The Best Strength Books

Stronger was selected as a Nature ‘Best Science Pick’ and a Kirkus ‘Must Read’ because of how deftly you draw on the expertise of physicians, historians, and athletes, braiding together physiology, philosophy and cultural history, to tell the story of muscles and strength. You spent a decade reporting and writing it. What did you aim to achieve when you set out on this odyssey?  

After I turned 40, I had a powerful experience with strength training. It changed me, inside and out. I went looking for great books to read about it, and I found a lot of how-to manuals, textbooks, and memoirs, but nothing that blended a variety of approaches to the topic that could give me a rich reading experience. I was hoping to find something like The Emperor of All Maladies, but about strength training. There wasn’t anything like that in print, so I decided to write it myself.

As I got deeper into the research, I found that progressive resistance weight training, which is practiced by only a small fraction of the population, is the type of exercise that could deliver the biggest benefits to the largest number of people in the smallest amount of time. One of the most compelling insights of strength training epidemiology, to me, is that the people who can benefit the most from lifting weights are the people least likely to do it: women, older people, and those with chronic diseases. That fact gave my work on this book a mission: to bring strength training out of the margins of our culture and place it where it belongs—at the center of all our lives.

Your selections range from physiology to philosophy to autobiography — from Greek gymnasia to California gyms. What guided you in curating this list of five?

This list represents a progression through time and to some extent, through genre. These five were almost like ribs in the body of the book that I wrote—books that I can’t imagine having been able to write Stronger without. Though each of these books stands up beautifully on its own, too.

Let’s begin in antiquity. The Greeks made physical strength a civic ideal. Tell us about Ancient Greek Athletics: Primary Sources in Translation and why you think modern readers should make time for it.

Most of what we know about ancient Greek athletics comes to us in fragmentary form from texts representing many topics and genres like history, law, drama, poetry, and biology. This source book gathers all these fragments and arranges them in a way that no scholar had previously done.

My book is built around the lives and works of three main figures. The first of these is Charles Stocking, who worked his way through classics graduate school as a strength and conditioning coach for UCLA and Olympic athletes. He is almost certainly the only person in academia who has a joint appointment in both classics and kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement. Stocking and his Stanford colleague, Susan Stevens, assembled this book.

In the past, sourcebooks had always been organized by topic. So, you have all the texts referring to the pentathlon in one place, all the texts referring to soldiers’ physical training in another place. That organization made it impossible to discern the evolution of Ancient Greek athletics in a chronological way. It read as if everything took place in one big blob of oldness. But when we talk about ancient athletics, in the Greek and Roman traditions, we’re talking about texts that range from about 750 BC up into the Common Era. These traditions, and even the experience of the body itself, changed dramatically during that time.

What is your favorite thing about reading these sources?

When Stocking teaches courses on ancient Greek athletics, he’ll often begin by saying to the class: The one thing we all have in common with Ancient Greeks is that we all have bodies—but the question is, are they the same bodies? What Stocking teaches his students, and what readers can learn through this sourcebook, is that people’s experience of our own bodies and their powers has been constructed and radically changed over time. For instance, the warriors in Homer’s Iliad experienced their power not as being centered in their muscles, but in the joints of their knees. The knees had a sanctity in Ancient Greek literature that we have completely lost track of. Even the distinction between mind and body is, as Charles Stocking points out, not an empirical fact, but the result of a long series of decisions that human beings have made. My favorite thing about the sourcebook is that these translations can help readers to discern, step by step, how the idea of a split between mind and body was invented, and how it evolved.

In Stronger you explore how these ideas echo today. Does the broad social and cultural significance of contemporary fitness culture recall the broad social and cultural significance of athletics in Ancient Greece?

Contemporary Western physical culture, for people who actively and energetically participate in it, approaches the all-encompassing quality that it had in Ancient Greece and Rome. As the classicist Paul Christesen at Dartmouth points out, ancient Greeks were among the few societies that took physical culture as seriously as we are now starting to take it. The important caveat is that everything I just said mainly applies to well-educated people who consider themselves to be healthy.

Pioneering neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington’s erudite exploration of what it means to be human, Man on His Nature, is your next recommendation. The book is based on his Gifford Lectures, which were delivered from 1937 to 1938 at the University of Edinburgh. It was first published in 1940. Please tell us about Man on His Nature and why we should read it today.

Sherrington was a Nobel laureate who, more extensively than anyone else, mapped the amalgamation of the muscular and neurological systems. Sherrington discovered the synapse. Sherrington discovered the most basic unit of interaction between nerve and muscle, called the motor unit. Sherrington was also one of the last generations of great humanist scientists.

I chose this to follow the sourcebook because it continues to develop this question of whether our bodies are the same as the bodies of our forebears. Man on His Nature begins with and is mainly oriented around the life and work of Jean Fernel, the author of the first physiology textbook, which was published in 1542—the year before Copernicus published his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. In the 16th century, Fernel developed a physiology that echoed ideas Aristotle first articulated in the 4th century BC. His elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are the same as Galen’s. Sherrington, in Man on His Nature, is travelling back and forth through time from Fernel in the Renaissance to the most up-to-date neurological research of the early 20th century, and then all the way back to ideas articulated by Aristotle in Ancient Greece.

Why does this remain essential reading for anyone thinking seriously about strength?

With precision and ambition, Sherrington situates the mind and the body in history and raises the deepest questions about how our experience of our minds and bodies connect us to each other or can separate us from each other. It’s absolutely exhilarating. Sherrington is the greatest writer about physiology I have come across. His prose is a complete joy to read. His description of, for instance, the development and function of the eyeball or of the many processes involved in the act of standing make you, as a reader, want to stand and cheer.

Strongmen, metaphorically speaking, loom large in today’s politics and culture. Your next recommendation concerns a literal one — Arnold Schwarzenegger, the athlete turned movie star turned governor. Why should we still read Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder? What makes Arnold important and what makes his memoir endure as a cultural text?

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the dominant figure in physical culture of our time. He came to own weight-lifting to such an extent that, because he is a bodybuilder, most people refer to all forms of weight training as bodybuilding, even though that’s no more accurate than referring to all forms of music as the waltz. Schwarzenegger also came to own the concept of muscle. So, if you have even a passing interest in contemporary physical culture, or particularly in weight training and muscle, Arnold’s memoir is a must-read.

The book is funny, it’s candid. It is full of practical information. A lot of the best-known people in physical culture learned to lift weights by reading this book. It still serves as a good guide for an absolute beginner and it’s a great refresher for advanced lifters, too.

When you read Arnold alongside the ancient athletes, do you see continuity, or a reinvention of what strength means? Has the ideal evolved — or just changed from toga to tights?

Ancient Greek athletics began in a ritual religious context. Classicists such as Harvard’s Gregory Nagy believe that the oldest athletic event was a race from one altar to another. The distance of the race was about 200 modern meters. The purpose of this race was to be the first person to reach an altar to Zeus where a priest was standing with a torch. The winner would take that torch from the priest and light the fire of sacrificial offerings of meat to Zeus. This was the pivotal act in the preparation of a ritual feast involving the whole community. So, the victor wasn’t just winning for himself, he was winning for everybody. The strength that allowed him to win was seen not as an individual accomplishment, but as a gift from the gods—and he exercised that strength on behalf of the community. There’s a stark contrast between that ancient, communal understanding of athletics and our modern, individualistic view of competition.

Your next choice is by a Belarusian fitness instructor who has published 14 books but nevertheless might be unfamiliar to our readers. Please tell us about Kettlebell Simple and Sinister and why you recommend it.

Stronger is not a how-to book. Yet in telling the stories of athletes, scientists, and doctors and the various ways these individuals pursue strength, the book offers a lot of useful information to people who are interested in getting stronger. As I talk about the book with people, I find that it really awakens a desire for more practical guidance. And so, for the fourth title, I chose what I consider to be the best book by one of the best strength coaches in the world.

Tsatsouline, a former fitness instructor for the Soviet Special Forces, immigrated to the United States in the 1990s. He is largely responsible for popularizing the kettlebell, a piece of strength training equipment that basically looks like a round iron purse with a short strap that’s also made of iron. This book gives a simple, sophisticated, direct, and useful introduction to kettlebell training, which is an especially accessible type of strength training, especially for people who want to train at home. This whole book is built around a minimalist program of two moves, the kettlebell swing, and the get-up. The writing is witty and engaging, with serious concern for safety, conveying the fine points of proper exercise form with impeccable descriptions and lots of photos.

Tsatsouline calls himself, tongue-in-cheek, “comrade.” He is a graduate of the Belarusian State University of Physical Culture. His story seems to illustrate how the Soviets institutionalized the cultivation of strength. What does his export of that system to America tell us about the global traffic in strength culture?

Exercise is like learning a language. The movements are a vocabulary. Their frequency and repetitions are like intonation and grammar. Kettlebell training is one way of showing that resistance exercise can take many forms. It doesn’t have to be barbell squats. It doesn’t have to be pull ups. There are many ways to approach strength training. What catches on depends on many factors, but one of those factors is certainly political. When people feel powerless, training can help you reclaim some power in your life. That does not totally explain the popularity of strength training in czarist and Soviet Russia, or why kettlebells caught on here, but it’s probably part of the explanation. It’s incredible how much you can do to change your life, and even change the world, just by picking up a heavy piece of iron, moving it around, and setting it back down.

Finally, we turn to a muscle-centric perspective on aging and preventive medicine written by a physician. Why is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s Forever Strong important reading?

Gabrielle Lyon is a board-certified family physician who trained in geriatrics. Her basic idea is that skeletal muscle is the key to longevity because most of the diseases of aging are related to deficits of muscle. She flips the script on a common view of the obesity epidemic, arguing that most of us are not suffering from being overly fat but rather under-muscled. As she interprets recent medical research, most people should shift away from working to lose weight and toward working to build muscle—because having more muscle can change the systems of the body in ways that prevent or treat most of the diseases that are killing us.

Lyon emphasizes that muscle is an endocrine organ. It’s almost like a built-in pharmacy for the body. So, the more muscle you have, and the more you move it, the more you produce of a certain kind of molecule called myokines, which circulate throughout the body to regulate the workings of almost every organ, including the brain, heart, liver, lungs, pancreas, even bone. Lyon also emphasizes that muscle is a metabolic organ. It is the main site of disposal of glucose in the body. So, more muscle means less type 2 diabetes and less metabolic disease. Most surprising to most people, bigger and stronger muscles also help improve our mental health. Increasing evidence shows that weight training may play a very important role in preventing or slowing the progression of dementia.

In addition to providing an accessible overview of some important medical research on muscle, Forever Strong is a practical guide to nutrition for supporting muscle health, especially for people who are lifting weights. The book’s recipes alone are a great reason to read it.

Both you and Lyon are stoking a perspective shift regarding strength training from a focus on aesthetics and performance to a broader focus on health and longevity. It’s a message that seems to be resonating, judging by how influencers, doctors and media are echoing it. But that leads to a crucial question: How can the culture of strength training be democratized, so that the benefits of it are more broadly experienced?

Good messaging is not enough to overcome the massive problems of institutional and educational inertia, where strength training is concerned. Physical education classes are being cut from schools. Medical schools teach future doctors little to nothing about exercise. And what they do teach tends to be about aerobics. Health insurance policies don’t pay for exercise physiologists to teach people how to train—even for the treatment of diseases where all evidence shows that exercise is more effective as prevention or treatment than drugs or surgeries. We need a strong movement of people insisting that medicine and society take muscle seriously. We need more people to ask the question you just posed and propose answers to it.

To encourage strength training at every stage of life and at every level of education, we need to start with helping adolescents. From junior high school onward, all our kids—not just the ones who play sports—need to have access to the knowledge and practice of strength training. In medical schools, we need exercise to be part of the curriculum for everyone, we need muscle to be a bigger part of the picture in most specialties, and we need exercise-focused questions on the board exams.

The biggest opportunities for democratizing strength training lie in the giant untapped market for weight training in medicine, and among older people. Patients who get diagnosed with chronic diseases need to tell their doctors they want exercise to be part of their medical treatment, and insist on getting a prescription for it, in addition to whatever prescriptions for pills the doctors want to give. Every person who moves a parent into a nursing home needs to insist that those institutions have real, robust resistance training equipment on site—because high-intensity strength training is the only thing that can really build muscle and strength for the oldest, frailest people. We could have a program modeled on the Peace Corps or Teach for America that would teach young people to train older people—creating jobs, social connections, and improving health and function all at the same time.

But anybody who tries to do any of these things has to be totally clear-eyed about the fact that they are swimming upstream against currents that have gathered force for millennia. That’s what Stronger is all about. Every one of us is caught in the middle of a 2000-year tug of war between medicine and athletics, with doctors on one side and trainers on the other. At stake is who gets to corner the market in what we now call healthcare. In the ancient debates between doctors and trainers about who had the better approach to taking care of the body, physicians often won the argument by pointing to men who were training to build mass as cautionary examples of what can happen if you put athletic training at the center of your life. Ancient doctors said that mass-building could smother a person’s soul and make it impossible to think. The whole tradition of mind-body dualism, which we’ve been talking about, goes back to this white-knuckled conflict between doctors and trainers. And the myth of brain versus brawn—the idea that if you’re bigger, you’re probably also dumber—which so many people still accept as common sense, originated as a rhetorical dirty trick in that conflict.

Enough is enough. The best evidence shows that mind and body can’t be separated, and brain and brawn aren’t enemies. As I show in Stronger, the purpose of strength training is much bigger than winning games or getting jacked. Lifting weights and building muscle and strength have existential stakes. Anyone who goes to the gym is training to win a prize so big, it’s hard even to name it. But the prize of lifting weights is life.

After living with these ideas for a decade, what does strength mean to you?

Strength is the ability to act upon the world in the ways that we want to. What I want is to keep spending time with the people I love for as long as I possibly can. And the way for me to maintain that ability is to show up at the gym, just about every day, and do the best I can do when I’m there and keep an eye out for chances to help others do the same.