is new, potential for change, something that makes us think, oh, you know, maybe I like that. Maybe that's something that I can do. Not like, I can't do it. I won't be able to do it. It hurts.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  But that there's a growth potential on the other side of that. I think that's what I think this sort of philosophy of muscle.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Is valuable to kind of remind you all.

• 50:27Dan Harris?

  I'm going to read you what I believe is a passage from your book that feels apropos. Weightlifting has also been shown to build resilience in the mind. New research with populations recovering from post-traumatic stress illustrates how lifting weights helps people feel more at ease and in control of their bodies. And you talked about this a little bit earlier, but it feels apropos to bring it back now. If you can improve your physical strength in a solid, visible way, it can reframe your self-perception. Look what I did. This is evidence that I'm different now. You can see yourself as a person with agency. And all of this feels relevant to all of us, whether we've had trauma, big T or small T trauma or not.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was important to write that, to highlight that this is not, our physical health, our muscular health is not a frivolous thing. It is actually something that has a lot of wide-ranging impacts on your life. I don't think that's an exaggeration. I think that that's real. And I'm not talking about bodybuilding for bodybuilding's sake and like getting big muscles so that you look nice. I'm talking about, this is, it's like going back to the root of what muscle is in our lives, which is that it animates our existence in this world and moves us around and everything that we're doing. Like I'm talking to you, I'm gesturing, thinking, I'm speaking to you with my body and you're

• 51:52Speaker 01

  speaking to me with yours. When you smile, when you nod, when you tilt your head and you think about, okay, maybe that makes sense. This is how we do life. And so if you support that by supporting the health of your muscles, you're supporting yourself. And again, like what you were saying about like building resilience through physical strength. Yeah, it's true. I think that's basically all I have to say about that.

• 52:19Dan Harris?

  Well, it's, what you're saying is important. This is going to sound like a A non sequitur, but I think it does follow. There's a lot in the book about the push-up.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:29Dan Harris?

  And I want to hear more about the push-up. But I do want to just read you back to you again because there's something you wrote about the push-up that is very relevant to the sort of psychology of all of this. Every push-up was a note to yourself that you were capable of more than you were the day before. These days, when so much of life feels out of our control, something concrete and tangible, however incremental, feels like a small victory. During the writing of this book, I've been doing a lot of push-ups and thinking about what it means to do them. Lately, I've come to understand that what I learned from my father was not just to lift heavy things, but to lift myself.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I still stand by it, even though push-ups suck. Okay, so there's a few different levels there.

• 53:13Dan Harris?

  I like push-ups, just to say.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Oh, see, that means that you have a full body, all-around strength, and your core is excellent. What I love about the push-up is many things. So it's a very basic foundational movement, right? You use, you really employ like your entire self to do them and to do them well. And I also love that there's sort of like a mythological, there's a lore behind them, you know, with Jack LaLanne breaking the world record by doing like, I don't know, a thousand plus push-ups in some matter of minutes. And that it's also like this demonized thing. Everyone hates them. Not everyone, some people like yourself love them. But that it's, but it's so basic. Okay, so I was thinking about this when I wrote that passage during COVID, when I started writing

• 53:59Speaker 01

  this book, as we mentioned. And I guess that was like the fall of 2021. And we were all just trying to figure out how to stay sane and not fall into puddles of mush every day. And the push-up is something you can do in a very contained space. It's really like all you have to do is be able to lie down on the ground. You know, you could do it where you are, I could do where I am. You don't require anything but yourself. And there's something also great about that. It's just you and your body and the ground. And how many times you can go down to meet it and then come back up and go down and come back up. And in terms of A daily practice, if you did do it every day, you would understand that you feel

• 54:42Speaker 01

  different every day, different parts of you hurt differently every day. You feel the push up in your neck, your back, your ankle, maybe your wrist is sore. And again, it's like an exercise in awareness. And I actually feel like this, it's also translates to yoga. You know, there's lots of positions in yoga that kind of call on the push up, call on this, like, supporting yourself, your body weight on all fours. And just like historically over time, like, I go into this in the book, there's a passage at the end of the book in which someone has asked a character in my book named Jan Todd, who was the first woman to lift these Scottish stones of strength called the Denny Stones. But she's also not only

• 55:23Speaker 01

  a world record breaking power lifter and a pioneer weightlifter, she also is a sports historian at UT Austin. And so she gets a lot of questions through the center that she runs there. And one was, had to do with the history of the push up and where did the push up come from? And who did the push up for the first time? And of course, there's no way of knowing, like, who was the first person to ever do this in the world as like a way to strengthen body and mind. But she did find this wonderful reference in a book about physical health that did not call it the push up. And she, and, but what it did

• 56:01Speaker 01

  call this exercise was kissing the ground in equilibrium. And I love that phrase so much. It's like kissing the ground in equilibrium on fingers and toes or something, hands and toes or something like that. But kissing the ground in equilibrium, I think, is like a great mantra for living. You are doing this thing that's really hard, as are many things in life. But you appreciate that the ground is there and you go down to meet it and you come back up and you kind of try to figure out how to reach equilibrium, which is, you know, what is equilibrium? You know, you're seeking a kind of, like, a resting state in the flux of life.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And I just think there's just so much there to think about. And, you know, we're getting a little heady here, but that's a real thing. That's what a push up can do for you.

• 56:58Dan Harris?

  Uh, the 10% happier podcast is definitionally heady. So, uh, you're in safe territory. You can get as mystical as you want around here.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  The push up is heady and practical. How's that?

• 57:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah. No, I think it's beautiful.

• 57:14Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Bonnie talks about the connection between your muscles and your longevity, practical advice for getting started with strength training and food habits that support muscle growth.

• 57:30Dan Harris?

  On a more practical level, although the push up is super practical, but this is a little less heady, this question, you write about the connection, you mentioned this earlier. So I wanted to follow up on it. The connection between our muscles and our mortality, the longevity piece of all of this. And for you earlier, you said that's quite motivating for you. What do we know there?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  We know that age related muscle loss, right? And this is something that's sort of been in the health headlines of late. So it's sort of timely. It's called sarcopenia. It's natural. It's normal. Over the course of our lives, we lose muscle mass, but I'm sad to report that it starts in your 30s.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  So it's a great idea to start lifting weights and start doing strength training throughout your life. Like when you're younger, not when you're confronted with osteoporosis as well, which is the bone loss that's age related. Oh no, that's osteopenia, but osteoporosis obviously is an extreme loss of that, that a lot of, especially women experience. But all of this can be combated and shored up with strength training, both the bone and the muscle stuff. And, you know, there's a lot of work being done with different kinds of ways of increasing muscle mass as you get older, because the mass is important, right?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  So like, we're talking about the stuff on your body, like not that they're big, but that there's enough of it. So that it's basically resources for your body to draw on. And I will say that my, my mom, who is now Seventy eight, no seventy seven, sorry. She has been going through a lot of health struggles lately where it's autoimmune. But one of the things that a doctor told her was your condition is exacerbated by not enough muscle. Then I remember being in the room with her and hearing this doctor say this to her and I went, what does that mean? And it's that if you don't have enough muscle, your body doesn't have enough resources to fix itself.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  You know, like muscle is not just about moving your body around nicely as you get older and having strength. It's that from a metabolic and physiological state and level of things. It is important to the overall functioning of your body in terms of recovering from illness or injury or anything. Whether it's like you have tripped and fallen and you broke something and then you're kind of like, oh, I gotta build up strength again. The stronger you are physically, the more muscle mass you have, the more likely you will be to bounce back from all of that. And same goes for like other kinds of disease and illness that may come up, you know, throughout your life. And it's just a fact.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  If you talk to doctors in hospital, they will all tell you that getting enough protein, especially amongst their older patients who haven't been thinking about this, haven't focused on it for, for many, many years. And of course, as you get older, your kind of appetite goes away to some extent. And so you're kind of like, oh, I don't, you know, I didn't really need to eat that much. My metabolism isn't relevant. If you build muscle, your metabolism goes up because your muscles need calories. And so it's all this kind of self reinforcing virtuous cycle. And so these are a little few of the pieces of this is really important. And I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but there's a section of the book that is about fall prevention and all this research that's being done on like.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Not just muscle memory. Again, there's this new science around muscle memory that is like actually in the cells themselves, not just the motor neurons remembering muscle patterns of movement, but that there is muscles themselves are really smart. They're intelligent. They have their own kind of memory and they remember past exercise. So even if you do have periods where you haven't been working out or you're due to life circumstances or injury or illness that you've sort of been laid up. COVID was one of those times too, where people couldn't have their normal routines. And then also if they got COVID, they had to recover. But that your muscle cells remember. There's a couple of different kinds of memory in the cells, cellular memory and what's called epigenetic memory, which

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  is that certain genes turn on and off such that your muscles are more likely to bounce back after certain periods of inactivity if you have exercised before. And not only that, it remembers periods of inactivity and there's muscle wasting. I mean, there's all kinds of really interesting science of like how your muscles remember the things that you do. So the more good stuff you do with them, the more that they will treat you better.

• 1:02:11Dan Harris?

  This is also fascinating. All right. Let me ask you a bunch of practical questions. I know the book is mostly an intellectual exploration and also an emotional excavation for you personally, but listeners are going to have a lot of practical questions. Like you've made such a compelling case about the importance of muscle. Where do we begin? If we're interested in getting stronger?

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Thing one, go to talk to a trainer or take a class. Okay. We talked about this earlier in our conversation, but it is the easiest way to break that seal, get up that activation energy to kind of make this a routine in your life. I'll be frank, and that's the hardest part, but it's also like really exciting. It's a new chapter in your life, either to have a friend to walk you through some of the basic things that you could be doing at the gym or get a set of weights for, you could do it at home. So many of us did it at home during COVID. We know it's possible also that we have options. If you can't get to the gym on any one day, you might have. A bunch of weights at home that you could do something with. And just to get the basics, take a class, join a group.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  And also, it's not just about lifting weights. It's about getting other kinds of activity in your life. It could be like body weight exercises. It could be resistance bands. And also, don't forget about the kind of exercise and movement that makes you happy. I know that there are so many people who are like, I don't really like exercise. But there are things that you like that bring you joy that involve moving your body. Dance, or it could be some other play based movement. But I think the important thing is to just start with that. Start with trying to figure out what is the way that will bring you joy. And also, your community will support you in that because that is like the easiest way. Where then it becomes a part of your life that actually makes you happy.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Instead of dreading, you know, going to go lift weights at the gym. There are so many different ways to do that and to not be afraid of it. Because, you know, we all have a body. We all occupy a body. We all have muscles that could use a little action and that all comes back to benefit you.

• 1:04:15Dan Harris?

  That was all beautiful and I just want to highlight a couple of things you said. Just based on my, having done, you know, so many interviews on the show with experts in habit formation and human behavior change. The finding something you like is really important.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  It's so big.

• 1:04:34Dan Harris?

  I'm a mutant and I think you and I are probably both mutants in this way in that like, I like so many forms of exercise. It's not hard for me to get to the gym, but I recognize that that's not true for everybody. And so, like my wife, we were married for many years. And even though she's a physician, never really was into exercise for a whole bunch of complex reasons. And I dragged her to SoulCycle, which I honestly didn't even like that much myself. I like spinning, but I wasn't super into SoulCycle because of all the stylistic stuff around it. Although I have to say, I've become friends with the women who founded and then sold SoulCycle. And I really like them a lot. Anyway, it was somewhat ironic that I bullied my wife into coming to SoulCycle, but she then fell in love with it.

• 1:05:17Dan Harris?

  And it changed her so much.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  She found her people.

• 1:05:21Dan Harris?

  It wasn't so much actually about the people. It was about she just found that the form of movement she enjoyed.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Dan Harris?

  Context in which she enjoyed it, which was it's totally dark in that room and nobody can see or judge her.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:33Dan Harris?

  You know, unfortunately, she's had some subsequent health problems. So she's had a couple of years where she hasn't been able to get in motion. And I've been thinking about her a lot in the course of this discussion.

• 1:05:43Dan Harris?

  But, okay, so but finding joy in what you do, finding something you really like. So I just wanted to double click on that. And then also doing it with a group or just one other person. I started going to SoulCycle a ton because my wife was going and I like hanging out with my wife. So I went, she would sometimes do two in a day and I would do them with her. She's actually quite naturally, unlike her husband, really good athlete. It was very common for us to be leaving SoulCycle and for the teacher to stop her and say, you know, I'm just watching you. Your form is so good. They never even made eye contact with me during those conversations.

• 1:06:20Dan Harris?

  But doing it with my wife was very motivating and doing it now with the aforementioned Strauss Zelnick and his crew of friends. And there's a ton of evidence to show that what psychologists call social support is really, really, really helpful when it comes to this diabolically difficult endeavor of habit formation. Okay, just a few other practical questions for you. Eating. Now, eating is a very difficult subject because it's got all sorts of, you know, there's all sorts of unhealthy messages sent to us about like what we should eat. And I do want to say about Strauss, like Strauss eats dessert like he's a normal person. What are the guidelines generally and gently that we should have in our minds for eating in a way that supports muscle strength?

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  I am an omnivore. I love eating. I subscribe to the everything in moderation, including moderation. That's my husband loves to say that. And he has a huge sweet tooth and I, you know, and I agree with that. So in terms of eating to support muscles and your muscle health, I mean, obviously you need to have protein, but chances are you are getting enough to be quite honest. I don't think you should obsess about it too much. Just make sure you're having some. Somebody was telling me, oh, you need to be having the equivalent of how many grams of how much you weigh times X. And I was just like, that's a lot. And he's like, that's three chicken breasts a day. I'm like, that's a lot of chicken breasts. I think just making sure that you have some.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  It's going to be different for everyone, but just to make sure that you're having some protein for maybe a couple of your meals where that does figure prominently is just sort of my ballpark, but also eating all the other things, eating all the vegetables and grains and complete proteins or like rice and beans, you know, I'm not a dietitian. I'm not going to tell everyone what to eat, but I do tell you what it works for me and what I like. My general outlook on it is that I do pay attention to it, but I don't pay too much attention to it.

• 1:08:16Dan Harris?

  Yes, that sounds fucking perfect. As Bonnie knows, and as the producers know, I did the rudest thing I've ever done in the course of a podcast interview today, which is I ate my lunch while Bonnie was talking at the beginning of this conversation because I had my day had been such that I wasn't able to eat until right now. And my lunch had tuna and egg and a bunch of vegetables in it.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, that was a really good lunch and now I'm hungry and I want to eat that lunch.

• 1:08:46Dan Harris?

  Yes, it was a healthy lunch, but I'm going to have some gummy bears too afterwards, being omnivorous. Not being overly abstemious is important.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:55Dan Harris?

  The final question before I ask my habitual two final questions is, what about things like creatine? I don't even really know what creatine is, but somehow I've been wondering about it recently because I hear it mentioned within the context of muscle building.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  I think generally speaking, people, meaning people who know what they're talking about, doctors and, you know, sports, physical fitness folks, generally speaking, it's not a bad supplement to have. I actually started taking it, I don't know, six months ago. I haven't noticed anything crazy or different, but I think it's something like three to five grams. It's on the package. I think it's grams. Like milligrams is really little, three to five grams, depending on, you know, your size and in terms of what your goals are. But I'm 48, I'm a woman. I know how important it is to get enough protein to support muscles at this point because they're just, if you do read the news, it's kind

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  of like they're falling off my body as I'm walking down the street, which I hope is not true, but it does feel like that. So I don't want to be alarmist. I think it is something that you should ask your doctor about because you might have some underlying Medical health reasons not to do that in terms of your body processing it. But I think creatine is actually generally considered pretty safe and is not one of those supplements that, you know, you would think about with bodybuilding that has a bad effect on you. It has many, many decades of research on it. So I think it's a pretty good option if you're thinking about doing that. I forgot the other question.

• 1:10:31Dan Harris?

  No, no, that was the only one. I have two I'm gonna ask you now. One is, is there something that you were hoping we would get to that we haven't gotten to somehow at this point?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I've had so much fun talking to you and I, including and not excluding your, your lunch, which really supported our conversation greatly, I think.

• 1:10:56Dan Harris?

  No, I've enjoyed this immensely. And so the final, final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book, the name of your old book, and any other stuff you're doing in the world that we should know about?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm gonna flash this in case this is being visible to the public on Muscle, The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. It comes out April 22nd. My last book was Why We Swim. And, you know, I'm kind of girding my loins for the, the baby coming out into the world as, as we speak in this publishing world. And I'm just really grateful for your time today and support you're, that you're giving to my work and me. It really means a lot.

• 1:11:36Dan Harris?

  But I'm grateful for your time, for your work, and it's a pleasure. And I'm also grateful for your forbearance as I mowed a salad in front of you while you spoke so eloquently.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Previous to, I think, when we started recording, I said, Dan Harris, he's just like us.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  And that makes us happy.

• 1:11:59Dan Harris?

  All right, great job, Bonnie. So I appreciate you.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan.

• 1:12:07Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Bonnie Tsui. Great to talk to her. Before I let you go, two things. First, don't forget that every episode this month during our Get Fit Sanely series comes with a companion meditation, a bespoke meditation from Cara Lai. Today's meditation is all about how to tune into your body with some appreciation instead of self-laceration, which is a key skill I am still working on. Head on over to danharris.com and you can grab today's companion meditation. And also, if you become a member, you'll get lots of other cool stuff, including free transcripts for every show, the ability to chat with me and my team, and crucially, twice monthly, at least twice monthly, live guided meditation sessions where I guide a meditation and then take your questions.

• 1:12:51Dan Harris?

  Second thing I want to do before I let you go is I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.