Surfing well requires me to activate dozens of muscles across my body, combining explosive power with balance and strength. It's a full body workout disguised as effortless grace. Oh, by the way, that's that's not me. Did you think that was me? That guy is amazing. I have no idea how he's doing that. When I surf, it doesn't look anything like that. It looks a lot more like this. Not catching a wave. paddling extremely hard and almost catching a wave and trying to pretend that I have caught a wave.

Look, I'm not what you'd call physically strong. I am more comfortable surfing the internet than I am surfing the ocean. All of my life, I have relied more on my mind than on my body. But as I approach my 40s, I've started to feel pain in weird places. I've gotten winded in ways that I never got winded before. So, I think that it is time to maybe start paying attention to muscles and to even dip my toe into getting stronger. But, as you can see, I'm going to need some help.

Bonnie Toy is a journalist, a surfer, and the author of the book On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. Bonnie.

>> Hi, Chris.

>> Thanks so much for doing this.

>> Hey, it's great to see you.

>> Wow.

>> Welcome. really beautiful.

I'm meeting up with her to find out more about the surprising science of muscles and how it's changing who and what we think of when it comes to physical fitness.

>> So, Bonnie, you wrote the book on muscle and I'm curious what writing and researching this book made you think differently about when it comes to strength.

>> I think this all goes back to what I learned from growing up having the dad I had who was not just an artist but a martial artist. I think this was so integral to my growing up in getting me to understand from a very early age that the body is beautiful because of what it can do. If you understand that these muscles that you're building are helping you live a better life, a longer life, a healthier life, one that helps your cognitive health. Like your muscles are always talking to your brain and having conversations that you don't hear.

One thing that I learned was that muscles are not just for like moving you around mechanically, but they are an endocrine tissue. And so they're always talking. They're super chatty. They are releasing these signaling molecules that travel all around your body to talk to all these different parts of it, including your brain, and are telling your brain to do certain beneficial things.

>> So what should we be doing? I think what has been a sea change over the last several years is that weightlifting is something that the medical establishment, your doctor uh will be telling you and your mom and your grandmother is it that is something that they have to be doing.

>> You said that pretty much everyone like there's this big change that now pretty much everyone should be lifting heavy. I want to ask you how and why. Most of us understand that as we get older, we lose bone mass. And less people are familiar with the fact that in your 30s, sorry everyone, you start losing muscle. So it's like age related muscle mass. It is normal for everyone. So what that really means is that in your 30s, you need to start thinking about who you want to be and what you want to be capable of doing in your 40s, 50s, 60s,7s, and beyond.

Much as I wish I could spend the rest of the day eating pasta on the couch, Bonnie really did convince me that building muscle matters a lot more than I thought. So, with that, I'm going to get a little training from her to build the strength that I'm going to need if I'm going to be able to tackle these waves and be able to grab a can off the top shelf when I'm 70 years old.

>> Always start off with a warm up. Okay.

>> Okay. Maybe we can do some jumping jacks.

>> Okay. Go.

And then let's do some burpees.

>> Two.

[Laughter]

>> Three.

I swear this here is me trying my hardest.

>> Four.

>> Five.

>> Oh, that was five. Oh, thank God. Okay,

>> we'll front kick towards We'll start with the right side. Okay,

>> so like this.

>> Yes,

>> except I'm not grunting.

>> You You can grunt if you want to.

>> It's hard to do without grunting.

>> Right, return, left, return, right, return. Yeah.

>> Okay, cool.

>> It just feels like yours is like a martial art and mine is like dog using a fire hydrant.

>> So, you want to do a plank off?

>> Sure.

All right.

Oh boy. After that workout, I was sore in places that I didn't even realize were muscles. Oh god.

Using all of my muscles at once prompted actually a little bit of a strange question for Bonnie. What's your favorite muscle?

>> Can you point that?

>> Well, you won't see it on this map. And that those are the muscles that give you goosebumps.

>> Oh, that's cool.

The erector peely. And these little muscle fibers that attach to your bottoms of your hair follicles. And so if you think about every time you're cold and you get goosebumps when those muscles contract, it's trying to warm you up. And also when you're scared, the hairs on your back and your neck all go up. and think about a porcupine being so frightened that their quills go up. And then also of extreme emotion, like awe. I think those are the most underrated muscles to be quite honest. And we all have them.

I got goosebumps hearing you talk about goosebumps.

>> That's a great favorite muscle because I'll tell you this, my erector pilly were flexing goosebumps all over me as we prepared to venture into the relentless ocean. Cold, check. Awe, check. Fear definitely check. You love being in the water in a lot of on muscle. You're also talking about surfing. Can you talk about your relationship to surfing?

>> It's mostly love and sometimes hate mostly because I hate that I'm not better at it all the time.

>> All right.

All right. Let's go waves. I love it. I love it so much. I love the feeling of flying and of flow and this dance that happens with the water and how the ocean is your dance partner and you have to work with that dance partner and sometimes your dance partner is feeling especially strong and rambunctious and you're trying to wrestle that dance partner into cooperating with you. All right, turn around. Turn around and try it. Let's see if we can party. What is the connection specifically between surfing and muscle and strength?

>> I mean, for me, surfing is the most joyful at this moment manifestation of muscle and strength and what I can use my body for in the world.

I love wrestling with the ocean. I love like understanding that the ocean itself has its muscularity.

>> It's an energy transfer. Yeah, Bonnie.

Watching Bonnie surf so effortlessly, so gracefully while I was flailing just to keep up, it made me wonder whether I would ever have the same command over my body as she does.

>> If you stop 100 people on the street and ask them, "What do you think of when you think of the word muscle?" I think there is a very specific kind of body stereotypically and a very particular kind of person who gets to have that body and often times it's someone who's in the gym, someone who's a bodybuilder, someone who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. What I learned is that it goes so much deeper than that.

There's an interesting metaphor, I guess, in muscle in that the way that you build a muscle is by tearing it. So, it has to break and then it rebuilds stronger.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So when you paddle, try to be deliberate with your paddles. Yeah. And don't don't do this so much. So it's just lifting. Yeah. There are all these characteristics of muscle that the tangible stuff, right? So strength and form and you know action that it is the stuff that actually moves us and flexibility and endurance. And these are not just qualities of muscle, but they are qualities that we strive for in personhood.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got this. Aim for that peak. Aim. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

You can only strengthen a muscle by stressing it, by pushing it, by challenging it. And And that's something that I think we all understand. We can look at life as something that always is stressing us, is always throwing these challenges at us.

Oh my god, that was so close.

>> So close. And yet no cigar.

I love Bonnie's point that pushing and stressing and building up our muscles is also about pushing and stressing and building up ourselves. We can't grow unless we are out of our comfort zone.

>> You went and visited with the strongest people on the planet, people who are quite literally like have lifted the heaviest weights imaginable, pushing the boundaries of what humans can actually lift. You talk about how the strength community is actually really inspiring to you in ways that are surprising because it's not just about can I lift a 600 lb rock,

>> right?

>> It's actually about something bigger than that. So, I'd love to have you um read this quote um for me.

>> But the strength community's insatiable curiosity about the human body is something I find surprisingly moving.

All right, let's do a little bit of a wave dance. A little bit of a wave dance. Come to us. To know one's own strength. I've come to understand the meaning of these words not as a binary statement and I do or and I don't, but as an ongoing process of discovery. All right, Chris, stop.

All right, let's turn around and paddle straight in as hard as you can. Yeah. Muscles matter. They allow us in an observable way to see what we can do.

Though you may not initially know what you're capable of, you have vast reservoirs of potential waiting to be tapped for just the right moment to be revealed.

>> All right, there's another chance. There's another one coming.

>> Stay where I am.

>> Yeah. Go straight.

>> Hard, hard, hard.

How do we know our true potential? I think that we don't know until we try. And I think that's both the beauty and the terror of trying.

I did it. I can't believe it. I did it. It only took 20,000 tries and 5 hours of effort.

Look, I I guess I'll probably always be a brain over brawn kind of guy, but spending the afternoon with Bonnie made me realize that muscles aren't just meat rubber bands in our bodies. They're also inextricably intertwined with who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we feel.

>> Yeah, baby.

>> Yeah, baby.

>> Yeah, baby.

>> What should people do to put these ideas into practice? I would love for you, the listener, to think about something that involves movement that you love. You know, maybe it's jumping a rope, maybe it's swimming, maybe it's playing pickup basketball, maybe it's, you know, just being outside more than you have been in your regular life.

>> Party. Keep moving because that's what life is.

>> We did it. We did it.

Thank you so much for watching this video. If you liked it, you should check out our podcast, How to be a better human. It has a much more indepth extended version of this conversation with a lot more insights from Bonnie Toy. And you can also find episodes with many new perspectives from more interesting and brilliant people. You can get those podcast episodes wherever you listen to podcasts every week on how to be a better human.

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