Our bodies are full of muscles big and small, some pumped and a few atrophied. In her latest book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, Bonnie Tsui digs through the human body and its known history to figure out why and how our muscles impact our lives, our culture, our looks, and our brains. Join Alta Journal contributor Tsui as she sits down with Alta Live to tell us what she learned throughout her extensive research into the meat on our bones.

About the guest:

Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to the New York Times and the bestselling author of Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year; it has been translated into 10 languages. Tsui is also the author of American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Sarah and the Big Wave, a children’s book about the first woman to surf Mavericks and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area.

About the book:

In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal—these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty—and how they have distorted it—through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.

Tsui introduces us to the first female weightlifter to pick up the famed Scottish Dinnie Stones, then takes us on a 50-mile run through the Nevada desert that follows the path of escape from a Native boarding school—and gives the concept of endurance new meaning. She travels to Oslo, where cutting-edge research reveals how muscles help us bounce back after injury and illness, an important aspect of longevity. She jumps into the action with a historic Double Dutch club in Washington, D.C., to explain anew what Charles Darwin meant by the brain-body connection. Woven throughout are stories of Tsui’s childhood with her Chinese immigrant artist dad—a black belt in karate—who schools her from a young age in a kind of quirky, in-house Muscle Academy.

On Muscle shows us the poetry in the physical and the surprising ways muscle can reveal what we’re capable of.

Here are some notable quotes from today’s event:

  • On muscle: “Muscle is literally the stuff that moves us through the world. And we all have them, and it all means something different to all of us. Like the picture in our head when we hear the word muscle is different, but yet we all inhabit these bodies that change over time as muscle is giving us shape, you know, giving us the ability to exert our influence on the world.”
  • On gender and muscle: “Why is it that muscles are equated with men, and women are equated with frailty and weakness—where did that come from? Where did those ideas originate?… And a lot of it is situated in a sort of binary gender role in society. When you have strength associated with one gender, then there’s all these kinds of power dynamics that are upset if the other gender acquires physical strength.”
  • On Ilona Maher: “I just wrote a feature for Elle magazine that talks about female strength and Ilona Maher and how she has almost single-handedly turned the tables on this discussion of femininity, power, physical strength, owning that strength, and confidence. And she’s such an effective communicator of these ideals because she also talks about what it was like when she was a kid. She said, ‘I didn’t have myself. I never saw bodies like my own when I was a kid.’ And now you’ll see all of these girls coming to her rugby games.”

Check out these links to some of the topics brought up this week.