Why Every Man Should Build Muscle

You should pray for a sound mind in a sound body. Juvenal spent an entire poem mocking the things people beg the gods for. Wealth. Power. Fame. Beauty. A long life. Then, at the very end, he tells you what's actually worth asking for. And he adds one more line, the one that matters most: what I'm recommending, you can give to yourself. This film is about the real reason every man should build muscle: what the largest studies say about strength, survival and the mind, why muscle is an organ that talks to the rest of the body, the old story of Milo of Croton and the calf, and why the iron never lies. SOURCES Juvenal, Satire X, lines 346-366 ("orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano", line 356; "monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare", line 363). The pages on screen are from the edition printed in Venice in 1498 (Boston Public Library copy). Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.9.5: "Milo, quem vitulum adsueverat ferre, taurum ferebat." The page on screen is from Robert Estienne's edition (Paris, 1542). Volpi, Nazemi and Fujita, "Muscle tissue changes with aging", Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care (2004): loss of muscle mass of about 3-8% per decade after the age of 30. Leong and others, "Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study", The Lancet 386 (2015): 139,691 adults in 17 countries, median follow-up 4 years. Momma and others, "Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies", British Journal of Sports Medicine (2022): 16 studies. DeFronzo and Tripathy, "Skeletal muscle insulin resistance is the primary defect in type 2 diabetes", Diabetes Care (2009): skeletal muscle takes up about 80% of glucose under insulin stimulation. Pedersen and others, "Searching for the exercise factor: is IL-6 a candidate?", Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility (2003): the term "myokine". Gordon and others, "Association of efficacy of resistance exercise training with depressive symptoms", JAMA Psychiatry (2018): 33 randomized trials, 1,877 participants. Henry Rollins, "Iron and the Soul" (Details, 1994). This film is general information, not medical advice. If you have a health condition, talk to a doctor before you start training. PICTURES The paintings, prints, photographs and book pages in this film are in the public domain or released under CC0. The vase with Herakles, the portrait of Caracalla and Strozzi's "Tobias Curing His Father's Blindness" are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's open-access collection; the dynamometer, Thomas Topham, the portable gymnasium, the Aldershot gymnasium, the sphygmograph, the melancholy head, the physician taking an old man's pulse and the anatomical plates are from the Wellcome Collection; the prints of the steps of age, old age, the old man with a boy and the sleeping man, the hourglass, the iron weight and the bone photographs are from the Rijksmuseum. No picture in this film needs an attribution credit. #strength #masculinity #philosophy