Mistakes I Carried: Building Strength in a Time of Crisis

My critical mistake as a historian was ignoring the physical body as a site of knowledge production. For years, I analyzed fitness history in archives and images while overlooking the value of embodied experience. Recognizing this blind spot offers historians a powerful new lens—namely, that bodies can serve as historical archives that capture dimensions of the past inaccessible through traditional sources. In this article, I explore this approach by connecting my personal weight training journey with J. C. Hise, an American strength figure from the 1930s. By examining parallel experiences of extreme body transformation during periods of economic instability—Hise during the Great Depression and myself following the 2008 financial crisis—the article explores how masculine identity crises repeatedly manifest in physical culture. Through my own experience with Hise’s grueling twenty-rep squat program, I discuss how physical practices reshape both bodies and worldviews. This embodied knowledge explains, in part, how fitness cultures reinforce the very insecurities they claim to address while transforming masculine anxiety into profit. By positioning the transformed body as a site where personal metamorphosis intersects with broader social and economic forces, historians can access a more complete understanding of how physical culture has shaped masculine identities across generations.