Whether or not we can actually stay motivated to exercise, we all understand it's an important

component of a healthy life. The ideal we often hear is a balanced combination of cardiovascular workouts and resistance training to build muscle.

But exactly how strong do we need to be?

Like what is wrapped up in some people's motivation to go beyond fit into the realm of ripped?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

My guest has been a devoted weightlifter for decades.

He's found pumping iron to be addictive over time. He likes the way his body looks when he's packed on

plenty of meat, as he refers to it. He likes the positive attention he gets, and he feels like

he's strong enough to defend himself in a fight if he's attacked. But this is a guy with a desk job.

He earns his living as the classical music critic for the Washington Post, which is to say he doesn't exactly need to be as muscular as he is to get through his life.

And he's wondered, what forces in the culture and within himself have driven him to keep at it in the gym day after day, year after year.

Michael Ander Broder writes about this in his book, Swole, The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle.

Michael, welcome to think.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. It's great to be here.

So you're at the gym five days a week for at least 90 minutes a session, and you are indeed

trying to bulk up and stay that way. It's such an interesting idea, I think, for a book

that you interrogate why, because that implies you realize your motivations are complicated.

Yeah, you know, I have a lot of people asking what a critic is doing writing about the gym.

And I think what happens when you're a critic is that you just tend to question everything that you come in contact with and every experience that you have.

And so when I first got into the gym, which, you know, I was, like you said, I've been going to the gym for decades, but getting into the gym is a different story when it becomes part of your life.

And when that happened for me, I noticed that a lot of the experiences that I was having in the gym, just walking up to a barbell and having to pick it up and put it down. Somewhere in this caveman activity, I was having kind of an intellectual experience.

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