466- The Weight

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That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99-P-I and use code 99-P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99-P-I code 99-P-I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you're listening to this show right now, you certainly understand the influence new products have on the ways we live. But the interesting thing is that over the course of history, so many products don't so much get newly designed, but get resold to us over and over again with different packaging. Versions of the same technologies to help us clean, cook, exercise and sleep. All promising more efficiency and more convenience. Attempting to turn our homes into private little utopias. Or at least that's the thesis of the podcast Nice Try from New York Magazine's Curved. Their first season was all about failed utopian experiments, but their second season makes a turn inward into the private haven of the American dream by looking at all the appliances in it. Nice Try also just happens to be hosted by 99-P-I superstar alumna Avery Truffleman. It's nice to say her name again. Avery Truffleman. So far, she's covered how the doorbell turned into the home security system, how the vacuum cleaner went from a public utility to the first widely accepted household robot. And how the crock pot and instant pot cleverly repackaged some of the oldest cooking technologies known to humanity. But the episode we're sharing today is about a self-improvement device that was not intended to make life easier. It was designed specifically to make life just a little bit harder. And it hasn't changed very much since its invention. This is a story about lifting weights and how it became a central component to home fitness. SPEAKER_11: So this is a full body exercise. Oh, there we go. Yeah, that works. Hold on. SPEAKER_12: I know where we are. Three more. Three, two, one. SPEAKER_09: Can I just introduce the show quickly? This would be a great place to introduce the show. Yes, totally. From New York magazines curbed in the Vox Media podcast network. This is Nice Try. I'm Avery Truffleman. SPEAKER_12: I love you. All right, should we do some goblet squats? I don't know what they're called. Let's do them. SPEAKER_10: Let the record show I totally work out. I'm just usually on team cardio. So I had never swung a kettlebell before. And when I went to the house of Natalia Melman-Petruzella, a historian of physical fitness and a professor at the New School, she had more than enough weights for both of us to work out together. This one is 20 pounds. SPEAKER_11: This one is 35 pounds. That one is 50 pounds. SPEAKER_10: Professor Petruzella roundly kicked my ass at lifting because this is just part of her home and her life. She has these weights and lifts them regularly. Workout equipment and accessories have become canonized into the realm of home appliances, especially during the pandemic. SPEAKER_11: With home fitness equipment, what people are willing to spend has only gotten higher and higher. And I think that's in part because we sacralize exercise as a legitimate expense and a legitimate pursuit. And then just from the built environment of the home, there's something desirable to show off. SPEAKER_10: Through the past 30 or so years, home workout machines have all but promised to move your limbs for you. The Nordic Trek, the Bowflex, the Peloton, maybe the Wii Fit, I don't know. But what Professor Petruzella gave me to hold while we did squats, a 35-pound iron kettlebell, is about as low-tech and simple as it gets. Fitness trends come and go, but the weight is an anchor in the shifting tides. There have been very few changes to its design. Russian farmers used kettlebells in the 1700s as counterweights to measure out grain. Barbells used to have those giant globes on either side of them that circus strongmen used to lift. And those were filled with sand or iron shot to modify the weight. But once barbells became a rod with changeable, solid iron plates, that was sort of that. 35 pounds of iron is 35 pounds of iron. It's just that the culture around weights, who lifts them and why, has changed. SPEAKER_11: If you look at the larger history of fitness culture in America, you have at some moments a kind of celebration of strength and muscle building, and at other moments a real ambivalence and even disgust and fear about what it means to lift weights. Professor Petruzella is truly not exaggerating about the disgust and the fear. SPEAKER_10: In the early part of the 20th century, there were honest-to-God health concerns around lifting weights. A widespread idea, promoted even by doctors, was that lifting weights would make you muscle-bound. Muscle-bound there meant being literally bonded by your muscles. SPEAKER_11: Like your brain wouldn't work, you were trapped by your muscles. SPEAKER_10: And you couldn't touch your toes or touch your head. You'd be locked in a puffy, muscular cage of your own making. And so the people who did venture into the world of weightlifting were not too forthcoming about it. Very unlike today, going to the gym being seen exercising is not something that displays your virtue. SPEAKER_11: Weightlifting as a subculture was sweaty and dirty and entirely suspicious. SPEAKER_10: It was considered a form of body modification to coax your muscles to this dangerous artificial edge with weights. And so it's easy to be like, ha ha, old timey people, why were they so scared of weights? I mean, I don't lift weights. I think some of the reason why is because I'm intimidated. Not that I think weights would make me like unable to touch my head, I'm just, you know, why would I want to get ripped? But in thinking about this eternal, unchangeable piece of equipment at the center of so many changing attitudes and fads around personal fitness in America, I came across the story of this one businessman who was arguably sort of a proto-home fitness guru from the 1930s. And his entire vision was to get everyone to lift weights, no matter gender or age or race, back when no one believed that it was healthy. And I don't actually know if I could say he succeeded or not because it's only fairly recently that we are finally sort of living in the reality that this guy envisioned. But it didn't happen until way long after his death and only in this very roundabout way. Oh, and his name is Bob Hoffman. Can you read it? SPEAKER_04: Yes. At one time I stood alone. I was almost the only believer in weight training for athletes. Now there are thousands of coaches who are teaching weight training to their teams and hundreds of thousands of athletes improving their athletic ability through weight training. Bob Hoffman. That quote from Bob Hoffman is on a plaque at the entry of the Weightlifting Hall of Fame in York, Pennsylvania, which is in a lot of ways a shrine to Bob Hoffman. SPEAKER_10: That's Bob. SPEAKER_04: That's Bob. Yeah, Bob later in life. SPEAKER_10: Jan Dellinger was my guide at the Weightlifting Hall of Fame, where out front there is a seven-foot tall bronze statue of Bob, gleaming, bald, shirtless, super ripped. Inside the atrium, there's another bust of Bob, his buff arms crossed proudly over his chest. And then right up there on the wall, there's a massive sepia photograph of Bob from the waist up in a frilly shirt, bow tie and shiny patterned tuxedo, decorated with military medals. He often had a lot of medals. SPEAKER_04: He just like wore medals around? SPEAKER_09: How do I talk about this telecl- okay, he was, he had a big ego. SPEAKER_04: He sometimes wore medals on his coat. He sort of looked like a third world general. Some of those were bought. Some of those he actually earned. SPEAKER_10: Okay, so Bob Hoffman was actually a decorated World War One hero. But he had a knack for, shall we say, pumping up the truth about himself in particular. SPEAKER_03: He was very egocentric, and I would say more so than 90% of people. When historian John Fair wrote the definitive biography of Bob Hoffman, it involved a lot of fact-checking. SPEAKER_10: But Bob's very hearty ego turned out to be a useful tool for selling weightlifting to an incredulous American public in the 1930s. SPEAKER_03: Because very few people believed in barbells. Because, again, really there was this concern that if you got too muscular, you'd ruin your body. SPEAKER_10: And muscles would make athletes slow and inflexible. Football coaches were the worst. Oh my gosh, yes. SPEAKER_03: And I played tennis in college, and the tennis coach told us, I don't want any of you guys ever touching barbells. Bob Hoffman had always been a good athlete. SPEAKER_10: He was a canoer and a boxer. And when he began working out with barbells, his friends ridiculed him for seeking manufactured bumps. But he discovered that the strength and muscle gained from weightlifting made him better at sports. He realized from his personal experience that they helped him grow big and strong back in his canoeing days. SPEAKER_03: But Bob Hoffman was able to ascend into so much more than another secret gym rat. SPEAKER_10: Because Bob co-founded a business that manufactured and sold oil burners. And in 1922, iron oil burners were a hot commodity. SPEAKER_03: He got in on a good thing. Oil burners were new. And everybody else had coal furnaces or fireplaces. SPEAKER_10: York Oil Burners, based in York, Pennsylvania, was doing pretty steady business, especially careening into the Depression. And so Bob Hoffman was at liberty to hire anyone he wanted to. And he wanted to hire fellow weightlifters. Not only because he knew that buff dudes are good on the factory floor, but he also wanted to create his own community. To train together and to engage in some friendly lifting competition. And then Bob realized the process of iron casting that they used for oil burners could also make barbells. Like, just to have them to use for themselves for their training. SPEAKER_03: They started manufacturing them there in the middle of the oil burner company. And he began recruiting weightlifters from around the area to work in the oil burner company. Which is a really original idea. He gave people jobs. SPEAKER_10: And so Bob assembled a team of his employees, of all races, of all backgrounds, brought to York, Pennsylvania from all over the country to form the York Oil Burner Athletic Club. Which is a very awkward name. And things ratcheted up very quickly from there. Because in the small but passionate world of competitive weightlifting, winning a regional meet could qualify you for the Olympics. And soon, members of the York Oil Burner Athletic Club were taking off to compete in the Olympics and all other kinds of international lifting competitions. SPEAKER_04: Bob spent, I think, $20 to send a telegram to Adolf Hitler, which was basically in your face. That was after a 1938 world championship. SPEAKER_10: As Bob saw it, his ragtag crew of guys, most of whom were blue collar and immigrants, were suddenly representing America. They were beating government-sponsored teams from fascist and communist countries. And this nationalism angle became a really important dimension for Bob Hoffman. SPEAKER_03: He was fighting for America. He was fighting for our side. And Bob came to believe that everyone should be super excited about what he was accomplishing. SPEAKER_10: I mean, Bob was basically funding and creating the American lifting team himself, out of his guys from the York Oil Burner Athletic Club. You're welcome, America. And so, if Bob Hoffman was going to get the appreciation he thought he deserved, he needed to get rid of the stigma around lifting weights. To get Americans to embrace the barbell and to understand the beauty of lifting. And not only for his employees slash Olympic champions, but so that every single American could be healthy and strong. And, you know, prepared, just in case one of those nations with a state-sponsored lifting team tried to invade us. It was entire nations he was working against, SPEAKER_03: and they were doing it for, to a great extent, ideological purposes. So, yeah, he was up against a big stone wall, and he couldn't get over it himself. Back in 1932, Bob had started a magazine out of the oil burner company called Strength and Health. SPEAKER_10: In editorials, Bob warned that American life was too easy. The vast majority of the people are soft. SPEAKER_14: And that SPEAKER_10: To avoid having our own country invaded, we must be strong. SPEAKER_14: The magazine was packed with how-tos and advice and inspirational cover photos of Olympic champions, SPEAKER_10: many of whom just so happened to be Bob's employees at York. And in 1935, when Milo Barbell, America's biggest barbell company, went bankrupt, Bob bought it. We're in the middle of a depression, and Bob's buying a mail-order barbell business in the middle of a depression. SPEAKER_04: That tells you how much of a zealot Bob was. SPEAKER_10: By the late 1930s, Bob Hoffman had ditched the oil burner business entirely, and started manufacturing and selling barbells full time. York Oil Burner had now become York Barbell Company, which is quite the leap when you think about how popular oil burners were and how suspicious and niche weights were. So Bob had a lot of convincing to do. York gave a lot of exhibitions over the years, back in the 30s, and they would go to carnivals and have shows. SPEAKER_10: Bob used his Olympic team slash employees as models and spokesmen to sell his weights and home workout courses. The York men and Bob Hoffman traveled all over the country in a roadster with a barbell strapped to the front. They would lift the barbell and then touch their elbows to their toes to show how flexible they still were. And this is key. The style of lift that the York men were demonstrating, the style that Bob most adored, was Olympic lifting. Indeed, this is the style of lifting that is in the Olympics. But aside from that, it is a very specific style, which, put simply, is this. It is lifting a barbell and raising it over one's head through a sequence of choreographed moves like the snatch, clean, and jerk. It's not just about lifting the most weight possible. It's about how you lift it. SPEAKER_04: Olympic lifting takes a little more snap, speed, coordination, and flexibility. Olympic lifters were agile and, dare I say, graceful. SPEAKER_10: They were the opposite of muscle-bound. And so Bob really wanted everyone to be excited about his Olympic lifting team and to be doing Olympic lifting themselves. Everyone. All ages. Yeah, if you tapped into the strength and health culture, again, which Bob was very much informing, SPEAKER_04: you found support. And for a teenage boy, you saw some kids your own age. Jan Dellinger actually grew up to work in the editorial arm of York in the 1970s. SPEAKER_10: But even before that, strength and health had a column written for women by women called barbells, about how lifting can help you keep a trim physique. Reading strength and health was a form of community outside the realm of mysterious, scary gyms. And actually, Bob Hoffman thought that was a better way to work out. He wrote, SPEAKER_14: Home training is the best way to produce the maximum in muscular strength and growth. And again, this was a wild proposition when you think about the reaction Jan got from his dad when he asked for weights so he could work out at home. SPEAKER_10: My dad threw a fit. Yes, threw a fit. He said, we're not buying this for you. SPEAKER_04: So you could be like, wow, Bob Hoffman was pretty prescient. That's amazing. SPEAKER_10: How did he know that weights are good for you? The answer was he didn't. He was kind of shooting from the hip. It was all sort of trial and error, I guess you would say. But it seemed to be working. SPEAKER_03: And what's more, he was making a lot of money. Because at a certain point, Bob becomes like a macho Gwyneth Paltrow. SPEAKER_10: He starts cranking up books and more magazines full of all kinds of advice that extend beyond weightlifting into general wellness. And some of this advice is just like, wait, what? SPEAKER_04: Nobody's batting a thousand. But I mean, I know Bob's conundrum. Bob is a conundrum. In Bob's 1938 book, How to be Strong, Happy and Healthy, on one page, he's telling people to avoid eating white flour and refined sugar, which is like, OK, wow, pretty on the nose there. SPEAKER_10: But then you turn the page and he's saying most headaches are caused by constipation and not to put condiments on your food. And that masturbation can sap a man's strength. And the thing about Bob's rules that did have merit, oftentimes he thought they did not personally apply to him. He railed in print against caffeine and coffee and stuff, but he took no dose. SPEAKER_04: He was kind of a caffeine freak. Really? SPEAKER_09: Yes. I think I was mad at his boys for drinking coffee. That's drinking coffee. SPEAKER_04: There's, you know, separation there in one person's mind. Don't ask me to explain it. I'm probably telling you more I should. SPEAKER_10: Bob advised a solid eight hours of sleep, but said that he personally didn't need it because I sleep faster than most people. SPEAKER_10: It would be hard for anyone to live entirely by the rules Bob Hoffman set, including Bob Hoffman. SPEAKER_03: He loved hot dogs. He loved candy. He indulged himself with unhealthy food. He claimed to be the healthiest man in the world, but he turned out to be one of the unhealthiest men in the world. So Bob was a total mixed bag with a lot of contradictory or unfounded or unfollowable advice, SPEAKER_10: which makes it wild that he was 100% correct about weightlifting. But then the hilarious part to me is that this somewhat broken clock ends up being right twice. Because Bob shot from the hip again with another fitness product. And again, he hits the target. SPEAKER_03: If you want to be strong and healthy, you need more protein. Like, is he the reason I can go get protein bars at the bodega? SPEAKER_10: He definitely popularized the idea. SPEAKER_03: In 1952, Bob introduced a product he called High Protein, spelled with two e's. SPEAKER_10: The recipe was essentially stolen from a one-time business partner, and it was basically soybean powder that he mixed with chocolate from nearby Hershey, Pennsylvania. And he personally mixed it himself very unscientifically in a giant vat with a canoe paddle. Bob was in there sweating away, making high protein. SPEAKER_03: Eventually he got others to do the sweating away. He was using the same mixture to sell his gain weight product as he was to sell his loose weight product. SPEAKER_10: Oh my god, no. They were the exact same product. Exactly the same product. SPEAKER_03: He insisted that these high protein products were the reason that American weightlifters were so successful in the 1950s. So ultimately, Bob Hoffman had created this loop where he wanted to get Americans excited about his Olympic team SPEAKER_10: by essentially relying on his Olympic team to sell his publications and protein products and weights. But as individuals and professional sports teams and trainers started buying and using York barbells and high protein, it made lifting weights a means to an end and not an end itself. Because it turned out Bob's customers were not necessarily interested in learning the choreography and sport of Olympic lifting for the great glory of America. They weren't even necessarily interested in lifting to train for other sports. Turned out a sizable portion of Bob's customers, maybe more sizable than Bob realized, just wanted results. SPEAKER_03: That's what young men want most of all is to look big and to impress people and it doesn't, it's good to have strength. But appearance is the main thing. And the question became, what kind of appearance is the appearance to want? SPEAKER_10: And how do weights fit into that? After the break, an ideological challenge to the York empire pits the East Coast against the West Coast. Athletics versus aesthetics. And ultimately gets us to the kind of workouts you might be doing at home today. SPEAKER_00: The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. 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SPEAKER_10: The truism of rivalry is that it often springs from admiration. And so the cruel irony is that the weightlifting guru who emerged to challenge the reign of York Barbell could have easily been Bob Hoffman's protege. Because while Bob was building his empire in York, a kid named Joe Weider was home in Montreal getting hooked on weightlifting. And according to Jan Dellinger, Joe Weider gobbled up everything Bob did. He was a devoted reader of strength and health and a lifter of York Barbells. OK, here's something people don't know. SPEAKER_04: When Weider started out in the late 30s, he was a York rep. He was. He rep York Barbell stuff. SPEAKER_10: And if you'll recall John Fares description of Bob Hoffman, he was very egocentric. SPEAKER_03: And I would say more so than 90 percent of people. Here's the rest of the sentence. But he had his equal in this field of physical culture because Joe Weider was the same way. Joe Weider was still a teenager when he began to build his weightlifting empire. SPEAKER_10: Legend has it he pillaged old editions of strength and health to get the contact information of about 600 Canadian muscle men and mailed them each a postcard, encouraging them to sign up for his publication, which turned out to be the extremely French Canadian sounding your physique. The first issue came out in 1940 when Joe was only 19 years old. And eventually, when York stopped selling weights in Canada because of a tariff increase, Joe Weider decided to fill the gap by manufacturing his own weights. And eventually he got into shilling protein, too. Weider saw that Bob was making a lot of money out of it. SPEAKER_03: And so he started manufacturing his own protein and he called it high protein and spelled it differently. Weider spelled protein correctly. SPEAKER_10: And then Weider was making Weider vitamin mineral supplement, Weider energy tablets, Weider reduced aid supplement, Weider weight gaining supplement. Weider was essentially selling supplements as a magical shortcut to help you glean the benefits of working out without breaking a sweat. And this is part of an important distinction between Joe Weider and Bob Hoffman. Joe did not care about being able to execute a clean and jerk like an Olympic weightlifter did. And neither did his readers of your physique. They didn't want to read about precise Olympic choreography or how to be fit out of some patriotic duty. They just wanted muscles. So where do you go if you want to become famous and make a lot of money? SPEAKER_03: And Weider really got it right. He reasoned that it's in bodybuilding. So that's what Weider went for in a big way. And that's for big, bulging muscles. Bodybuilding is the idea that you can sculpt your deltoids and your triceps just so and make yourself into a statue of your own design. SPEAKER_10: It was less about athletics and more about aesthetics. SPEAKER_03: That you're doing this not so much for your country, but you're doing this for yourself. I guess you would say self-interest. That you become a Weider man. The Weider way and the Hoffman way were just fundamentally two different philosophies. SPEAKER_10: Even if they were using the same weights. At the York Barbell Club picnic in June of 1945, York, Pennsylvania was first dubbed Muscle Town, USA. Bob's Americana Norman Rockwellian mecca for blue collar workers living and grunting together on and off the clock, all obediently living by Bob's strict rules for health and wellness in order to bring glory back to the United States through the discipline of Olympic lifting. But the bodybuilding movement had been gathering steam in Los Angeles. And this is where Weider would eventually move and set up shop. Muscle Beach had popped up in the 1930s as a spot for gymnasts and acrobats to practice. Muscle Beach, where you flex whatever you have. SPEAKER_10: And by the 1950s, this slice of boardwalk attracted actors and extras and stunt doubles and workout buffs, men and some women, who went to exercise in the sun. Tourists came to gawk at their beautiful, perfectly sun-tanned bodies as they smiled and performed flips and stacked in human pyramids. It was a body-conscious culture. SPEAKER_04: Whether you were doing gymnastics or hand balancing or lifting and bodybuilding, whatever, it was just like this bohemian atmosphere there in Southern California. SPEAKER_10: To Bob Hoffman, this Muscle Beach scene just looked like narcissistic cotton candy. Repeatedly, strength and health smeared booby builders who wanted muscles for muscles' sake. SPEAKER_10: Soon, Bob coined the term sensible physical training to differentiate his athletic, healthy York way from what he saw as Joe Weider's superficial way. He essentially dragged Joe Weider into an ongoing war between their publications. Individuals that I've interviewed sort of blame Bob for the feud because Bob was the front runner and he didn't like this competition from this upstart, SPEAKER_03: this Canadian and this foreigner who was under communist influence or encouraging communist ideas. Which is like, lol. But the feud between Bob and Joe eventually got truly very ugly and petty. SPEAKER_10: Just like firing shots about each other's divorces and finances, stuff that didn't even make good articles. I mean, it was almost sickening. SPEAKER_03: Which is wild because bodybuilding and Olympic lifting used to have a lot of overlap. SPEAKER_10: A lot of the Olympic lifters at York used to also call themselves bodybuilders. But when this rift opened, a number of York men defected to become Weidermen. Also, a lot of the guys just left York because of low wages and poor management. After all, why would you want to live under Bob's impossible lifestyle rules and work for him in both the barbell business and on the Olympic team in central Pennsylvania, when you could work out in the sun on Muscle Beach and pose in Mr. Universe competitions? And the bodybuilding lifestyle was all the more alluring after Joe Weider took a young Austrian lifter under his wing. And in 1968, paid his way to the U.S. SPEAKER_03: My swartzenegger was a Weider product. Schwarzenegger changed the whole game, not just for lifters, but for the wider American public, when they saw Arnold star in movies. SPEAKER_12: I am Hercules. SPEAKER_03: Barbells became accepted by virtually everyone, but it didn't happen until widely until the 70s. And it was probably Weider that cashed in most and eventually displaced Hoffman. Bob Hoffman's impact on the culture of weightlifting was and is huge. SPEAKER_10: He converted a lot of sports teams and members of the military to start using weights. But ultimately, Bob gave up on the Olympic team, emotionally and financially. Oddly, Hoffman turned to funding softball teams. That softball thing was really weird. And American lifting at the Olympics has actually never quite recovered. Pretty much ever since, Bob stopped personally bankrolling it in the 60s. Last year was kind of a big deal because a member of the women's team won a silver medal. But the last time someone on the women's team won a gold medal was 20 years ago. And on the men's team, it's been especially bleak. The men's team hasn't won a single medal since 1984. And I didn't even know how bad Americans were at lifting. Because no one really talks about it. SPEAKER_03: Well, we don't emphasize weightlifting as a sport or as an Olympic sport. Other countries do this. SPEAKER_10: So, yeah, when weightlifting became culturally acceptable, it was for bodybuilding and the showiness of it rather than the sport. And interestingly, Professor Petruzella says that weightlifting set the stage for the next massive movement in American fitness, which was cardio. SPEAKER_11: So what happens when cardio becomes a big deal? Well, the enthusiasm that has been percolating thanks to these strength enthusiasts, now there's a form of exercise that the world is primed for that is good for you that doesn't involve lifting heavy things, doesn't involve sending away for these iron heavy weights that you have to have in your house. It could be just trotting around outside in the street, you know, in your jogging suit and your like rubber-soled shoes. SPEAKER_10: Cardio, which started in the 60s but really took off in the 80s, was like the surefire not scary way to a lean life body. In comes aerobics and swimming and aquaerobics. And the thing is, by the 80s, weights have become culturally accepted enough to be included as part of cardio home workouts. SPEAKER_05: If you have several weights, you may want to use the heavier one for these first exercises, the shoulder shrugs. SPEAKER_10: In this Jane Fonda workout video from the 80s where she's just using little metal dumbbells, you can hear the aesthetic influence of bodybuilding. SPEAKER_10: But you can also still hear the fear associated with getting too muscular. SPEAKER_05: The three movements together give your shoulders a great contour without giving it a bulky look. SPEAKER_10: The message had come through, like lifting weights was good for you, sure, but if you didn't want to get swole, maybe you should just use little ones. This is a new version of that same old fear of muscle boundness. SPEAKER_11: Weightlifting had always had this baggage with it, particularly for women, that it's unhealthy because it's heavy. There's a lot of that same kind of framing and marketing and reassurance about like, don't worry, it will make you thin or at least it won't make you bulky. And that's literally the same thing that we've been hearing since the 1940s. And this is, of course, gendered, but I don't think it's entirely gendered. SPEAKER_10: I think there are also a lot of class hangups around what kind of bodies an intellectual in the knowledge economy should have. What it means to be lean and leisurely. Muscles carry a lot of baggage, so I've always been like, I don't really want to lift that baggage up. And it turns out Professor Petruzella, at the same time as she was roundly kicking my ass with her workouts, told me that she used to be just as hesitant as I was. I had totally incorporated the world view that like, I build muscle easily and that's a problem, you know, and so I don't want to bulk up. SPEAKER_12: So here, I'll tell you, grab your right leg. Basically, in 2018, Professor Petruzella wanted to train for the New York Marathon and a coach suggested that part of her training should be weightlifting. SPEAKER_10: That it would make her faster and healthier and fitter. That cardio and real, full weight training can go together cohesively. And this has been a fundamental tenant of a relatively recent movement in fitness. One that I actually did not realize was actively underway all around me. Alright guys, what's your last one? Okay, we're going to do a 10 in 10 seconds. SPEAKER_02: Get your load on. SPEAKER_10: CrossFit gyms are often in garages or designed to look like gritty garages. Because that's where the movement began. It was invented for anyone to do in their home. Because you're not working out with abstract workout machines or trying to target specific body parts. You're working with different weights and ropes and things that might replicate real world situations if you had to quickly run somewhere or lift something. CrossFit is a polarizing program, but there's no question that after CrossFit came out in 2001, it spawned all of these different kinds of programs that put weight training at the center of fitness. SPEAKER_11: CrossFit was the birth of the functional fitness movement. SPEAKER_10: The idea of the functional fitness is that you only need one barbell and a few weights and you can do all these different kinds of things. SPEAKER_10: Katie Rose Haipmanik is a professor of culture and anthropology at Brooklyn College. SPEAKER_08: And I'm an Olympic weightlifter. SPEAKER_10: Indeed, the style of lifting that Bob Hoffman loved. SPEAKER_08: Olympic weightlifting in the United States has boomed since the advent of CrossFit because CrossFit brought the weightlifting equipment and style and moves into an everyday class for like general populations. SPEAKER_10: And the person responsible for CrossFit is in some ways a very Bob Hoffman-like figure who is proposing weightlifting workouts for the masses. A rogue personal trainer named Greg Glassman. SPEAKER_08: He got kind of kicked out of his mainstream gym because he was doing all kinds of stuff differently. SPEAKER_10: Glassman would do ridiculous numbers of repetitions in a short time and then run around the block and then maybe do some gymnastics moves, maybe swing some kettlebells, maybe do some Olympic lifts. Each totally scattered workout was super quick, super high-octane. And Glassman started to post his very intense workouts on the internet for anyone to follow. SPEAKER_08: So this was like early on line 2001. So this was done mostly by rogue individuals in their garages until after September 11th. SPEAKER_08: It is not coincidental that CrossFit, the War on Terror, the U.S. military and the barbell sort of came up together. SPEAKER_10: After 9-11, all the elements that had been weird and alienating about CrossFit, the accessibility, the intensity of it, suddenly this was really appealing to a civilian population who just bought gas masks and go bags because they wanted to be prepared for everything. And this was also appealing to a military gearing up to recruit for a new war. Paramilitarism was built into the very culture of CrossFit. CrossFit even started a line of workouts named after soldiers who died in the War on Terror. You can go to the website and you can find an image of the man who died and a workout named after him. SPEAKER_08: And they're called hero workouts. SPEAKER_10: The hero and tribute workouts now also include cops who've died in the line of duty. But ultimately, this is the culture that really made weightlifting mainstream in America. More so than Bob Hoffman or Joe Wieder ever could, even though CrossFit was actively developed to be rogue and fringy. SPEAKER_08: CrossFit was built in opposition to a mainstream gym. Now you can go into any mainstream gym and find functional fitness spaces. And gyms throughout the country have revamped their spaces to accommodate that because it's been so popular. Think about the equipment that sold out in the pandemic. SPEAKER_10: It was like kettlebells and barbells. Stuff that was all revived by CrossFit. Or rather, functional fitness. You can't use CrossFit because it's branded. SPEAKER_10: Also, a lot of people don't want to use the name CrossFit because of its long history of being libertarian and white and militaristic and male. Especially after the murder of George Floyd, when Greg Glassman tweeted racist things and was ousted from CrossFit corporate. SPEAKER_08: A lot of people will not continue with CrossFit because of the undercurrent white supremacist imperialism, misogyny that's inherent to the practice. SPEAKER_07: It would be disingenuous and it would be maybe even borderline dishonest if I didn't give credit to CrossFit despite the shitty putt. SPEAKER_10: Maylard Howell is one of the founders of Dean CrossFit in Brooklyn. It's one of only a few black-owned CrossFit gyms in New York City. And a lot of CrossFit gyms have changed their names or disassociated from the brand. But Dean CrossFit was not one of those gyms. We try to be an example of what it should be or what it could be. SPEAKER_07: Maylard started lifting through bodybuilding. SPEAKER_10: When he was young, he wanted to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that's how I started. I chased wanting to look like those guys in Flex magazine. That's how I started doing push-ups in my mom's garage. SPEAKER_10: But when Maylard was compelled to try a CrossFit class, he realized his muscles couldn't actually help him. SPEAKER_07: And I was like, whoa, that shit kicked my ass. And there's either two reactions to that. Either that shit kicked my ass, I don't ever want to do that again or ever feel like that again. Or two, shit, that kicked my ass, I got to do better. I think I could do better. Now, I may be an anomaly, you know, but I don't think CrossFit or the functional fitness space would be where it's at right now without that raw... It appealed to a large percentage of fitness goers. SPEAKER_10: For Maylard, functional fitness is about what your body can achieve, not what it looks like. It's just right out of the Bob Hoffman camp. It's almost like he took the words right out of Bob's mouth when he said... Everyone should be lifting weights. SPEAKER_07: Everyone. Everyone. I'm not saying you should be lifting weights to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever. No, you should be lifting weights to improve your quality of life. You should be lifting weights to be a stronger human, to be a healthier human, SPEAKER_07: to be able to do day-to-day stuff with minimal risk and increase your longevity. That's why you should be lifting weights. Period. SPEAKER_10: In a functional fitness class, you might encounter kettlebells and dumbbells or barbells. But in the class I just so happened to go to, we were given barbells. And we were instructed how to clean and jerk with coordination and flexibility. Olympic style. SPEAKER_13: You want your elbows to be up, resting on your... And the bar is actually resting on your shoulders. Are you always consciously considering the choreography, or at some point does it become second nature? SPEAKER_10: It's second nature. Greenpoint Athletics, formerly known as CrossFit Greenpoint, is gritty and raw feeling. I would have been way too intimidated to go by myself. But my friend Tori and her wife, Chris, have been going a lot lately. And they have computer-centric, brain-in-a-jar jobs like me. Chris is a law professor, and Tori is a writer. I'm Tori Peters. What should I say? SPEAKER_13: Author. OK, I'm an author. I don't know. SPEAKER_09: Fitness aficionado as of like three months ago. SPEAKER_13: After a lot of instruction for how to execute an Olympic lift without throwing at your back, I spent 20 minutes trying to sink my breath with my movements to hoist my barbell over my head. SPEAKER_10: And it required a lot of focus. My whole body and mind was induced into this very trance-like, beatific state. And I didn't feel competitive or like anyone else was looking at me. It was just me and this weight and this energy. It was just me and this weight and some really loud music. I think it's like, I feel, I get to feel good about my body here, SPEAKER_13: not because of necessarily the way it looks, but like, instead of being like, I want my body to be ornamental, I start aspiring for my body to be able to do, jeez, they're doing, I don't even know what this movement is, but they're doing like pull-ups wild ladder. Right on cue, the teacher who taught the class, Kylie, SPEAKER_10: they're doing these ridiculously intimidating pull-ups, like just as some sort of cool-down. I think when I see people do these movements, I don't look at them. SPEAKER_13: I can imagine what it would like to do that. And instead of, even as like an aspirational attainment, aspiring to be in my body as opposed to aspiring to have somebody like gaze on my body is a really big difference. The Olympic lifting class made my whole body ache in this satisfying way that felt pulsating. SPEAKER_10: And I was like, huh, I think I could see myself getting into this. But I wasn't sure if I was considering it for weeder reasons or Hoffman reasons, you know, like, did I actually want to be strong? Or did I just want to look like I was strong? Arguably functional fitness kind of blurs that line. SPEAKER_13: Bodybuilding is supposed to be ornamental and then CrossFit is like, oh, it's applicable. But there's something ornamental in having a body that's so easily applicable to work. And it's work that you'll never actually do. And it's like, yeah, I sit at my computer all day, but I could, I don't know, like chop down a tree. And so there's a kind of like, it's like a hidden ornamentalism of the body. SPEAKER_10: It's a set of considerations and circumstances that seem so far removed from Muscle Town USA and from the Olympics and from fears of muscle boundness and from the Mount Rose Cemetery in York, Pennsylvania, where Bob Hoffman's grave was designed to look like Elvis Presley's, but engraved with a long glowing list of his many accomplishments. At one time I stood alone. I was the only believer in weight training for athletics. Now there are millions. SPEAKER_09: But Bob didn't need all the braggary and the fake metals. SPEAKER_10: His legacy speaks for itself, albeit more quietly and subtly than Bob would have liked it to. Because when I took that class at Greenpoint Athletics, the 2.5 pound plates I kept adding to my barbell each time I lifted it high above my head were emblazoned in iron with the name York. SPEAKER_02: SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be talking about the origin of the Western bathroom and the culture of modern cleanliness as examined through the great mystery of why Americans cannot seem to fully embrace the bidet. Embrace the bidet, people. It is delightful. Nice Try is written and performed by Avery Truffleman. Produced by Megan Kinane with associate producers Diana Budds and Sarah Burke. Fact checked by Selena Solon. Lisa Pollock is their editorial consultant with sound design and engineering by Alex Higgins. Their showrunner is Art Chung and executive producers are Nishat Kurwa and Kelsey Keith. This program, 99% invisible, is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt, Swan Rial, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivien Ley, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madon, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. SPEAKER_02: Okay, I want you to do eight reps of Stitcher followed by 12 reps of Sirius XM. SPEAKER_00: Okay, here we go. SPEAKER_05: One, two, three, four. Those are numbers, but you already knew that. If you want to know what number you're going to pay each month for your car, use Kelly Blue Book My Wallet on AutoTrader. They're really good at numbers. AutoTrader. SPEAKER_06: Get more out of zero.