The Atlantic

The Life of a Jacked Guy in 2019

Getting ripped comes with cultural baggage.
Source: Gabriel Bouys / Getty

Bro, I definitely lift. A decade ago, after years of amateur wrestling, I got into competitive powerlifting. As my form improved, the lean, strapping muscle of my youth thickened into the carapace of a latter-day Farnese Hercules. Now, at 37, I’m 6 feet tall, I weigh 240 pounds, and my entire basement serves as a well-appointed gym. Depending on where I am in my training cycle, I can usually find time to flip 1,000-pound tires and crush small apples in my hands.

Outside of competitions, that strength is a source of relief. It feels like there’s no physical task I can’t perform with ease. I can carry dozens of bags of groceries up many flights of stairs, haul buckets of gravel to and from cement trenches, and easily help people remove their overstuffed carry-on bags from the overhead compartments of airplanes (). Socially, that hard, muscular shell has helped me

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Most Consequential Recent First Lady
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The most consequential first lady of modern times was Melania Trump. I know, I know. We are supposed to believe it was Hillary Clinton, with her unbaked cookies
The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult

Related Books & Audiobooks