This story is part of Fit At Fun At Any Age—a seven part guide to live a longer and better life.
FOR CHARLES STOCKING, long hours at the desk are part of the job. As a scholar of ancient Greek and a university professor, he spends many hours sitting almost every day. And all his desk work, which may appear to be mainly work of the mind—reading and writing—also trains his muscles. Teaches his muscles how to be, or how not to be.
Sitting in a chair, he unconsciously teaches groups of muscles on the front of his body, flexor muscles, to tighten—including upper-body muscles that pull the arms and shoulders forward, such as the biceps and pectorals, and lower-body muscles, at the junction of the pelvis and legs, that pull the hips forward.
The pernicious engagement of those muscles—as well as disengagement of the opposite sets of muscles on the back of the body—helps explain why, after sitting for a while, he feels stiff and starts to ache, even though he’s in good shape and not quite 45 years old. Standing up, moving around a bit, he feels more comfortable again. Aches and stiffness subside when he engages the extensor muscles on the back of his body, including upper-body muscles that
The pernicious engagement of those muscles—as well as disengagement of the opposite sets of muscles on the back of the body—helps explain why, after sitting for a while, he feels stiff and starts to ache, even though he’s in good shape and not quite 45 years old. Standing up, moving around a bit, he feels more comfortable again. Aches and stiffness subside when he engages the extensor muscles on the back of his body, including upper-body muscles that retract the shoulders, such as the rhomboids, and lower-body muscles that pull the hips back as he rises from his chair, such as the glutes.
Still, the training effect of all that sitting time persists. When steady, low-level engagement of those flexors on the front of his body continues for weeks, months, and years, the body changes. This is how Stocking sees the situation: “Left to its own devices, your flexors will tighten up and take you back to the fetal position, whence you came—if you don’t do something about it.”
Stocking is probably the only classics professor who is also a record-setting powerlifter. He broke the junior state record for his weight class in California by squatting 562.1 pounds in 2003—triple his body weight at the time—when he was 23 years old. He went to graduate school in classics at the University of California at Los Angeles while at the same time working as a strength and conditioning coach for several UCLA Bruins teams and for individual U.S. Olympic athletes. Coaching, he likes to say, was his “ethnographic fieldwork in physical culture,” though he was, and still is, a participant observer in physical culture, simultaneously inside and outside the phenomena he studies.
He is the author of four books, including Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, a study of eight Greek words for strength in the ancient epic about the Trojan War, and he is on the faculty of two academic departments at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches both classics and kinesiology.
For one person to work in these two very different fields is unusual, and it may be unique, but Stocking’s hybrid expertise makes poetic sense. Getting to know him while researching my new book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives, convinced me that one of the best ways to understand exercise is as a kind of language—a language that sustains our ability to enjoy some of the best things in life. With life, in Stocking’s case, meaning helping to care for his family, friends, and students as they all grow older; writing more books at his desk; and many more years of daily walks with Bhima, his Cane Corso bulldog mix.
BACK IN HIS COACHING DAYS, a big part of Stocking’s job was guiding athletes through a sticky wicket he calls “the sport-specific paradox.” He explains the concept to me: “The more you do a sport, the better you get. But the better you get at the sport, that leads to overuse injuries, and eventually not being able to do the sport.”
As a coach, Stocking identified basic movement patterns in various sports, then designed training programs that emphasized the opposite movements, to reduce athletes’ risk of overuse injuries. For example, when you extend your leg to kick a ball, the main muscles involved are the hip flexor muscles on the front of the legs, extending from hips to knees. Athletes who do a lot of kicking, Stocking says, are wise to balance that work by training muscles that pull in the opposite direction—the hamstrings and glutes, which are extensor muscles on the back of the legs spanning from buttocks to knees.
As a professor, Stocking now applies the same principle to his own body, to manage what could be called the desk job–specific paradox. Starting work each morning, he knows that some flexor muscles on the front of his body will be pulling forward most of the day while some extensor muscles on the back of his body will spend those hours starved for attention. So, before the sitting starts, Stocking tries to compensate for some of his extensor muscles’ impending deprivations.
A short routine, he says, “locks the body into proper posture, which sitting will inevitably destroy.” It’s a simple regimen of two exercises: a lower-body move and an upper-body move, one for the butt and one for the back. The biggest muscle in the butt, the gluteus maximus, is a priority because it is the biggest, thickest, most powerful muscle in the body—and the significance of this muscle would be difficult to overstate. “Being endowed with prominent rounded buttocks is the unique privilege of humans,” wrote the evolutionary biologists Françoise K. Jouffroy and Monique F. Médina in their 2006 study of the glutes, “A Hallmark of Humankind.” No other mammal even has a gluteus maximus.
The gluteus maximus, therefore, ranks high on the list of characteristics that make humans human, in terms of comparative anatomy. In the muscle’s enormous size, Jouffroy and Médina see evidence that actions it enables “have been of paramount importance during the course of human evolution.” The muscle is most active during powerful movements, including “jogging, running, sprint-starting, leaping, and walking up stairs or a slope,” and “with straightening up from stooping or squatting positions.” It is “inactive, or quasi-inactive,” during normal walking and when a person stands still, sits, or reclines.
The design of modern life has eliminated much need for engaging the glutes. Standard heights of chairs, beds, tables, and desks make deep squatting unnecessary in most people’s daily lives. Even central heating helps people “avoid squatting and crouching for hearth upkeep.” In such a world, the evolutionary biologists write, properly stimulating the gluteus maximus often “requires re-creating unaccustomed conditions, to be found only in sports and body-building rooms.”
If people don’t seek out such unaccustomed conditions, making special efforts to challenge the glutes, these muscles can become so estranged from the nervous system that it’s almost as if they are forgotten. The sorry state of gluteal amnesia—an actual clinical term—can set in. “Gluteal amnesia,” Stocking says with a half-chuckle, “is my favorite term in the world.” Even as sarcasm, that’s quite a statement, because within the field of classics, Stocking is a philologist. From the Greek word philo, for “loving,” and logos, for “word,” philology concerns how language is structured and how it develops through history. Philology is a discipline of word-loving, and Stocking loves words in seven languages.
Stocking’s strategies for avoiding gluteal amnesia include the hip thrust. With the lower edges of his shoulder blades pressed against the side of a bench, a bed, or a sofa, and with his feet flat on the floor in front of him, his knees bent and his trunk muscles braced—to keep his spine in neutral position—Stocking extends his hips and contracts his glutes.
Hip thrusts teach the contractile tissue of the giant complex of muscles in the rear to pull, faintly and constantly, against the force of the hip flexors, in a balanced tug-of-war. That way, Stocking says, “you can sit for a certain amount of time and not be crippled afterward.”
Stocking’s favorite exercise for the upper body is the row. His favorite form of the row is the reverse pullup. Positioning himself beneath a horizontal bar—like a railing at a playground or a barbell on a rack at the gym—he raises his arms to grip the bar with his palms at shoulder width. He fully extends his legs, with toes pointed up and heels dug into the ground—or, to make the move more challenging, he digs his heels into a raised surface. Then, while stiffening the muscles of his trunk and contracting his glutes and quads, all to fix the length of his body as a kind of lever, he pulls himself up and touches his chest to the bar while pinching his shoulder blades together.
Stocking tries to do three sets of 20 or so repetitions, approximately every 90 minutes or whenever his back starts feeling uncomfortable, each day that he spends mostly sitting at his desk. Even with a formula so flexible, Stocking’s deskproofing workout is a lot of work. “The degree of volume and intensity that’s required for these muscles to stay tight—people underestimate that,” he says. “And the amount that has to be done on a daily basis—people underestimate that. When we sit all day, the hip flexors get really tight. The quads get really tight. We’re basically just in that fetal position. And so the amount of work you have to do just to be able to sit and not develop overuse injuries from sitting—it has to be a lot, on a daily basis, the other way.”
THE BALANCE OF muscular tension that Stocking strives for is an ancient paragon—a central concept of the only book about athletic training that survived antiquity, the Gymnasticus, written by Flavius Philostratus in ancient Rome around 170 A.D. Stocking has spent years studying, translating, and writing about the Gymnasticus, which presents athletic training as “a form of wisdom, inferior to no other expertise.”
Philostratus said the whole point of training is to create balance—which, he believed, could be seen in an athlete’s symmetrically developed physique. Most of the Gymnasticus “is devoted to a description of the athlete’s body,” Stocking writes. Ideally, Philostratus said, an athlete should look like a sculpture of an athlete. His vision was related to a traditional sculptural ideal involving a certain set of proportions, based on bodily symmetries. He thought that ankles and wrists should be the same size, and so should forearms and shins, arms and thighs, and shoulders and glutes. Yet Philostratus may also have been ambivalent about symmetrical standards of beauty. His writing about the links between performance and appearance is marked by contradiction and inconsistency.
While propounding one optimal physique, Philostratus also approved a diversity of athletic physiques, because, as he asserted, different kinds of bodies suit the different movements involved in various competitive events. For example, the Gymnasticus says a sprinter’s “muscularity should be proportionate. Excessive muscles are the bonds against speed.”
The Gymnasticus also says a boxer should not have “bulky calves” (the text does not say why), but a substantial belly on a boxer was fine with Philostratus, since the belly could “ward off blows against the face by sticking out in a way that impedes the forward motion of the punching opponent,” he wrote.
Philostratus described wrestlers in more detail than he described other athletes because wrestling was the most popular ancient Olympic sport. The Gymnasticus says wrestlers should have straight backs because straight backs are “pleasing,” despite the fact that “a slightly curved one is better suited to the position of wrestling, which is curved and bent forward.”
Despite his inconsistencies, Philostratus generally emphasized form over function, Stocking says, because he wanted “to cash in on the cultural capital of the Greek tradition.” Stocking says the Gymnasticus recommended “the emulation of sculpture that is based on the Greek tradition” as the way for Roman imperial athletes to get in top shape, to excel in competition—and thereby to experience ancient Greek virtue.
Many centuries later, these ancient beliefs that athletes should look like sculptures took on very different meanings. As Stocking says, “Greek sculpture has been appropriated for body fascism in the modern era: conforming to a certain standard of beauty.” For many, these appropriations have spoiled ancient Greek sculpture, if not all of ancient Greek culture. Stocking recognizes their dilemma. “Is it possible to appreciate and even praise the beauty of sport in a way that is free from the force of earlier ideological discourse?” he writes. “Can we appreciate the allure of sport without concern about the ethics of doing so?” He thinks we can, if we take care to avoid false equations of ancient and modern standards of beauty.
“The ancients saw the beauty of the body as a signifier of movement,” he says. “They understood the image” seen in sculpture “in reference to exercising bodies, not as an image unto itself,” the way many modern people have tended to do. “So the original understanding of these things works against modern concepts of body fascism. Because beauty is a function of movement, not appearance, as the priority.”
As evidence of this ancient view of beauty and movement, consider this passage Stocking translated from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, reflecting on “Bodily Excellence” by specifying that “Beauty is different for each age.” For each stage of life, Aristotle named the predominant purposes of beauty in his society. In youth, Aristotle wrote, beauty was “for labor, running, and acts of violence.” In the prime of adulthood, beauty was for “acts of war,” to protect the city-state. “For an old man,” he added, “beauty means being sufficient for the labors of necessity and to be free from pain by not having the typical ailments of old age.” Aristotle did not say how to train to those ends—but Stocking is on a quest to figure it out.
STOCKING’S MAIN WORKOUT GOAL right now is a long-term one for the future, rooted in the wisdom of the past. He wants to attain the beauty of an old man as Aristotle defined it—or, as Stocking says, “I’m training to be ready to be 90 years old.”
He looks ahead and sees how mechanisms of movement get worn out: “What are the inevitable injuries that come from old age? Hip replacements, knee replacements, rotator cuff injury.” Data backs him up. In recent years in the United States, total joint replacement surgeries have become more common than heart failure.
Though some age-related joint degeneration and damage are inevitable, it’s not possible to quantify how much. Joint damage may accelerate, though, accompanied by lower back pain, when muscles and connective tissue wither during long days of desk work. As those gradually tightening flexor muscles pull inactive limbs forward, they can curl and hunch our neutral sitting postures almost into fetal positions, a process Stocking calls “fetal-i-zation,” before admitting, “I’m making up a term here.” Stocking thinks, “If we can do things from a muscular perspective to prevent those problems, then we should just be doing that every day,” and that thought simplifies his training goal.
The goal: “Stopping that process.”
Stocking’s workout to maximize the chance of being strong and comfortable and mobile at age 90 involves the same exercises as his workout designed to minimize the pain and damage of desk work. The same movements—hip thrusts and rows—are part of his strategy for building enduring strength and functional alignment of the hips, back, and shoulders.
And his strategy is constantly evolving, based on how he feels on any given day. “Everybody wants the answer to be just one exercise,” he says, because “so much of the history of fitness is a history of gimmicks and fetishization.” Stocking’s countercultural commitment to improvisation is grounded in another ancient exercise principle from the Gymnasticus: Wise trainers, Philostratus said, never follow training schedules for the schedules’ sake—they “do not train by prescription, but provide exercises ‘all improvised for the right time.’ ” The key word there, translated as “time,” is kairos.
The word kairos has no precise equivalent in English, but Stocking interprets it as meaning “the window of time or opportunity to act.” Another scholar, Catherine Eskin, calls kairos “the ability to recognize the ‘right’ moment, and, knowing that right moment, to take decisive action.” That ability, Stocking believes, was the essence of training wisdom for Philostratus. And Stocking—who is writing a book about the Gymnasticus of Philostratus, which should appeal to everyone who loves Ryan Holiday’s books about the Stoic philosophers—is vehement about the principle of kairos. There is no universal answer to the question of which exercises will get us to the end of the road in the best possible shape: “Sometimes it’s this,” he says, and “sometimes it’s that.”
Sometimes, though, a gimmick catches on because it speaks to a genuine need in people that has too long gone unfulfilled, and that may be what’s happened in recent years with the hip thrust exercise. You could probably spend whole days on Instagram watching nothing but videos of beautiful people working to make their backsides more beautiful by doing barbell hip thrusts.
“Ironically,” Stocking says, “I bet there’s going to be a lot fewer back injuries and hip replacements in the future,” even for people whose glute training is mainly about appearance—because hip exercises that make butts bigger often also help to make them stronger. “As a by-product of obsessing over large glutes,” Stocking says, a lot of people “will probably not need hip replacements when they’re 90.”
Data supports that statement. In 2014, a randomized controlled trial compared long-term outcomes for two groups of people with hip osteoarthritis in Oslo, Norway. Both groups received classroom education about arthritis, and in addition, one of those groups went through a 12-week supervised exercise program involving resistance, flexibility, and functional training. Over the following six years, the exercise program reduced the need for hip replacement surgery by 44 percent.
So, the quality of your future may depend, in no small part, on what you do for your behind. “Aristotle said that the source of movement is the soul,” Charles Stocking says, setting up his own punch line with a chuckle. “But biomechanically it’s the glutes—so the soul must be located in the glutes.”
Adapted from Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross, available March 11 from Dutton, a division of Penguin Random House.
This story appears in the March-April 2025 issue of Men's Health.
