Former Strongest Woman in the World Jan Todd Shares Her Journey from 'Jock' to 'Whole Person' (Exclusive)

• Jan Todd and other prominent athletes are featured in Michael Joseph Gross' new book, Stronger, a comprehensive look at society's relationship with strength and muscle

• Gross was inspired to take a deeper look at strength after learning to “handle myself on the river” for a whitewater kayaking trip

• As Gross tells PEOPLE, "Jan Todd, by lifting weights, not only lifted women, she lifted her whole academic field"

Jan Todd’s journey to being the strongest woman in the world began by chance.

She was in a local Austin gym with her husband, Terry Todd, in 1973, when she saw another woman deadlift 225 lbs. It was then that she became inspired to lift weights — and within 18 months, she had landed the Guinness World Record for the heaviest deadlift (394.5 lbs.) by a woman.

“I really wasn't necessarily thinking about it as any kind of feminist statement at the time," Todd tells PEOPLE. "It was just, wouldn't that be interesting to see if you could get in the Guinness Book of Records?"

Now 72 and a professor at the University of Texas, Todd and her late husband, an Olympic weightlifter and powerlifter who died in 2018, became pioneers in physical culture and strength. The topic is explored by Michael Joseph Gross in his book Stronger, which also recounts Todd’s career and journey from powerlifter to academic. The book, which comes out March 11, is a comprehensive look at how muscle — and the concept of strength — shapes our lives and society, and how the idea of being physically strong has evolved.

Related: Chef Julia Turshen Says Powerlifting Helped Transform Her Life and That She's No Longer 'Afraid to Take Up Space' (Exclusive)

A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Gross, 54, tells PEOPLE he was inspired to write the book after his own experience getting stronger in his early 40s. “I needed a new physical challenge to help get me out of my head. And I decided that I wanted to learn whitewater kayaking.”

“I started lifting weights more seriously than I ever had before, training to get strong enough to handle myself on the river. And it turned out that the lifting just became so interesting to me that I wanted to read more about it.”

“So I wrote the book that I wanted to read,” he says.

“One of the most surprising things to me was how long it took for medicine to recognize the value of weight training," he says. "But I was also surprised to learn why.”

“There's an ancient prejudice against muscle, an idea that goes all the way back to ancient Rome, that the training to build mass can actually suffocate a person's soul,” says Gross, who spent eight years researching and writing the book.

“This prejudice has really persisted into modern medicine, and we still experience it today in our daily lives, every time we run into anybody talking about a trade-off between brain and brawn, which is completely absurd. It has no basis in biology.”

But it’s something Todd said her husband experienced when, while working on his PhD, he attended his philosophy class in his gym clothes — which in the ‘60s was gray sweatpants and sweatshirt.

“He remembered at the beginning of one semester in his doctoral career that he walked into a philosophy class he wanted to take. And he went in and sat down in the back of the room, and of course, in his gray sweats and sweatshirt and weighing about 330 lbs., the professor actually looked at [Terry] and he said, 'Excuse me, you must be in the wrong room.' ” He had assumed an athlete didn't belong in the class.

Related: Constant Gym-Goer Ditched Her Cardio Workouts for Powerlifting and Lost 37 Lbs.

Stronger also addresses how physical fitness has evolved for women. Todd shares that when she began lifting, she was warned that it “would make my waist bigger. People were very worried about me damaging my bones by lifting weights, which, of course, the reverse happens. It strengthens your bones.”

And then she was told, “You could have a prolapsed uterus and then it would just fall out while you're squatting. And I said, 'No, I don't think that'll happen.' ”

“You have the choice to decide who you want to be as a person,” Todd, who famously rejected the use of steroids — wildly popular at the time she was competing — says. “I think for a lot of women, we don't recognize that we actually do have choices we can make in our lives. If a man were to decide that he wants to play football, his coach would say, ‘I think you're gonna need to be bigger to play football.’ He would probably not hesitate to say, ‘Okay, then I'm going to try to gain some weight,’ and he would figure out how to do that.”

“Culturally, we have always suggested to women that the gaining of weight is somehow a transgression because we are making a choice to make ourselves — in the eyes of men — less attractive,” she said. “We have to be able to say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna do this for a period of time and I'm going to make the choice to be bigger because I want to be stronger.’ “

These days, Todd — who was in a severe car accident in 2020 which led to her being pinned under an SUV and facing a hip replacement — is still a prominent figure in the sport, if not actively competing. She’s the chair of the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas Austin, and professor of women’s and gender studies.

Related: Powerlifter Shares Proud Weight Loss Journey but Says 'There's More to Life Than Having a Six-Pack'

She and Terry opened the J. Lutcher Stark Center and Archive for Physical Culture and Sports; the Austin-based complex shows their personal collection of memorabilia — including images of strongmen, and illustrations of Victorian women working out (in full dresses).

And while she’s no longer driving “nails through boards with my bare hands” or able to “lift 1,000 lbs. of kids” on a table, there is one feat from her powerlifting days that she can still do: She can bend a metal bottle cap with just her fingertips.

“Michael sent me the proof of the book and I was reading through some of my sections and I saw that he had retold the story about me bending the bottle caps,” Todd tells PEOPLE. “Last March, I was in England, running a strongman contest for [Arnold] Schwarzenegger — we do an Arnold Britain” she explained, referring to the annual competition named after the actor, retired bodybuilder and former California governor.

“After the contest was done, we were drinking beer. And of course, I'd had a couple of beers, which always makes that strength easier for me. And I had no trouble doing it then. I sent Michael a photograph of it on the page of the book and I told him I would save it for him. And I said, 'Who knows, it may be the last one, we'll have to see.' ”

”Jan Todd, by lifting weights, not only lifted women, she lifted her whole academic field and she lifted the athletic endeavor,” Gross tells PEOPLE. “I think Jan Todd changed the world in those specific ways and what’s really interesting to me — what was so appealing to me — is that she didn't make some grand plan to change the world and then execute that plan. She just did the difficult thing in front of her every day and kept doing it.”

And there’s one thing Todd especially wanted to highlight to PEOPLE — an earlier goal that she says she’s reached.

During an early Sports Illustrated article, she was quoted as saying “I want to be a whole person and not just a jock.”

“At that point, I was primarily Jan Todd, a very young woman lifting weights and that was kind of what I was known for," she tells PEOPLE. "I've always remembered that and kind of kept it in my head as aspirational.”

“I think in terms of Michael and the book Stronger and everything, the message is that I have achieved what I said I wanted to do. The work I've done as an academic, the research, the writing — that qualifies me now to say I have become a whole person.”

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