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Home > Waterpeople Podcast > Bonnie Tsui: On Muscle + Movement


	Podcast:		Waterpeople Podcast
	Episode:		Bonnie Tsui: On Muscle + Movement
	Category:		Sports & Recreation
	Duration:		01:19:43
	Publish Date:		2025-06-09 09:00:00
	Description:		What moves you through the world? In the most literal sense, it's the same answer for all of us: muscle. In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are - but what they mean to us. Bonnie attended Harvard University, where she rowed crew, snowboarded, and studied American literature. She came to surfing in her late 20s after relocating to California. Today, Bonnie lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and contributes regularly to the New York Times. She is the author of four books: American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, Why We Swim, Sarah and the Big Wave, and her latest, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters Bonnie talks us through the purpose of the brain (!), learning to surf as an adult, the gendered cultural narratives around strength, the name of a whale's powerful butt muscle, and the inevitability of age related muscle loss (and what we can do about it). ... We first encountered Bonnie's work reading Why We Swim (It's on our 50 Books for Waterpeople list: "Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool, modern‑day Japanese samurai swimmers, even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six‑hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times contributor Bonnie Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what seduces us to water, despite its dangers, and why we come back to it again and again." ... Timestamp 00:06:40 - A Transformative Ocean Experience 00:09:55 - Navigating Childhood Memories with Water 00:10:51 - The Ocean's Complex Beauty 00:11:26 - Community and Connection in Surfing 00:13:26 - Personal vs. Shared Experiences in the Water 00:15:02 - The Beauty of Morning Light 00:17:16 - Perspective shift from Swimming to Surfing 00:18:48 - Discovering Surfing in California 00:21:13 - The Lifelong Journey 00:22:14 - The Fountain of Youth 00:23:52 - The Joy of Learning to Surf 00:25:21 - Muscular Harmony 00:31:25 - Cultural Perspectives on Strength 00:36:34 - The Role of Hormones in Strength 00:39:28 - The Evolution of Female Strength in Send us a text ... Listen with Lauren L. Hill & Dave Rastovich Sound + Video Engineer: Ben J Alexander Theme song: Shannon Sol Carroll Additional music by Kai Mcgilvray + Ben J Alexander Join the conversation: @Waterpeoplepodcast ... Get monthly musings and behind the scenes content from the podcast by subscribing to our newsletter. You'll get water-centric reading and listening recommendations, questions worth asking, and ways to take action for the wellbeing of Planet Ocean delivered straight to your inbox. You can stream every Waterpeople episode from your desk.
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