This is my second conversation with Jordan Castro, author of Muscle Man (Catapult, 2025) and The Novelist (Soft Skull, 2022). He’s also the deputy director of the Cluny Institute and has written for Harper’s, The Point, and Tin House.
Since this is Strength Month here at the Substack, I wanted to talk to Jordan about his Harper’s essay “Getting the Pump,” which argues that lifting, more than just some value-optimizing activity done for health benefits or functional fitness, represents a much-needed a spiritual corrective for people who live too much in their heads.
Over the past few weeks, several readers have reached out saying they were athletic in their youth, then decided to embark on the life of the mind, let the body go, and then had this period where they got back into it. Castro’s essay covers that arc. He went from 140 lbs at 6’0” to gaining 70 lbs of muscle and achieving some respectable numbers on the three main powerlifts. He synthesizes Mishima’s Sun and Steel, René Girard’s work on pride, and Christian theology of bodily resurrection to argue that lifting integrates thought and action in ways pure intellectual work cannot: “Many writer types, I think it can fairly be said, feel an unconscious resentment toward the fitter and well-adjusted, and have an intuitive sense that they are above these sorts of base activities.”
Jordan didn’t have some grand plan to become a lifter. He started with running because he was basically constantly afraid — anxious and depressed, trying to read novels, the “classically tortured “scenario. He worked at an art store in Cleveland. His boss told him he was “kind of freaking out, and to just go for a run after work. Didn’t matter how fast. Just run for 20 minutes and don’t stop.”
“It was like a revelation,” he said. “The next day I went into work and I wasn’t as queasy when customers came in. I wasn’t afraid of interacting with them.”
He started lifting when he moved to Maryland. Few friends, not a lot going on, so he started going to the Planet Fitness nearby. It was open 24 hours. When he was anxious night, he could just go. He learned mainly from YouTube — Googling “men’s upper body workout,” then standing in the gym searching for “tricep push down” on his phone.
This brings up something Jordan clocked early that I think is underrated: the people who are into optimizing, always thinking about the right amount of proteins and fats and carbs, measuring their macros — they rarely get jacked…but they do often end up tired/disappointed/trapped in some kind of “analysis paralysis.”
“Everyone I know who’s ever been super into Andrew Huberman is not jacked,” he said.
There’s something about just pushing weight around. That’s partly why I was excited to talk to him again. I post videos of myself deadlifting in my basement, and Jordan and his wife Nicolette just moved into a new house with a garage they’re turning into a gym. We talked about Eric Bugenhagen, the former WWE wrestler who performed as Rick Boogs and now does fitness content on YouTube.
The powers that be cut Eric from WWE, which I think was a bad decision — he was a real collegiate wrestler at Wisconsin, extremely jacked before he ever touched a steroid. Now he does these utilitarian odd lifts with weird bars and bands, screaming at the camera that it’s a mindset, failing a PR three or four times and then getting it. He doesn’t talk about macros or practical programming. He just gets in there. It’s motivating in that Ronnie Coleman way: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Jordan’s first program was one of Jeff Cavaliere’s Athlean-X beginner programs, which had him doing a different exercise every day for three months — weird stuff with bands, standing on one leg. He was embarrassed to be in there doing it. But early on, everything works for the first two or three months. The problem is guys like Cavaliere need to keep pumping out new exercises. That’s why Bugenhagen has the best gimmick: heavy weight lifts with assorted bars, let the character carry the rest.
When I was doing CrossFit at the University of Pittsburgh, guys there had discovered Kelly Starrett, the Supple Leopard mobility guy. I have the book right above me — 400 pages, you couldn’t possibly do everything in it. But some of these dudes were doing an hour and a half of mobility work, plus loads of “active” rest days. This isn’t sustainable, and indeed, most aren’t doing anything nowadays.
“I’m so allergic to that whole zone where people are just imbibing content and becoming nerds about lifting,” Jordan said. “It’s antithetical to the spirit of the thing.”
If you’re not injury maxxing, you need to be quarter repping. Either it’s partials this week or full ROM or extra ROM, break-your-neck ROM. These things swing every couple months.
Jordan just did a Mad Cow program — basically five by fives of all the main lifts three times a week, one of the standard jump-start programs. When you’re lifting, the difference in how you feel in the world is real. With running, it was almost like medication — it felt neurotic. With strength training, you start to take up more space, experience your body differently, become more physically competent.
All of this once-secret bro knowledge is immediately accessible now. Indeed, there’s probably too much of it. You can binge fitness content or take the Mark Rippetoe books and feed them into AI for a 20-page breakdown. The laziest move is taking a YouTube transcript and pumping it into AI for a 500-word summary. But that’s so lame. And speaking of content — I’ve been getting a lot of Instagram reels of people eating enormous amounts of food. Jordan finds these disgusting.
“Part of it is that they always do it in their car,” he said. “I saw one the other day, this guy was like Patrick Bateman. He put on a full plastic suit to eat three giant servings of wings in his car. There’s also this obese couple who cut open a bag of Doritos and dumped Chipotle in there, eating it in their car. I don’t know why they do it in the car. There’s something about that to me that is totally repellent.”
The car content Jordan does like is Sam Sulek videos. Sulek is the meme-spawing young bodybuilder who recently earned his IFBB Pro card at the Arnold Amateur. Before he lifts, he spends 20 minutes in his car talking to the camera — maybe he’ll hit chest, maybe back, maybe arms, it all depends on how he’s feeling, the vibes. He doesn’t follow a program, doesn’t do any of the nerd stuff. Then he gets to the gym and works out in complete silence.
“There’s something very lonely and really emo about Sam Sulek,” Jordan said. He’s probably our best bet to be the next Rich Piana.
I mentioned Badlands Chugs, the competitive eater who holds multiple Guinness World Records. This huge fellow drank gravy out of a boot, and his work with gravy was what hooked me me. People get hung up on the lemonade and the soda he consumes, but a gravy boot — 40, 50, 60 ounces of gravy — that’s no joke. I’ve consumed a lot of foods over the years in mass quantities, but I could never do gravy.1
Jordan doesn’t enjoy this content at all. Part of his displeasure comes from imagining other people enjoying it, though “joy” is probably the wrong word. I’m more in the zone of: I can’t believe this is so gross, what a sick thing, what a low opinion of themselves they have, how interesting. And then it’s like, hey, here’s another one. And here’s another one after that.
But back to the work of fandom. Our mutual friend Luke Burgis writes about mimetic desire in his book Wanting. When you pull out of fitness fandom or fitness science fandom but keep lifting weights, you can extract yourself from the otherwise-unavoidable mimetic conflict. Those communities will fight over partials versus full reps, go to the barricades for their favorites or their view that week. People struggle to integrate the reality of weightlifting into their understanding of the world, so they focus on science or memes or aesthetics at the beginning.
The healthiest outcome from any engagement with this stuff is to just gradually lose interest in the fandom but continue doing it. You have the initial conversion, you’re probably really into it, and then you just build it into a system of practice. Religion ultimately works the same way. You can read 50 theology books off the bat, but if you aren’t in the practice that the faith culture has, you’ll fall off.
As we concludedd, Jordan told me he’s deleting his X account. If he doesn’t reactivate within the next hour (as of the time of our conversation), it’s gone forever. He thought he was going to let it go.
“Great,” he said when I asked how it feels to be off. “I feel way more present in my life. I’ve been reading more. My brain works again.”
He heard someone say: it’s not that you’re giving your kid access to the world, you’re giving the world access to your kid. You’re giving all these extremely online creatures free rein inside your head and your life — money-hungry app inventors with the morals of a shark, plus all the millions of loony posters who would have been in insane asylums in the early 20th century.2
What’s going to be interesting going forward: there was the whole return of physique and aesthetics culture, everybody being a trainee or aesthete of some kind. But what are they training for? Why did they want to be beautiful? My own line has always been, I’m not training for the Olympics here. I’m just training from day to day. Nor did I really care how I look so long as I can move around well and lift heavy objects. Fortunately, at some point there will be people left over who are genuinely moved by matters of faith or other things. The physical fandom will have a dry-up period until it’s relaunched with a different cycle of people coming through. Tide goes in, tide goes out.
Jordan thinks that once people tap into their physicality in a true way, it sticks. Maybe the physique trends or the cringe meme-ified version waxes and wanes, but people are going to increasingly want a more embodied experience of the world. The best outcome isn’t that you become the most aggressive farm poster who continues farming. It’s that you become someone who enjoys the physical experience of farming, finds the memes and debates have receded, and you’re just working the land. As Castro wrote in his essay when describing the pump: “It starts in your blood and stretches out over the world, where everything remains the same, but different... Before, I saw colors, but now I can actually see; before, I could breathe, but now I can actually breathe.”
At the end of the day, you have to do the work. The work, unlike life itself, never stops.
“The principle [of the “second wind”] is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.” G.K. Chesterton, “The Free Family” in What’s Wrong with the World (1910)?
Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man is available now from Catapult. His first novel, The Novelist, is available from Soft Skull Press.
For more on my eating exploits, read this Thrillist article about the various food challenges I’ve undertaken or this long, fun story about my years at the Golden Corral.
“Close the feeds and reopen the asylums” is the only political sloganeering I’ll get behind.
