Reflections on the Stronger Release Party by Rachel Ozerkevich

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I found myself surrounded by paintings and sculptural reproductions of historical strength heroes, chatting with one of the strongest men in the world. We were discussing the challenges of teaching visual culture to undergraduate students in sport history classes, but I was also getting useful pointers on how to increase my back squat—a lift I’ve been working to improve for nearly a decade (it turns out that my back is likely too weak, and I need to improve my confidence). I’m at work right now, I marveled to myself. My personal, professional, and academic interests were colliding.

The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports hosted a multi-part release day celebration on Tuesday, March 11^th for Michael Joseph Gross’s book Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in our Lives. The book had been in the making since at least 2016, when Gross reached out to Dr. Jan Todd and Dr. Charles Stocking, asking them to collaborate. The project evolved into something truly paradigm-shifting: a tome, endorsed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, about the importance of strength training for everybody, written with both journalistic accessibility and academic rigor. This is a combination unlike anything I had seen. I was certainly not alone in this, judging from the enormous turnout at the release event. The crowd was made up of faculty from across the university, students, local Austin residents, and a substantial group of enormous strength athletes. Upon leaving Gross’s reading and the subsequent Q&A from Dr. Stocking, Dr. Todd, and special guests Mitchell Hooper and Martins Licis—each recent winners of the Arnold Strongman Classic and the World’s Strongest Man competitions, with Hooper winning the former in 2025—one undergraduate remarked that he felt so inspired that he couldn’t wait to get to the gym.

I shared in the sentiment. I have been working at the Stark Center since August of this year. I started my academic career as an art historian who also happened to do CrossFit and powerlift in my free time. It was only towards the end of my PhD, when I attended the Stark’s first annual Physical Cultures of the Body Conference in 2021, that I felt like I had found “my people”—that is, others who strength trained in their personal lives and were writing exciting, engaging scholarship about the cultural importance of lifting, exercise, movement, and sport. Much to my delight, I now find myself here as a faculty member, with an office in the same Stark Center that first gave my work a voice and a place.

The event on March 11^th was groundbreaking for several reasons. Gross was introduced by Dr. Stocking—himself a seasoned collegiate strength coach, powerlifter, and scholar of ancient sport. Gross’s talk made clear that strength training has immense and wildly underappreciated health benefits for every single segment of society. The strongest men in the world and Holocaust survivors in their late 90s have this in common: though the dose may differ, both populations can, and should, resistance train. All the rest of us who fall between those extremes should be taking up this call to action. Hooper spoke about the role that lifting plays in his life. With a master’s degree in Clinical Exercise Physiology, Hooper has merged his academic background and personal interests to forge a (wildly) successful career in strength. He and Licis (now an accomplished strength documentarian and coach) answered audience questions about their training philosophies, mindset, injury prevention and care, and the role that strength history plays in their practice. Here was a group of academics, writers, speakers, and athletes whom I have long admired all making clear that sport, history, and health can and should align. It’s a simple message that has nonetheless been largely sidelined until now.

My own professional and academic goals have been to merge art history with my personal interests in lifting and physical culture. I’m doing so by examining the specific techniques that sport photographers used before Photoshop to adjust the appearances of strength athletes in the press. But I continue to feel troubled that much academic work on strength remains inaccessible to the people who need the message the most. The public often gets left out of these discussions, seeing professional athletes as unapproachable anomalies and academics as too esoteric. Many of us knowthat lifting is good for us—for our bone density, for our physical and mental resilience, and to prevent age-related muscular decline. And many of us know that the media’s portrayal of strong bodies has an impact on our own body image and ideas about what health “looks” like, for better or for worse. These are topics that unite everyone and yet their discussion, in my experience, has been deeply segmented. This gap dissolved on March 11^th: the popular appeal of incredible athletes combined with the empirical expertise of researchers made the topic of strength training seem exciting and accessible. It’s difficult to overemphasize how impactful this was.

Dr. Todd shared with her late husband Dr. Terry Todd a lifelong mission: to give strength training, physical culture, and sport the institutional support they deserve while at the same time including—rather than alienating—the public in the project. Jan and Terry started the Stark Center fifteen years ago to find a home for the incredible collection of strength history material they had amassed during their careers as record-breaking athletes, coaches, and educators. It has since turned into the world’s foremost collection of physical culture and sport history material. It hosts interdisciplinary researchers, visual culture exhibitions, and now, events like this one. Though I haven’t quite been at the Stark for a full year, I understood this event to be the culmination of what the Todds first set out to do in Austin. Sport and strength history have achieved academic recognition in large part thanks to them.

Now the Stark has begun to successfully extend this conversation to the rest of the population. Dr. Todd and Dr. Stocking have both been featured in major media outlets this past month. A recent article in People magazine recounts how Dr. Todd revolutionized the field of women’s strength beginning in the 1970s. As a groundbreaking strength athlete and advocate for women’s lifting, she inspired (and continues to inspire) countless other women athletes to push beyond the cultural limitations imposed upon their bodies and identities. Dr. Stocking, in turn, is profiled in Men’s Health this month, where he explains how strategic yet simple strength training methods inspired by antiquity can counteract modern sedentary work environments. The press that this movement is garnering is gaining steam; the momentum is palpable and will only keep building.