3 Ways the Gym Made Me a Better Writer

Introduction:

• Is fitness your thing? Do you make time, every day, for iTunes music, earbuds, and an hour of cardio? If you're like many of us, fitness is a part of your life, but not central. As I will show you in this article, however, your time pumping iron can carry over to your time with a pen. 

• We’ve all seen them. Guys strutting around the gym, stuffed full of muscle like a balloon ready to pop. Some are the nice guys, happy to see everyone and ready anytime you need a spot. Others put on a ‘bad’ persona and look like working out makes them angry.

• As a young guy, I bounced back and forth between these two. What kind of gym rat I would become depended on how I thought I could get the most respect from peers. Working out was going to be my life and I was going to have to build more shelf space for all of my bodybuilding trophies.

• It didn’t turn out that way.

• Do you remember your dreams from long ago? How does it feel to pull them to your attention?

• My, like many people's these days. love for fitness and for the gym never stopped. It’s just different. Now, instead of using fitness to feel, I use it to feel and to think. The following are three ways you can become a better writer from fitness. 

Number One: Meeting People

• Did you ever have those aha! moments in higher education? Starting in my junior year of college, I had a divine revelation. I wasn’t struck by a white bolt of lightning by an angel named Seymour. But it still was an epiphany.

• Simply put: everything is connected. It may sound weird and your mind may try and argue with it, but it’s true. Everything is connected to everything else, somehow.

• Have you ever stopped and meditated on your place amongst a universe of other things? I’ve seen this in the relationship of writing and fitness. As I’m going through the gym, with nothing but the sound of grunts, dropped weights, and the blender making protein shakes, my mind zones out and I’ll arrive it home without remembering much of my workout.

• But what I do remember are the interactions with people I’ve known at the gym—sometimes people I’ve known for several years. 

• Tie this back to writing. What is writing? I don’t want to offer up some blanket idea. But I will say that, in a way, writing is a relationship. 

• Think about it. You relate to the pen, which relates to the page, which ultimately, relates back to your reader. Put some flavor on those words and you have a form of communication that can bring out emotion, which is often writing’s whole point.

Number Two: It Helps build structure. 

• Are you an organized person, or are you, more or less, a 'free spirit'? I hesitated to include this one because it seemed too simplistic. But since structure is something both writing and fitness have a need for, I thought it necessary. 

• Did you set goals as a youngster (or even an adult) that played a pivotal role for the positive  place you've ended up, today? Let me back up and talk about how I got into lifting weights. I joined Gold’s Gym Missoula when I was fifteen. I was probably the youngest guy in there. The owner had done my parents a favor since I had nowhere to go, after school. I wasn’t into sports, music, or chess club, and was dying to fit in. Gold’s Gym gave me a way to do this and I was starting to put in my time. 

• Who have been your mentors? What did they teach you and how can you tie this into your piece? 

• Did you apply yourself in school, or were you more into sports, music, etc.?

• School came easy for me—at least, in a way. I was the child computer who could download massive amounts of data onto my hard drive and then spit them out on command. Teachers were impressed at my aptitude for learning, but my aptitude for social, not so much.

• I was the lopsided whiz-kid. But fitness gave me a way of evening out.

• You may learn quickly that good results in the gym must go along with good structure. I would spend hours on Google running through tips on how to better build my adolescent physique. If I came into Gold’s every day for ten years but only did squats, I would have enormous quads at the expense of everything else.

•  Have you felt unbalanced at times in life? 

• If so, you're exactly like everyone else. 

• Seeing this carried over to my writing. I’m a firm believer that anyone can become a fantastic writer. You might enjoy placing the occasional poem on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. Having a community of readers can be helpful for you. 

•  Most of us need what I guess you could call a formula and a way to map and direct our progress in order to improve our writing.

• I’ll continue to go to the gym as long as I am able. The principles of working out carry over to far more than just the physical. 

• In what other daily activities can you absorb ways to become a better writer?  Our topic, here, is obviously fitness. But if you consider it, nothing is off limits when it comes to growing with language arts!

Number Three: Self-Confidence

• Did you, as a kiddo, wonder how peers seemed to fit into the same, predictable categories? Did k-12 feel, weirdly, to have the identical patterns as every other k-12 school in the country? For the entirety of my young years, the concept of ‘confidence’ eluded me. What was it? Why did some kids have it and some kids just didn’t? 

• As a youngster, I used to figure that confidence was something only attainable by the gifted. After all, you have to have something to be confident in. Now as an adult, I see that’s not always the case.

• What are your fitness goals, if you have them? Are you more into sports, cardio, power, physique? 

• I’m an interesting study in fitness. I worked with a personal trainer in college for several years and he always told me how fast I got both in and out of shape. According to him, of all his clients, I built muscle and strength the fastest. But by the same token, I lost it just as fast.

• Let’s say we live in a different dimension where no matter how hard a person works, they never get any better. I could work out ten hours a week, every week, but not gain a pound on my max lift.

• How many people do you think would go to the gym?

• Not many.

• You have to base your self-worth on the work in progress you are. I’m a pretty big guy. I’ve got some decent lifts on the floor. But I’ll never be top dog at my gym and that’s alright. I’m okay because I continue to try and I refuse to stop.

• It’s a lesson that can be carried over to writing.

• As someone who studied language arts, I have always enjoyed mapping my ideas out on paper. But I’ll never be Earnest Hemingway and they probably won't teach my writing at a college level or feature my novel on the Amazon bestseller list.

• I don’t care! 

• And neither should you! You are no better and no worse than anyone else. You are an equally valuable human being, and don't let anyone ever tell you different! 

• Fortunately, we live in a universe where we can get better and that’s what we should continuously strive to do. Through these three methods, going to the gym and working on your body can teach you things that can carry over into all facets and music of your life. 

• Life isn’t about what we do or how good we are. It’s not about having the mentality of always being the best. 

• Life is about loving yourself and challenging yourself to become the highest you are capable of being.

• This attitude can spill off onto the page. 

Exercise:

• Make some time for yourself and write down five ways using your body ignites your imagination and creativity. Now melt these five qualities into a fictional character you can place in your next story! Have fun!