The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center celebrated the official release of Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by longtime Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Joseph Gross with an afternoon of compelling conversations around the impact of physical and cultural strength across human history.
“Good training is the endless adventure of improvisation,” Gross said.
The book talk, part of the Clyde Rabb Littlefield Lecture Series, featured Gross and special guests, strongmen Mitchell Hooper and Martins Licis. Hooper is the back-to-back winner of the Arnold Strongman Classic and currently holds the title of World’s Strongest Man, and Licis, former World’s Strongest Man, is the producer and star of the popular YouTube series, Strength Unknown.
Gross’ latest book examines the fundamental beliefs and long-held misconceptions surrounding strength, muscle and exercise throughout history. Critics have praised the book for its innovative storytelling, taking readers on a journey from the introduction of muscle in Homer’s Iliad to a nursing home in Boston.
In his analysis, Gross also dove deeper into the stories of three distinguished scholars—Stark Center Founder and Director Jan Todd, sports historian and College of Education Associate Professor of Kinesiology Charles Stocking, and exercise physiologist and geriatrician Maria Fiatarone Singh of the University of Sydney.
Todd, who leads the Stark Center and chairs the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, said she was hesitant at first to be featured in the book. As a renowned former powerlifter and seasoned researcher in the fields of exercise and strength, she was eventually persuaded by the thoroughness of his research and his review of her many publications.
Gross elaborated on a research study conducted in 1990 by Fiataroni Singh at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston that enrolled 100 seniors in high-intensity strength training. At the time, conventional wisdom held that the elderly should avoid weight training because of the risk of cardiac arrest.
One of the first to volunteer was a wheelchair-bound 96-year-old woman who was so frail she “could lift no more than the weight of her own two arms.” After completing the 10-week strength training regimen, she was able to walk with only a walker.
She kept up her weight training until she died at the age of 103 years old.
As Gross wrote in his book, and reiterated with this story, strength follows a cyclical pattern, not a linear progression. “It’s never too late to get strong,” he said. “There’s always something you can do to improve your situation, no matter how dire it may seem.”
Gross is adept at using his narrative to reflect upon differing worldviews on muscle and weight training as an exercise, not only to build muscular strength and increase power but to change lives.
“Strength is relative,” Gross said. “Young champions in their moments of glory hoisting hundreds of pounds above their heads probably have more in common than you think at first, when you take a look at the old woman who struggles to lift the weight of her own two arms above her head but shows up every day and does it, until she can do it no more.”
Gross continued, “I wonder how the world might look different if every time we heard someone say the word strong or muscle, our imaginations conjured up the strongmen and the grandmothers, both at the same time.”
About the Event
The release of Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives was part of the Clyde Rabb Littlefield Lecture Series, which began in 2019 in honor of the late Clyde Rabb Littlefield and his father, Clyde Littlefield, a former UT Track coach. Following his death, Clyde Rabb Littlefield, a sport enthusiast, bequeathed his estate in support of the Stark Center and other programs at UT Austin.
