Decades of sitting at  a desk can wreak havoc on your muscles.

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.

“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.”

So, before the sitting starts, Stocking tries to compensate for some of his extensor muscles’ impending deprivations.

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.
No other mammal even has a gluteus maximus.

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.

Stocking’s favorite exercise for the upper body is the row. His favorite form of the row is the reverse pullup.