The Weight of History: Building Strength in a Time of Crisis

I am delighted to share that my new article, Mistakes I Carried: Building Strength in a Time of Crisis, has just been published in the American Historical Review. For historians, the AHR is the big one. But what excites me most is not the prestige of the publication. It is that the piece gave me the chance to write about something I have lived as much as I have researched: what happens to us when we force our bodies through dramatic transformation.

The article tells two stories separated by nearly a century but bound by the same paradox. One is about J. C. Hise, an American lifter who transformed himself during the Great Depression through a brutal programme of twenty-rep squats and gallons of milk. The other is about me, in 2019, when I decided to put myself through the same programme after my own body had been driven to its limits by competitive bodybuilding. Together, these stories reveal how strength training, especially in times of crisis, becomes more than exercise. It becomes a way of grasping at certainty when the world feels uncertain.

From 148 lbs to 200

In early 2019, I stepped on stage for a natural bodybuilding show at a shredded 148 lbs, down from my usual bodyweight of around 190. I had dieted for months to get there, and afterwards I decided to maintain the leanness. For several months I hovered around 150 lbs, counting calories with precision, measuring every ounce of food, and keeping myself razor lean. On the outside it looked like success. Inside I was miserable. Physically I was constantly exhausted. Hormones were in the gutter. I wasn’t sleeping properly, my energy was low, and my mood was flat.

It was at that point that I returned to Hise. He had become something of a legend in 1930s America for his astonishing physical transformation. A slight man by build, he forced his body into bulk through twenty-rep squats and force-feeding, growing to nearly 300 lbs. He told anyone who would listen that the training had changed not only his body but also his entire worldview. “Each rep brought him closer to a new identity,” I wrote, “each forced meal adding layers to both his frame and his worldview.” For Hise, the growing body was proof of masculine certainty in the chaos of the Depression.

Inspired by his example, I decided to try the programme myself. Three times a week I squatted until my vision blurred, forcing down air between reps, forcing down milk and food after. Within four months, I had gained more than fifty pounds, topping out around 200. On paper it was extraordinary. My logbook showed numbers I had never thought possible. But the transformation was not simple. As I wrote in the article, “The taste of bile after morning sessions, the trembling legs that sometimes refused to carry me home, and the tears that came without warning.”

Still, in the strangest way, it was exactly what I needed. The bulk pulled me out of the hormonal ditch I had dug for myself by staying so lean for so long. At 200 I was bloated and uncomfortable, but I felt alive again. I cut back to 200, then settled at 185, where I still sit now, far healthier and far happier than I was when chasing the leanest possible version of myself. That experience gave me a new respect for what Hise went through in the 1930s.

Hise and the Great Depression

Hise’s own story is crucial to understanding why the programme mattered so much to me. Born in 1905, he came to national attention in the 1930s and 40s after what fitness magazines called a near-miraculous transformation. Within a month he claimed to have gained thirty pounds, and over the course of years he turned himself into a three-hundred-pound behemoth. His method, breathing squats combined with huge amounts of food, became famous through the writings of Mark Berry and later Randall Strossen’s book Super Squats.

But Hise was not just building a body. He was building an identity in the depths of the Great Depression. At a time when millions of American men were unemployed, when the image of the productive male breadwinner was collapsing, Hise found a form of productive labour in the squat rack. Each session of forced breathlessness, each added plate, each new inch around his chest became proof that he was still capable, still strong, still a man. He wrote incessantly about how training had given him not just bigger muscles but a new sense of power and superiority.

His case illustrates how physical transformation becomes a cultural phenomenon. In Hise’s America, strength meant discipline, vigour and whiteness. His growing body fed into a worldview that celebrated husky men as the salvation of society. When I followed his programme in 2019, the cultural context was different but the logic was the same. I was recovering from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, from an academic career built in precarious conditions, and from the personal toll of bodybuilding culture. The barbell promised control when everything else felt unstable.

The Body as Archive

That is the lesson I carried into the article. As a historian, I usually study men like Hise through the written archive: magazines, training manuals, photographs. But when I pushed myself through his programme, my own body became the archive. Every aching squat, every forced meal, every hormone rebounding after months of depletion taught me things the paper trail never could.

“Each time I grip a barbell, each moment I examine my changing reflection,” I wrote, “I’m reminded that the real story of physical culture lives not in documents but in flesh and sinew.” That is why this experiment mattered, and why I wanted to share it in the pages of the American Historical Review. Strength training does not just change our bodies. It changes how we see the world.

It also shows us the paradoxes of physical culture. The squat rack offers empowerment, but it also breeds fragility. The more we pursue certainty through strength, the more that certainty slips away. That was true for Hise in the 1930s. It was true for me in 2019. And it remains true today in an age of online influencers promising salvation through the next routine or supplement.

As I concluded in the article, “The body remains our most intimate battlefield in the endless war between what we are and what we think we should be.” That is the paradox of strength, and it is why physical culture remains so endlessly fascinating to study.

Publishing in the American Historical Review is a personal highlight, but more than that, it’s an opportunity to spark new conversations about lifting, transformation, and the histories we carry in our bodies.

If you would like to read the full article, I am happy to share a free PDF—just drop me a message.

As always… Happy Lifting!