On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui

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.

Why I Picked It Up

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Bonnie Tsui wrote one of my favorite microhistories, Why We Swim, which made me realize which qualities I loved most in nonfiction:

Personal, poignant commentary in combination feels significant, and I love how wide Why We Swim goes in tying together multiple interdisciplinary subjects.

So when I saw she was writing a book on strength training? Hell yeah. Sign me up.

I read plenty about physical endurance and fitness. There's the limit-pushing Endure by Alex Hutchinson, the gendered Let's Get Physical by Danielle Friedman, and an assortment of other titles rotating around why I find it so significant: mastery, quantifiable pursuit, excellence, mind-body connection. So I knew On Muscle would likely hit the spot.

Where I Read It

Ironically enough, I ended up reading most of On Muscle in ten-minute spurts on my eReader while waiting for my group training classes to start at my gym.

For the last year or so while revising my book again, I've largely done at-home workouts: runs, bikes, and the like. I've tried the fitness studios up on the North Shore (and they're tough!) but tend to feel like if I'm just taking a mat-based class then I could do it myself for free. So with book edits done, I'm going hard on the conditioning cadence. Strength classes (I like someone correcting my lifting), ballet and dance, hikes, runs, swimming laps. I love variety, but appreciate being in a strict rhythm or cadence. For the record, I discovered this was also the prime way to survive [redacted book process.]

So a precise combination of sensations contributed to the feeling of reading On Muscle too: that specific stickiness of the mat floors at the gym against my legs, electrolytes in hand, a little nervous for the countdown to start. Driving back home, feeling the tiredness hit in my back, golden light, wet hair drying from the gym showers. I love a lot of the small satisfactions related to that ecosystem, and that intensified my appreciation of the book.

On Muscle is a speedy read; it feels a little more plainspoken—or perhaps just less personal—than Why We Swim, so I did have to force myself through it at some points. Less colorful in some ways, but still with plenty to latch onto.

“It's a good life if you don't weaken.”

The Book Itself

Bonnie Tsui approaches strength training, muscle, and fitness through a few different topics and stories—definitely her style. I ultimately think the anecdotes or rabbit holes she chose were more loosely related than those from Why We Swim, meaning that readers may feel she connects them too abstractly.

Ultimately, I liked them all, but as I noted above, found my interest drifting at certain points. The book wasn't quite as continuous as her former. I love her voice enough that I didn't mind, but y'all should know it's much more of a memoir in feel.

One point is that being physically strong and tough was immensely important to her father, so that was a way they bonded during periods of distance, such as after he moved out of the U.S. and stopped contacting the family. You get the visual of a little girl doing calisthenics with her brother because that was a way of earning her dad's approval, an image that's undoubtedly personal.

That's a strength of Tsui's curiosity I do appreciate, albeit makes her more of a fit for certain readers than others. She's unafraid to introduce the personal elements of why an activity matters to her, which I think is crucial to understanding why a pursuit like strength training affects others too. Most hobbies we have operate on multiple levels: cultural and individual. She loves to follow a thread.

She starts the book by talking about Jan Todd, a female powerlifter who shattered barriers, and points out how Todd discovering her peculiar capacity for the sport was somewhat accidental.

On Muscle excels most, I think, in line-level insights and prose. Her style and tone are overall lovely, and you can tell that she's a person who finds significance in these singular, symbolic moments. She's very vocab-focused, as I said above, so will often muse about the metaphor for example of shouldering something as an act of generosity, or how a synonym for muscle is potency. What atrophies, and what grows?

“We move our bodies through the world, and our minds follow. The artist Paul Klee described visual art as a record of movement, from beginning to end—a drawing of a dancer, say, is made by a roving hand, which pins down the movement of said dancer, and the finished work is then appreciated by an audience's ever-tracking eye.”

“We often think about muscle as existing separately from intellect—and maybe even oppositional to it, one taking resources from another.”

“New research with populations recovering from post-traumatic stress illustrates how lifting weights helps people feel more at ease and in control of their bodies. If you can improve your physical strength in a solid, visible way, it can reframe your self-perception: Look what I did! This is evidence that I'm different now.”

Personal Connection to the Book

As I mentioned, I've been especially fascinated by embodiment and physical limitation lately. I find it extremely helpful—and healthy—for me to have specific ways to get out of my brain and into my body after long days drafting or on screens. (Related: I'm trying to force myself to become a morning workout person, but I'm smartest first thing and get progressively dumber throughout my day—so try not to waste my most intelligent window.) There's a lot we only learn by doing.

I resonated with Bonnie Tsui's notes on how the perception of physical strength reverberates throughout society, and actually had the delight of learning a new vocabulary word I'm about to be obsessed with: atavistic. I adore her vocabulary.

It's silly to share, but I somehow ended up only ever dating athletes in high school and college, and I think that's (beyond the various evolutionary qualities we're attracted to) because of what this book points out—that it's not like other people aren't equally driven or capable, but athleticism is an almost immediately visible shorthand for endurance and willpower. The people I tend to get along with best are incredibly "active" people—not solely physically, but that's a helpful shorthand. They're likely to understand my drive, solitary hours devoted to the mastery of something, exhaustion and the push, operating in seasons and cycles, etc,.

“Show me you're in good form; show me you're a person of action. Character that's grounded in something you can feel. It's a way to assert presence.”

For me, I've always found an athletic challenge helpful to have in parallel to my other projects. Because my work and output (writing and art) is so subjectively judged, having an objective goal or purpose helps me to keep my head on straight and keep myself aligned with my identity as a disciplined and capable person. It's satisfying to have a domain in which consistency is rewarded, and visible, when so much of what I've been grappling with lately has to do with the frustration that effort and result are not always 1:1. It feels so good to see incremental progress, to be able to relish a process that ultimately does not hinge on a final judgement, and to prove to myself that I'm as tough on the outside as on the inside.

“In his writings, Galen describes muscles as the drivers of voluntary action and thus our human selves.”

Plus, endorphins make you happy (cueing that H&N processing system), and I do like the aesthetics of muscle especially as someone who loved figure drawing so much. I love shutting my laptop, getting the hell out of my house, and getting to straight-up black out my brain for a portion of my day when it often feels far too active. Switch into a different mode.

“Part of the fun of attempting the impossible, of course, is surprising yourself when you get there.”

Various Curiosities Sparked by the Book

Recently, I've also been thinking about the poetics of muscle being built by training until failure and what it means to be a person who's good at failure. A lot of people just can't mentally stomach being confronted with that line of inability. But you're supposed to go until you hit failure, hurt and recover, and come back better the next time. That's literally the science behind what makes you stronger, and avoiding that isn't resilience; it's ego. So there's a certain kind of relentlessness I appreciate about the process and about me.

I loved Tsui's conversation with Dacher Keltner, who I've been talking a lot about lately as he's the primary researcher spearheading studies of awe. He described emotions as being about action and the preparation and intention for action, which I think is a framework I'd never considered because normally we think of emotion as something impeding or complicating our actions instead. According to him, the reason they are expressed outwardly is so that they can make something happen. (More on this another time.)

I also have thoughts on how she ended the book in the epilogue, by defining grace through the lens of endurance (something I've been thinking about lately, especially re: Flannery O'Connor's definition of grace being almost violent as something that changes you), but I'll leave that musing for another time. I've been thinking about my name a lot lately.

“Grace, in part, is about restraint, physical calm in the face of uncertainty...Grace, then, is also about endurance...With grace, the beauty and elegance in movement comes from a seeming effortlessness and ease. But we all know that nothing comes without hard work.”

I could also go on forever about muscle memory, and I loved the research Bonnie Tsui pulled into the ending of the book too about what's most effective in keeping our bodies engaged with our surroundings over time. Definitely relevant, applicable, and great to understand. When tackling something explanatory, she's very clear in a way that casual readers will appreciate.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed On Muscle a lot. Bonnie Tsui's style is familiar and likable to me: lots of curiosity and exploration filtered through her own personal synthesis. I find her writing poetic and her insights thoughtful.

Personally and solely as a reader, I think her tackling strength training and the mind-body connection there to make a lot of intellectual and philosophical sense. I highlighted plenty, and liked the read especially in how I consumed it: bite-sized sessions spread out over a period of days.

I'd recommend opting for Why We Swim first to see if you like her vibe because it does get abstract (and this one even more so), but if you love the former, you'll appreciate the latter too.

For fans of:

Labor of Love by Moira Weigel; Endure by Alex Hutchinson; Let's Get Physical by Danielle Friedman; Exercised by Daniel E. Lieberman; Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami; Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky; etc,.

Listen to My Voice Note About the Book

The accompanying voice note is 16 minutes long, covering my shift in routine towards something more physical, weight on my shoulders (punny), meditations on being an "active person," the book itself, etc,. I'd recommend listening at 1.2 to 1.5x speed.