Hall, a 99% Invisible editor, was narrating after describing her own recent start at weightlifting in middle age. She explains progressive overload, lifting something genuinely hard and adding more once it stops being hard, and ties it back to Jan Todd's history.
…I feel a kind of resolve to continue it when I launch my kid into the air at the pool, or when I hold my dad's painfully skinny tricep and help him out of his chair. All the strong men and strong women of history were right. Muscle really is currency, and it is independence, and it does matter.
…thing, like no matter where you are, where you begin, like to lift something that's heavy for you, and it doesn't mean that it's a bajillion pounds, it means that it's hard for you to do it. And when you do it, it means something. It means that you have done something that you could not do before.
The whole idea at the heart of strength training is progressive overload. It's the idea that you lift a weight that's genuinely hard for you. It's heavy enough that it's almost impossible to lift on your last rep. You do that until it stops being hard, and then you add weight and it's hard again. You get strong by repeatedly asking your body to do something that it can't quite do yet. Building muscle is about discovering a limit and then surpassing it. And it's only recently, in the grand scheme of things, that women have even been invited to try.
Because if you think about the history of all this, men have been given the right to be strong from the beginning, from time immemorial. Whereas women have only really in about the last 50 years or so, have we actually said to women, it's okay to try to run fast. It's okay to try to be strong.…
99% of Visible was reported and produced this week by Delaney Hall and edited by Meg Kramer, with additional production by Jacob Medina Gleason. Mix by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact-checking by Graham Haysha. Special thanks this week to Bonnie Tsui. Her book on muscle is excellent. It…
Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at…