Name: How to Use Your Muscles — or Risk Losing Them (W/ Bonnie Tsui) | How to Be a Better Human | TED
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T08:18:21.000Z
Duration: 13 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

Foreign well requires me to activate dozens of muscles across my body, combining explosive power with balance and strength.

It's a full body workout disguised as effortless grace.

When I surf, it doesn't look anything like that.

Not catching a wave, paddling extremely hard and almost kick.

Catching a wave and trying to pretend that I have caught a wave.

Look, I'm not what you'd call physically strong.

I am more comfortable surfing the Internet than I am surfing the ocean.

All of my life, I have relied more on my mind than on my body.

But as I approach my 40s, I've started to feel pain in weird places.

I've gotten winded in ways that I never got winded before.

So I think that it is time to maybe start paying attention to muscles and to even dip my toe into getting stronger.

But as you can see, I'm gonna need some help.

Bonnie Tsoi is a journalist, a surfer, and

the author of the book on muscle, the Stuff that Moves us and why It Matters.

I'm meeting up with her to find out more about the surprising science of muscles and how it's changing who and what we think of when it comes to physical fitness.

So, Bonnie, you wrote the book on muscle, and

I'm curious what writing and researching this book made you think differently about when it comes to strength.

I think this all goes back to what I learned from growing up having the dad I had who was not just an artist, but

I think this was so integral to my growing up in getting me to understand from a very early age that the body is beautiful because of what it can do.

If you understand that these muscles that you're building are helping you live a better life, a longer life, a healthier life, one that helps your cognitive health.

Like, your muscles are always talking to your brain and having conversations that you don't hear.

One thing that I learned was that muscles are not just for, like, moving you around mechanically, but

They are releasing these signaling molecules that travel all around your body to talk to all these different parts of it, including your brain, and

are telling your brain to do certain beneficial things.

I think what has been A sea change over the last several years is that weightlifting is something that the medical establishment.

Will be telling you and your mom and your grandmother is something that they have to be doing.

You said that pretty much everyone, like there's this big change that now pretty much everyone should be lifting heavy.

Most of us understand that as we get older, we lose bone mass and less people are familiar with the fact that in your 30s.

Sorry, everyone, you start losing muscle.

What that really means is that in your 30s, you need to start thinking about who you want to be and what you want to be capable of doing in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and

Much as I wish I could spend the rest of the day eating pasta on the couch, Bonnie really did convince me that building muscle matters a lot more than I thought.

So with that, I'm going to get a little training from her to build the strength that I'm going to need if I'm going to be able to tackle these waves and.

And be able to grab a can off the top shelf when I'm 70 years old.

I swear this here is me trying my hardest.

It just feels like yours is like a martial art and mine is like dog using a fire hydrant.

After that workout, I was sore in places that I didn't even realize were muscles.

Using all of my muscles at once prompted.

Actually a little bit of a strange question for Bonnie.

And those are the muscles that give you goosebumps.

And there's little muscle fibers that attach to your bottoms of your hair follicles.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Use Your Muscles — or Risk Losing Them (W/ Bonnie Tsui) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

stuff

potential

deliberate

straight